This book is about to be finished. It will be by the end of this month at the latest. The new book will be released on the first of next month. Therefore, the update of this book will be unstable. Brothers who follow the update should not follow it in the future. There is still time left in this month.
In the past twenty days, I have to work hard to prepare a new book. I will spend less time on this book in the future. The quality has deteriorated a lot, so I don’t want to continue to delay the book until it is finished, so I will finish it after a few chapters.
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The scale of the city wall today started from the south of the Jin Dynasty, the capital city, and the end of the Jin Dynasty. In order to resist the powerful Mongolian army, "Xuanzong thought that the capital city was vast and far away and difficult to defend, so he called Gao Qi to build the inner city, and it was possible with all the public and private efforts."
Xuanzong ordered that while strengthening and heightening the east and west walls, he also flattened the north and south walls and expanded them, pushing the inner city about 300 meters to the south and about 700 meters to the north.
This renovation determined the scale of Kaifeng City Wall today.
Jinnan and Jinghuang City were built on the ruins of the Forbidden City in the Northern Song Dynasty. They have been slightly modified, but they are mostly from the Song Dynasty.
Are the city walls of the Song and Jin Dynasties on the same level? What were the names of the city gates in the Jin Dynasty? These are all awaiting archaeological verification.
After the Yuan Dynasty destroyed the Jin Dynasty, Kaifeng and Feng were renamed Bianliang. In the 17th year of Zhengzheng (1357), the Yuan general Taimuhua (Qin Buhua? To be tested) defended the Red Turban Army from attacking the city and captured 13 cities in Bianliang City.
Only five gates are left to lead in and out, and the remaining eight gates are blocked.
In May 1358, Liu Futong captured Bianliang. Even though Han Ji came here to found the country and proclaimed himself the Song Dynasty, he did not open the fortified city gate. However, in August of the next year, it was counterattacked by the Yuan army.
Except for the imperial city which was built of bricks, the city walls before the Ming Dynasty were all made of earth. Only the city towers and gates were built of bricks.
Since the Ming Dynasty, the city walls have been replaced by bricks on a large scale.
The same goes for opening and closing the city wall. In the first year of Hongwu of the Ming Dynasty (1368), based on the city wall of the Jin Dynasty, all the city walls were covered with bricks. After the city wall was built, the total length of the city wall was 20 miles and 190 steps, and it was 3 feet high, 5 feet wide and 2 feet wide.
It is 1 foot wide and is surrounded by a moat 5 feet wide and 1 foot deep outside the city.
Due to the overthrow of the king's power, only five city gates were opened. After that, the Kaifeng city wall was repaired many times in the Ming Dynasty, and once reached a small number.
Regarding this, there is a detailed record in "Rumenglu. City Records": The city was opened and closed to a height of five feet. "There were five enemy towers, all with holes for arrows and cannons. There were four righteous and sixteen evil in three directions, five large towers, and five turrets.
There are twenty-four star towers, all arranged according to the twenty-eight constellations; ten sample shops, fifty-four nest shops, and ten gun towers...".
The five city gates, plus the Moon Gate and the Water Gate, have a total of twenty-five door openings. Each door opening has two iron-clad doors, totaling "fifty iron-clad doors."
With the improvement of various defense facilities such as watchtowers, gunholes, and gun towers, a majestic city wall stood on the land of the Central Plains in the Ming Dynasty.
In the early Ming Dynasty, Kaifeng was designated as Beijing by Zhu Yuanzhang.
In the eleventh year of Hongwu (1378), after Zhu Yuanzhang gave up the plan to build the capital of Kaifeng, he gave up Kaifeng and sealed it. He named Wu King Zhu Xi the King of Zhou and sealed the country here.
Feng Sheng, the father-in-law of the King of Zhou, completed the construction of the Zhou Palace and the Forbidden City, forming a three-layered wall structure of Kaifeng City Wall, Xiao Wall, and the Forbidden City.
Xiaoqiang is a small wall used to separate the inside and outside of ancient palaces.
The Zhou Palace is surrounded by a wall of nine miles and thirteen steps (or nine miles and thirty steps? This is also to be tested). It is about two feet high, suppressed by centipede wood and covered with glazed tiles... To the south is the Meridian Gate, to the east is called Donghua Gate, and to the west is called West Gate.
Huamen. The north is called Houzaimen."
The inner city of the Forbidden City is about five miles around, five feet high, with flower crenels on it, and moats surrounding it. Four gates are called "The south gate is called Duanli Gate, the north gate is called Chengzhi Gate, the east gate is called Liren Gate, and the west gate is called Zunyi Gate."
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However, in the Ming Dynasty, in order to protect Beijing, they mainly built embankments on the north bank of the Yellow River, which caused great harm to the areas south of the Yellow River when it overflowed.
The opening and closing of the city wall were repeatedly ravaged by the water of the Yellow River. In the first month of the 20th year of Hongwu (1387), the year Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, the Yellow River burst and water entered the city from the north gate, flooding many official and civilian houses.
In the first year of Jianwen of Emperor Hui (1399), the Yellow River burst and water entered the city from Fengqiu Gate. Many palaces and houses collapsed, and water accumulated in the city for a long time.
In the autumn of the eighth year of Emperor Yongle's reign (1410), the Yellow River burst, destroying more than 200 feet of the city, "more than 14,000 households were affected, and more than 7,500 hectares of farmland were lost."
In July of the fifth year of Emperor Yingzong's Tianshun reign (1461), the Yellow River burst and water entered from the north gate. More than half of the official and private buildings were submerged, and countless residents died.
From April to September of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen (1642), Li Zicheng attacked the city for the third time. In order to destroy the rebel army, the officers and soldiers in the city opened two places on the Yellow River embankment in the north of Kaifeng, flooding the rebel army. Only 370,000 people in the city were left.
More than ten thousand.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Kaifeng and Fengcheng were flooded by the Yellow River and only the battlements were exposed. After this happened again and again, in modern times, after 20 years of archaeological excavation, we now found that 3 meters to 12 meters underground in this ancient capital, they are stacked up and down.
There are 6 cities, including 3 capitals, 2 provincial cities and 1 important town in the Central Plains, forming a unique landscape of "city upon city".
Although this cannot be said to be unique, it is similar. Except for Kaifeng and Feng, there are only six ancient capitals of different dynasties discovered under the existing ancient city of Shangqiu in Shangqiu City. The ancient cities are superimposed on each other.
The wonder of cities stacked on top of each other was caused by the flooding of the Yellow River in past dynasties.
Except for the Wei Daliang City at the bottom, which could not be discovered due to its deep burial and limited exploration techniques, the other five cities have been discovered and initially explored one after another.
At this point, "Kaifeng city, city upon city, several cities buried underground", this mysterious legend that has been circulating among the people of Kaifeng and Feng has finally been confirmed by archaeology.
Archaeological data show that the five discovered cities are basically in the same area. The top one is Kaifeng City in the Qing Dynasty, and the bottom one is Bianzhou City, an important town in the Central Plains in the Tang Dynasty. Among them, the largest city is
Thousands of years ago, Dongjing, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, was an international metropolis with a population of over one million and the wealth of the world.
In 364 BC, King Hui of Wei during the Warring States Period moved the capital to Kaifa and built the famous Daliang City. Over the next 2,200 years, rulers of all dynasties built Bianzhou City in the Tang Dynasty, Tokyo Three Cities in the Northern Song Dynasty, and Jin Dynasty City on this land.
Bianjing City, Mingkai, Fengcheng and Qingkai, Fengcheng.
War and river mud and sand have buried these once-splendid and famous cities again and again, and people have rebuilt their homes on the original sites again and again. The ancient cities buried deep in the mud and sand are stacked on top of each other like "stacks of Arhats."
The Northern Song Dynasty established its capital in Kaifeng for 168 years. The capital of the country at that time, the capital city, mysteriously disappeared after its peak.
As one of the most important capital cities in Chinese history, finding its whereabouts has always been the goal of archaeologists.
The longed-for opportunity finally appeared in 1981: during the dredging process at the bottom of Longting Lake in Kaifen, the large-scale Ming Dynasty Zhou Prince's Palace ruins suddenly emerged.
According to historical records, the Zhou Palace was built on the foundations of the Song and Jin palaces, but is there really a thousand-year-old imperial city buried beneath the Zhou Palace?
The large-scale "Song City Archeology" has since begun, and the eastern capital city has finally appeared in front of archaeologists.
Archaeological excavations show that in the eastern part of the Northern Song Dynasty, the capital city was a capital city that was slightly shorter from east to west and slightly longer from north to south. It had an imperial city, an inner city, and an outer city built in sequence from the inside to the outside, each with a protective moat.
Not only does it have a high city and a deep pool, but there are also walls outside the walls, so there is a city within the city.
The outer city ruins with a circumference of nearly 30 kilometers and an area of more than 50 square kilometers are all buried at a depth of 2 to 8 meters underground. During the archaeological excavation of the southwest corner of the outer city, it was discovered that the outer city wall is still 8.7 meters high.
The city wall is 34.2 meters wide at the bottom and 4 meters wide at the top. The city wall is extremely hard.
In the process of searching for Songcheng, I also accidentally discovered many other city sites stacked one above the other, which opened up the mystery of the legendary "city upon city" under the Kai and Fengcheng.
Today, the famous Longting Scenic Area in Kaifeng is about 8 meters underground. It is the site of the imperial city ruins of the Eastern Capital of the Northern Song Dynasty. It overlaps with the Jinhuangcheng and the Forbidden City ruins of the Ming and Zhou Dynasties respectively.
The inner city is the second city wall of the east capital. It was built on the basis of Bianzhou City in the Tang Dynasty.
Archaeological surveys also show that the inner city of the Northern Song Dynasty was slightly smaller than the existing Ming and Qing city of Kaifeng, and its east-west walls were located on the east-west walls of Bianzhou in the Tang Dynasty. The upper floors overlapped with the Kaifeng city of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The north and south walls are located in the northern and southern areas of today's Kai and Feng old cities respectively. The remaining walls are 10 to 12 meters above the ground.
In order to explore the structure and stacking relationship of the Song and Jin city walls, archaeologists conducted archaeological excavations in the western section of the northern wall of the inner city of the Song Dynasty.
Excavations show that the three city walls of the Ming, Jin and Song dynasties were stacked together from top to bottom. Although the city walls were made of rammed earth, there were obvious differences in the rammed layers and rammed nests.
Most of the Xiaoqiang ruins of the Ming and Zhou Dynasties are well preserved and buried 3 to 5 meters deep under the ground.
From the anatomy of the northern wall of the Forbidden City of the Zhou Dynasty, it was found that the city wall was divided into two parts. The upper layer was the northern wall of the Forbidden City of the Ming and Zhou Dynasties, and the lower layer was the north wall of the Song Dynasty Imperial City. The two walls were stacked on top of each other, which confirmed that the Ming and Zhou Dynasties were indeed used
It was built on the old foundation of the Song Palace.
Archaeological exploration also confirmed that the east and west walls of Bianzhou City in the Tang Dynasty, which was located at the bottom of the "city upon city", were stacked under the east and west inner walls of the Northern Song Dynasty. The north and south walls were destroyed in the late Jin Dynasty, and the remaining walls were buried in the present place.
At a depth of 10 to 12 meters below the surface, the city wall remains 1 to 3 meters high and about 10 meters wide.
In addition to "city upon city" and "wall upon wall", many strange phenomena of "road upon road", "door upon gate" and "horse road upon horse road" were also discovered during the archaeological process.
The bustling Zhongshan Road is the central axis of the old city of Kaifeng City. Eight meters underground is the Imperial Street, a thoroughfare on the north-south central axis of Tokyo City in the Northern Song Dynasty.
Between Zhongshan Road and Yujie, there are pavements from the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty respectively. This "road on top of each other" landscape also means that from ancient capitals to modern cities, there are several roads stacked on top of each other.
The city was closed, but the north-south central axis remained unchanged at all.
Li Da is indeed an expert in this field. Through his introduction, Han Kongque was already very interested in this underground treasure house here.
Under the leadership of Li Da, Han Kongque went to the archaeological site in person.
Now, on the north side of Daliang Gate, the west gate of the Kaifeng City Wall, the remains of an ancient horse trail from the late Qing Dynasty were unearthed, and about 1 meter below it, another well-preserved section of sidewalks and pavements (Panshi Jiacha) was discovered. Clearly visible remains of the ancient horse trail.
Surprisingly, about 50 centimeters below the second layer of the ancient horse track, another ancient horse track with seriously damaged brick layers, a longer period of use, and an even older age was unearthed.
The three layers of ancient horse roads are stacked on top of each other, truly showing in a three-dimensional form the peculiar landscape of "cities on top of cities" under Kaifeng and Fengcheng, once again adding more conclusive evidence to the study of the "city on top of cities" phenomenon. (Unfinished) To be continued, please search Piaotian Literature, the novel will be better and updated faster!