The literary giants of the late Ming Dynasty began by copying books

“Finally, the method of comparison and mutual verification can be used to determine whether the two words have the same origin. In addition to having the same or similar sounds, the connection in meaning of the words with the same origin is not accidental. There must be a relationship of inheritance or a relationship of overlap across the board, such as I think they are homologous words for the three characters 'create, establish, and collect'. This is a conclusion drawn from the comparison of their extended series..."

"With the method of comparative mutual verification, we can judge the error of exegesis according to the rules of word meaning. This method has not been used by predecessors, but it can very effectively avoid the shortcomings of indiscriminate use of glyphs and sounds..."

"Now we have finished talking about all the methods of exegesis. I hope that all students will carefully sort out the lecture notes of the past few months when they go back. Those who will talk about the methodology of exegesis will stop here."

Wang Wenlong made a salute to the students in the audience, then closed his manuscript and got up from the lecture.

When he walked out of the East Lecture Hall, he saw Bai Yu running towards him with a happy face, and said to Wang Wenlong with admiration: "Mr. Jianyang, listening to your lectures for two months is far better than my own study for more than ten years."

Wang Wenlong asked curiously: "I've been talking for months, can Xia Zhong remember all these contents?"

Bai Yu said: "Every time Mr. Xi ends his lecture, I go back and record by hand all the contents of the lecture that I remember. Although I will forget a little bit, the general framework has been memorized."

Wang Wenlong's lecture in the East Lecture Hall of the Imperial College was crowded with people at the beginning, and it was so crowded that almost everyone had to stand and listen. However, the more the lecture went on, the more in-depth it got, and the fewer students were able to stay and continue studying. But until the last lecture There are still hundreds of students coming to attend the lectures.

Because there were too many people coming to listen to Wang Wenlong's lectures in the Imperial College, the tables could only be removed. Students attending the lectures only had benches to sit on. There was no place to put paper if they wanted to take notes. They had to rely on memory or write on each other's backs. , the learning conditions are difficult.

This is related to the lecturing habits of people in this generation. People in this generation do not rely on teachers to take notes during live lectures. They assume that this kind of work should be completed by themselves after class. The teacher only simply explains his own principles during class.

There were no blackboards in classrooms in this era. Wang Wenlong would write whatever he needed to write on the blackboard in class, and then ask the long class member who was helping him to hold it up for students to see.

Wang Wenlong said: "My lecture notes have been given to the Imperial College, but they contain a lot of content. I don't know if the Imperial College will verify them. However, I am also planning to compile the exegetical content I taught into a book, and I still have a manuscript. Xia Zhong, if you need the handout, I can lend it to you to copy it first."

"This is great!" Bai Yu said happily, and then asked: "Sir, I will talk about it after this time. What are your plans next?"

It is rare for an Imperial Academy assistant to be as hard-working as Wang Wenlong. Bai Yu doesn’t think Wang Wenlong should continue to work in the Imperial Academy in Nanjing after giving lectures for two consecutive months. It doesn't seem like hard work, but something strange.

Wang Wenlong replied: "The Oracle Bone Society has written books and invited people several times. Now that the lecture is over, I plan to go to Anyang in a few days to see the excavation of oracle bones."

Hearing this, Bai Yu became interested and asked, "I am also planning to go to Henan to enjoy its prosperity, why not go with my husband?"

"Of course that's good."

Although Wang Wenlong did not plan to bring his family with him to Henan this time, he still had to bring reporters and servants from Suzhou Xunbao, not even Bai Yu.

Two days later, Wang Wenlong and his party sailed north from Nanjing. Wang Wenlong was the leader, followed by Tong Qu, Pan Xiuxi, Langxian, Bai Yu, as well as luggage-carrying servants, bodyguards, etc. Pan Xiuxi, Langxian, etc. Along with Bai Yu himself, there were also bookboys and servants. In the end, there was a large group of people going to Anyang, with a total of eighteen people.

It was already June of the 32nd year of Wanli. When Wang Wenlong and others headed north, the dredging project of the Ba River in South Zhili was in progress.

This project was actually started to solve the sequelae of the Yellow River diverting the Huai River and flowing into the sea. After the Yellow River diverted the Huai River and entered the sea, it flooded every year. Especially the flooded area was close to Fengyang. It flooded the ancestral tombs of the Ming Dynasty several times.

However, water transportation at this time, especially the annual grain transportation, relied heavily on the Yellow River. Although it was known that there were problems with the Yellow River's channel, it could not be rectified for the sake of water transportation.

In order to regulate the Yellow River, it was necessary to find a second channel for water transportation, so the plan of the Yahe River channel was proposed by Li Hualong. After dredging the Yahe River as a canal, the Yellow River can be regulated. Moreover, the Yahe River as a canal can save distance, help discharge floods and divert water during flood seasons, and other benefits.

However, the original plan proposed by Li Hualong was to gather people to start work during the spring famine, and people would disperse when the wheat was ripe. However, after the actual discussion, the time has been postponed to June, and the busy farming season is approaching, and many people have to put down their farm work. Go to do corvée service.

So when Wang Wenlong and others took a boat through Beizhili, what they saw was that almost only the old, weak, women and children were working on the fields.

Looking at this scene, Xi Langxian shook his head and said: "People's livelihood is very difficult. If the river control project is delayed again, there will be another civil uprising in South Zhili and Shandong next year."

The situation in South Zhili looked worrying, but it was still a relatively wealthy area. As we continued westward into Henan, we saw an even more desolate scene, with many villages simply empty.

These villages close to Xuzhou used to be wealthy places, but as Wanli's tax supervision policy raged, small businessmen doing business in Henan and Nanzhili suffered losses, and local commerce also declined rapidly, and along with this People along the canal also lost the opportunity to do business.

People who are close to the canal are more likely to be exploited by water transport officials, and they are often taken into labor to repair the river channel. If the people don't run away, what are they waiting for?
After the boat passed Dangshan Mountain and entered the border of Henan, the scene we saw became even more desolate.

Last year, bandits broke out along the canal in Suizhou. In the summer, the river bandits were quelled by Li Sancai. Yang Sijing, a native of Suizhou, gathered people to cause trouble again. The rebels plundered Sui County, Ningling, and Shangqiu. They were not wiped out until winter. .

But the people near Shangqiu suffered a lot. The journey from Shangqiu to Henan, where the boat stopped and entered Henan, could be said to be a thousand miles without roosters. There were even uncollected corpses of refugees among the long grass on the roadside. The scenes along the way were fascinating to watch. All the people who set off from Nanjing were in a bad mood and were depressed and silent.

Fang Damei said that she did not have time to take care of the excavations in Anyang Mansion and it was indeed true. With the refugees causing chaos, who would have the time to take care of any archaeological discoveries?

Wang Wenlong looked at this scene and couldn't help but think that this was still the 32nd year of Wanli, which was basically a peaceful year in history books. The chaos of the late Ming Dynasty decades later in the original history was even more tragic.

At this time, Bai Yu said: "Mr. Jianyang, I heard that there was a big disaster in Shangqiu last year. Many refugees dug up graves in order to survive, but they unearthed a lot of gold and stone artifacts. This can be considered helpful for archeology, right? "

Wang Wenlong shook his head and said: "Archaeology is for historical value, not to dig out treasures. To destroy tombs for treasures and scatter all the items inside makes it impossible for people to restore the historical information of the tombs at that time. This is not called archeology, this is called Grave robbing.”

Separating archeology and tomb robbing is a concept that Wang Wenlong really wants to spread to everyone in the Oracle Bone Society.

Most people in the Ming Dynasty didn’t understand archeology at all. A few years ago, the eunuch Chen Feng was digging ancient tombs everywhere in Huguang. It was even said that he stole the tomb of Emperor Jiajing’s father, but most people couldn’t find any evidence at all, because the treasures unearthed All were destroyed. The gilt on the Buddha statues would be scraped off and melted into gold nuggets. The brass would be turned into molten copper. As for beads and other objects, they would be circulated on the market as rare treasures. All the dirty things would be digested. I can't find it even if I try to find it.

This is also what most people in this era think of antiques - a bunch of old things that can be recast. As for the value of cultural relics, most people have no concept of them.

Even for epigraphers, much of the understanding of archeology is still in the stage of collecting antiques, paintings and art treasures.

Wang Wenlong knew that the thinking of epigraphers at this stage should be regarded as antiquities in the history of archaeology, which was only the predecessor of archeology and was still far from modern archeology.

Because of the practice of archeology, everyone in the Oracle Bone Society probably began to regard archeology as a way to understand the source of information about the past. Only in the eyes of such scholars, those oracle bones would be of great value. Although Wang Wenlong’s previous call for the protection of oracle bones caused a lot of The response, but before the noise got louder, many people really thought that the pile of oracle bones was just a pile of medicinal materials dug out of the ground, which could be powdered after studying the words on it.

(End of this chapter)