The latest discovery! Inscriptions of Bai Juyi’s poems appear in Jin Dynasty tombs more than 800 years ago

A few days ago, the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics Protection completed the restoration of a tomb with murals in the Jin Dynasty. The verses in “Tian Ke Du”.

This is cultural preservation workers protecting and restoring the tomb. Photo courtesy of Shaanxi Cultural Relics Protection Research Institute

In 2010, the tomb was discovered at a highway construction site in Zhidan County, northern Shaanxi Province. When it was discovered, the tomb was not only robbed and excavated, but the top of the tomb was also squeezed by gravity, the surface of the tomb bricks was partially cracked and deformed, and the murals also had problems such as fading, partial warping, and cracking.

This is the mural and poem in the tomb. Photo provided by Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics Protection

In order to preserve the historical information of this tomb to the greatest extent, cultural relics protection workers “packed” it as a whole and moved it to the laboratory for further research Protection repair. First of all, the overall stability was strengthened, and the dust and scale on the surface of the mural were cleaned up. After the floor layer and paint layer were reinforced, the mural was partially completed to effectively continue and display. The original style of the mural tomb was lost.

In the restored mural tomb, you can see exquisite brick carving patterns and murals. The brick carvings include waist drums and Yangko dance in northern Shaanxi, as well as horses, lions, Deer, turtledoves, cranes and other elements; murals include lotus, peony, chrysanthemum, woman with half-opened door, door god and warrior.

The cultural relics protection workers also cleaned up and repaired many inscriptions on the walls of the tomb, including the poem “The fish at the bottom of the water” in the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Birds in the sky are high enough to shoot and deep enough to catch. Only people’s hearts are so close, and within so close they can’t be predicted”, and the poems in Song Dynasty poet Shi Huiyuan’s “Forty-Five Poems of the Ancients” and so on.

This is the inscription on the wall inside the tomb. Photo courtesy of Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics Protection

Through comparison, it can be found that the poems written on the wall of this tomb are different from the version that is common today. According to Yu Gengzhe, a professor at the School of History and Culture of Shaanxi Normal University, this was a very common phenomenon in ancient times. In the process of text transmission, sometimes it was misrepresented, and sometimes it was modified, which made the text different from the original. , It is often encountered in the edition study of ancient books. Which version of “Tian Kedu” is closer to Bai Juyi’s original work still needs more evidence.

Source: People’s Daily Online