Abstract:
In the existing epitaph materials of the Northern Wei Dynasty, there are two main titles for the country of the Northern Wei Dynasty: "Dai" and "Wei", with Emperor Xiaowen moving the capital to Luoyang as the boundary. , showing the trend of the decline of the title of "Dai" and the majority of titles of "Wei" and "Da Wei". The author has reviewed the unearthed epitaph materials from the 1960s to the present. Within a unified dynasty, and in extremely serious funeral ceremonies, the mixed use of country names seems to be the only one in the Northern Wei Dynasty. The author therefore puts forward two points of view: First, because the Northern Wei Dynasty There was a change in the country's name (this happened in the first year of Emperor Daowu's accession to the country, that is, 386 AD), and the country's name of Dai was abandoned. The old Xianbei people were nostalgic for their homeland, so they used the power of the country's name "Dai" as comfort; secondly, the country's name was changed. After nearly a hundred years of management during the Pingcheng period, the Northern Wei Dynasty already had the strength to aspire to the top. Under such circumstances, it was inevitable to abandon the old customs of Xianbei and gradually transform into a Han clan state. The abandonment of "generation" representing the old system was also the general trend. Due to the limitations of the author's academic ability, this article should be used as a starting point to catch a glimpse of the leopard.
Keywords: Northern Wei epitaphs, country titles, clan states, Sinicization of the Xianbei people
Contents: 1. The Central Plains trend of Tuoba Xianbei tombs 2. The basic characteristics of the Northern Wei epitaphs 3. The epitaphs of Emperor Xiaowen before he moved to Luo - taking the epitaph of Sima Jinlong as an example IV. The epitaphs of Emperor Xiaowen after he moved to Luo - taking the epitaphs of Yuanjian, Fenghetu as examples V. Conclusion
1. Tuoba The Central Plains trend of Xianbei tombs
The Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms--Southern and Northern Dynasties period continued the trend of declining imperial power in the late Han Dynasty. As the first period of imperial power reshaping in Chinese history, it was equivalent to the "post-imperial era" of the Han Empire and at the same time emerged as the forerunner of the Sui and Tang empires. From the fall of Chang'an to Liu Yao's Huns cavalry to Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty sending his troops south to re-establish a unified dynasty, the most promising unified dynasty in the Central Plains in the past three centuries has reference significance and the regime with the most outstanding achievements is undoubtedly the Northern Wei Dynasty. From the very beginning of its establishment, this regime showed characteristics that were completely different from other Wuhu regimes, that is, the sublation of its own Hu ethnic nature: on the one hand, it retained the form of a tribal army, thus ensuring that it was relatively strong among many warlord states. The military strength of the Northern Wei Dynasty completed the historical task of preserving itself; on the other hand, the Northern Wei Dynasty's decisive tribal disbandment policy fundamentally overturned the previous Hu nationality model and advanced its historical nature to a new level, that is, Started its own process of centralization. In terms of physical evidence, what is obvious at this point is the Centralization of tomb forms.
The southward migration of Tuoba Xianbei began in the third year of Ganlu in the Cao Wei Dynasty when Emperor Shenyuan Tuoba Li moved the Xianbei tribes to Shengle (north of Helinger, Inner Mongolia). According to "Book of Jin·Biography of Wei Guan" According to records, the Xianbei tribes at this time were the same as the Wuhuan tribes: they all had adults, and the adults of each tribe discussed matters together and publicly recommended the emperor. The inward migration of the Xianbei people can also be seen as the internal migration of the border tribes since the Han Dynasty. The epitome of Sinicization in the following way - Liwei listened to slander and killed his son Tuoba Desert Khan in his later years. After Tuoba Liwei's death, various factions were divided until 338 AD, when Tuoba Shiyiqian established the Daiguo regime in Shengle. After 80 years of hard work, Tuoba Xianbei truly settled down in Shengle, the first political center. The state of Dai perished in the former Qin Dynasty. In 386 AD (the first year of his ascendance to the state), Emperor Daowu Tuobagui took advantage of the civil strife in the former Qin Dynasty to rebuild the state of Dai. In April of the same year, he changed the name of the state to Wei and abandoned the state name "Dai". , claimed to be King of Wei; in the third year of the emperor's reign (AD 398), Emperor Daowu moved the capital to Pingcheng (today's Datong, Shanxi), and the Northern Wei Dynasty stayed in Datong for 97 years, until Emperor Xiaowen moved the capital to Luoyang and the Northern Wei Dynasty entered its final period.
Since the 1960s, 7 Northern Wei tombs (groups) have been excavated in Horinger and surrounding areas, including Baotou and Hohhot; while in Datong, 11 Northern Wei tombs have been excavated (group). Among these tombs, the earliest one with clear time records is the Northern Wei Dynasty Mural Tomb in Shaling, Datong. This tomb was excavated in 2005. It is a brick chamber tomb with no ear chamber. From the ink-written patent leather inscription unearthed from the tomb, it can be seen that the owner of the tomb died in the first year of Taiyan (AD 435), the ancestor of Emperor Taiwu. The burial container unearthed from the tomb was a trapezoidal wooden coffin, which is a typical early Xianbei burial system. According to the identification and study of the remaining patent leather inscriptions unearthed from the Shaling Mural Tomb, it is known that this tomb is the tomb of the wife of Pingxi General Potarota. The special feature of the Shaling Northern Wei Dynasty Tomb lies in the unusualness of its unearthed murals. According to the "Brief Report on the Excavation of the Shaling Northern Wei Dynasty Mural Tomb in Datong", the murals unearthed in the Shaling Mural Tomb can be divided into two categories based on their content: ceremonial travel and daily life. . In the Shaling Northern Wei Dynasty Mural Patrol Picture collected by the Datong City Museum, the characters all wear cross-collared narrow-sleeved robes, but the ceremonial guards all follow the Han pattern. This provides a basis for the Sinicization of the Xianbei people from the unearthed objects.
If the Northern Wei Dynasty mural tomb in Shaling is still an exception, then the discovery of Sima Jinlong’s tomb as one of the largest Northern Wei Dynasty tombs excavated in China may be more illustrative.
Since Sima Jinlong himself belongs to the Han ethnic group, his tomb is still very different from the general Xianbei tombs. This is very obvious in the categories of burial rituals and funerary objects. It is different from early Northern Wei Dynasty tombs such as Shaling Compared with the mural tomb, no coffin was unearthed from the Sima Jinlong Tomb. According to the excavation briefing, the bones of the tomb owner were scattered around the coffin bed. This is certainly related to the disturbance caused by the excavation, but the main reason is that this tomb does not use coffins at all. , this point can also be verified in the tomb of Shaozu of the Song Dynasty, which is almost contemporary with the tomb of Sima Jinlong; secondly, according to the excavation briefings of some tombs, most of the Xianbei tombs in the early Northern Wei Dynasty did not have groups of figurines unearthed. In the important Xianbei tombs that have been excavated in the late Northern Wei Dynasty, such as Yuan Shao Tomb and Yuan Yi Tomb, more than a hundred pottery figurines and male and female figurines have been unearthed. Pottery figurines have become the mainstream of funerary objects, which is completely different from the burial customs in the early Northern Wei Dynasty. . It can be considered that in the late Northern Wei Dynasty, Xianbei and Han tombs tended to return to the customs of the Han Dynasty (large tombs with thick burials), both in terms of customs and actual tomb construction.
It can be seen that after nearly 200 years of self-development, in terms of tomb form, the Tuoba Xianbei tombs have broken away from the Wuhuan-shaft tombs and simple stone chamber tombs of the Xianbei period; in terms of funerary artifacts , refinement and complexity, breaking away from the early rough artistic style and the custom of using practical utensils as funerary objects; sacrificial rituals and funeral ceremonies tend to be secular (the widespread use of coffin beds is an example). From this point of view, the trend of the burial system in the entire Northern Wei Dynasty toward the Central Plains should also be certain.
2. Basic characteristics of epitaphs in the Northern Wei Dynasty
Epitaphs first originated in the Qin and Han Dynasties. The existing tiles with the names of prisoners in the Qin Dynasty and the bricks with the names of prisoners in the Eastern Han Dynasty can be regarded as the prototype of epitaphs. An epitaph is a square stone sculpture stored in a tomb to record the life story of the tomb owner. During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, influenced by the idea of ??thin burials, it became the norm for funerals to not build graves or erect monuments. In this case, epitaphs were widely used as a substitute for monuments. The epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty are sharp and sharp, and they are a type of font that has changed from Jin Li to regular script. It is known as Wei Shu in history. In the context of the trend of Xianbei tombs becoming Central Plains-oriented, the epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty have developed some unique system characteristics:
The first point is that the types are distinct. There are generally three types of epitaphs in the Northern Wei Dynasty: 1. Tablet-shaped tombstones inherited from the old system of the Western Jin Dynasty; 2. Square stone epitaphs (can be divided into head-top type and non-top type according to whether there is a cover). There are only a few of these types of epitaphs in existence. The largest and relatively well-preserved; 3. Tomb bricks. This kind of simple epitaph is the direct successor of the Qin and Han prisoner bricks. It was no longer the mainstream of epitaphs in the late Northern Wei Dynasty.
The second point is strict hierarchy. According to Zhao Chao's "A Brief Discussion on the Hierarchy System of Epitaphs in the Northern Wei Dynasty", the size of epitaphs in the Northern Wei Dynasty was determined by official rank. Beginning around the 18th year of Taihe, the epitaph system of the Northern Wei Dynasty entered a period represented by square stone epitaphs. From the emperor Xiaowen's period when the official rank was "designated as a permanent system" to the official promulgation during the Xuanwu Emperor's period, the official rank became a measure of An important symbol of official status. It can be seen from the records in "Sui Shu·Lü Li Zhi" that there were three main types of scale measurement in the Northern Wei Dynasty. The statistical results obtained by converting to meters found that the recipients of important positions or honorary positions represented by Sangong and Sanshi , the side length of the epitaph is about three feet, the side length of the epitaph of the third and fourth grade officials is about two feet and four inches, and so on. Among them, the epitaphs of those who were wronged during life and died after death have special treatment, such as the epitaph of Yuan Yi.
Judging from the existing epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty, the tomb system is always related to different social forms. In addition to the yearning for the past and the memory of the deceased, the epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty also contain the understanding of the people of that era. With the innovation of art and the pursuit of secularization, epitaphs, as important empirical materials, also physically reflect the integration of the culture of the Western Regions and the Central Plains, and the Xianbei culture and the Han culture. For example, the epitaph of Sima Jinlong and his wife Ji Chen in the Datong Museum Epitaphs and funerary objects widely used Western Region patterns such as honeysuckle patterns.
The above are some basic characteristics of the epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty. 3. The epitaphs of Emperor Xiaowen before he moved to Luo - Take the epitaph of Sima Jinlong as an example
Sima Jinlong's tomb is the largest tomb of Northern Wei nobles discovered in the Pingcheng area before Emperor Xiaowen moved the capital. Compared with the tombs of the Yuan kings in Luoyang, Sima Jinlong himself, as a Han Chinese, has certain differences in the construction of the tomb and the shape of the funerary objects. Due to the content of this article, we will only make a certain analysis of Sima Jinlong’s epitaph and its content.
The tomb of Sima Jinlong is 0.49 meters high and 0.45 meters wide. It has ten lines of regular script and seven characters in each line. The epitaph is 0.45 meters high and 0.55 meters wide, with nine lines of regular script and eight characters in each line. Both monuments were buried with Emperor Wei Xiaowen in November of the eighth year of Taihe (AD 484). From Sima Jinlong's tomb table and epitaph, two conclusions can be drawn: First, the shape of Sima Jinlong's tomb table is in the same vein as the Western Jin Dynasty-Liang Dynasty, and it is a standard stele-shaped tomb table. The development model of this epitaph is closely related to the Guanzhong area in the northwest and The Western Jin Dynasty pattern preserved in the Hexi Corridor area is exactly the same. With the unification of the north by the Northern Wei Dynasty, the epitaph pattern here was also brought to various parts of the north: the epitaph of Liu Xian unearthed in Chaoyang, Liaoning Province, records that a man whose ancestral home was in Guanzhong, and who died under Emperor Taiwu The life of junior officers whose families moved after the unification of the north (when the Northern Wei Dynasty completed a new conquest of a certain place, it usually set up a "town" here for militarized management and dispersed the local indigenous people).
Secondly, from the beginning of the epitaph text, "Only in the eighth year of the reign of Taihe", we can know that the requirements for the title of the Northern Wei Dynasty at this time were not strict. As the princes who were deeply relied on by the Empress Dowager Feng, Sima Chuzhi and Sima Jinlong could not be in the throne. There are errors in the writing of the state system. From the "Book of Wei", we cannot find the name of Sima and his son for the country of the Northern Wei Dynasty. However, there is a passage that can well reflect the political atmosphere at that time: I was ordered to conquer the south and was appointed. One side... discusses the beauty of the prosperity of the Celestial Dynasty... and makes the wind of Jiji spread to Jianghan. This passage comes from Sima Chuzhi's report during Emperor Taiwu's southern expedition. Not surprisingly, his policy of continuing the southern expedition was rejected. However, the memorial was full of compliments and subservience to Emperor Taiwu and the Northern Wei Dynasty. Metaphor. From the writing style of "Book of Wei", it is not difficult to see that the Northern Wei Dynasty was regarded as an orthodox Central Plains dynasty. This period happened to be the period when the Northern Wei Dynasty transformed into a Han clan state. The period when the epitaph of Sima Jinlong was produced was the most critical period of the sectarianization of the Northern Wei Dynasty, which also gave rise to two different names in one tomb.
The epitaphs of Emperor Xiaowen after he moved to Luo - Taking the epitaphs of Yuanjian, Fenghetu as examples
The epitaphs of Emperor Xiaowen after he moved to Luo, as mentioned above, are related to the title of the country. In terms of choice, the title of "Dai" has been reduced or even abandoned. On the other hand, there is a trend of the titles of "Wei" and "Da Wei" being the most common. At the same time, even though Emperor Xiaowen moved the capital to Luoyang, the clamor within Xianbei for returning to Daibei did not stop. One of the results of this situation was the differentiation of funeral rites. The two different epitaphs of Yuanjian, Feng and Tu are representatives of these two trends.
The Yuanjian epitaph was unearthed in 1925. It is 43 cm high and 45.8 cm wide. The inscription contains 327 words. Yuanjian's epitaph is already an extremely mature epitaph of the Northern Wei Dynasty: the square shape is neat, the font is powerful, and the inscription is as follows:
The king of Wei Dynasty, Wuchang, Tongzhi Sanqi, often served as a loose rider, often served as a champion general, General Yin Zuowei of Henan Province, held the festival and governed Qi. , the generals of the military conquests of the two states of Xu, the governor of the two states of Qi and Xu, and the governor of Qi state were given as gifts. The king was given the posthumous title as before. Wang Tajian, courtesy name Shaoda, was from Luoyang, Sizhou. The king is the great-great-grandson of Emperor Daowu, the great-grandson of King Henan, the grandson of King Cheng, and the son of King Jian. In the third year of the Zhengshi year, Bingshu, May, Renwu and Shuo, twenty-sixth, Dingwei, there were three spring and autumn days, and he died of illness in the third year. On the twenty-sixth day of the third month in the spring of the fourth year of Yue, it was attached to the east hill of Changling. After playing chess and repairing the emblem, Xia Yin was re-elected, Qiong Qianfang was divided, and Hua Jingzhen was separated. The hall structure is prosperous, the seal is prosperous, Bihua is Chongguang, and Weicheng is a town. Lingshe Duizhi, the imperial edict was moved to Songyu, which was the interpretation of Zongrui, and Jingyin was Fu. Good Er Yizhe, but Wang Siju, Kechang Chengyou, Qinglisi Tu. Zhaozhao Hongdu, Huihui Xuchong, the six skills are bright internally, and the five classics are integrated externally. Privately, the emperor respects the emperor, the public expounds the minister's loyalty, the throat is full of emperors, and the style of serving the emperor is announced. The special class is divided into Shaanxi, following the example of Mai Yijiang, the emperor rewards Xiuli, and there is a sea chest on the verge of death. The transformation spreads over the Eastern Xia Dynasty, and the area is flourishing again. The style follows the first benefit, and the world benefits from its glory. Fu Qi Polygonum Ling, Mugong Shuangtong, as a shepherd Peng Fan, guide morality and etiquette. The fierce association of autumn condenses, the benevolence of the winter sundial, the sound of the wind, and the praise of the distant and distant lands. The Wei Dynasty was the fourth year of the Zhengshi period of the Wei Dynasty. It was Dinghai, March, Geng, Shen, and Shuo, and it was Yiyou, the twenty-sixth day.
It can be seen that this is already a standard verse structure, with gorgeous diction and no trace of Xianbei’s own style. At the same time, because the political center was transferred from Pingcheng to Luoyang, the Northern Wei Dynasty called it the true Central Plains Dynasty. Nothing too much. In order to meet the needs of unification, the title of "generation" in a narrow sense and with the color of local separatism is not applicable.
The epitaph of Feng Hetu was found in Datong. The epitaph itself is not important. What is important is the content of the epitaph: Feng Hetu was not buried for three years, but finally returned to the north and was buried. From this passage, it is very important It is easy to see that Emperor Xiaowen's reform measures
were not all recognized by the Xianbei people. However, the country title on Feng Hetu's epitaph is still "Wei", not "Dai". This shows that after the baptism of the Luoyang era, the Xianbei people spiritually recognized the fact that the Northern Wei Dynasty had become a clan-based country.
Conclusion
The epitaphs of the Northern Wei Dynasty were a product of the social development of the Northern Wei Dynasty. Its shape, wording, and use all reflect the true state of a certain period of history in the Northern Wei Dynasty. As proposed in this article, the changes in the country names of "Dai" and "Wei" are actually the Northern Wei gradually accumulating power through Sinicization, breaking away from the shadow of the Wuhu regime, and then forming a great dynasty that laid the foundation for the unified Sui and Tang empires. .
Due to the author's lack of academic ability and limited time, this article inevitably contains omissions. Please correct me. The author would like to express his apology and gratitude.