Dear friends, wish you a good time! The scenic spot people will visit tomorrow is the epitaph museum called "a stone engraved Tang book", namely Qian Tang Zhai. It takes about 50 minutes by bus from Luoyang to Qian Tang Zhai. Now, I will introduce the relevant situation of Qian Tang Zhai to you.
Qian Tang Zhai is located in Tiemen Town, 45 kilometers west of Luoyang City, Henan Province. It is a part of the garden "Zhe Lu" built by Mr. Zhang Fang, a famous patriotic person and one of the main planners of the Xinhai Revolution in Shaanxi old army. It is one of the concentration places for lost tombstone carvings in China, and it is famous for collecting more than 1400 pieces of tombstone carvings since the Western Jin and Northern Wei Dynasties. Especially, the Tang Dynasty epitaphs are the most abundant, with as many as 1491 pieces. Zhang Binglin once wrote the signboard in seal script, and added a note at the top: "Old Zhang Boying has lost thousands of Tang Dynasty epitaphs, so he named it Qian Tang Zhai, and asked me (Zhang Binglin) to write it." This is the origin of the name Qian Tang Zhai.
Tiemen, now called Que Gate, is a town in central Henan, which is the hometown of Zhang Fang, the founder of Qian Tang Zhai. There are two mountains, Qinglong Mountain and Phoenix Mountain, standing opposite each other and connecting to the north and south streams around the town. To the west, it faces the Hangu Pass and controls the Xiaoshan Mountain. The scenery is beautiful, and the transportation is convenient. In recent years, especially since July, the Qian Tang Zhai established in the southeast corner of the town has attracted countless domestic and foreign tourists with its unique charm.
You may know that Tiemen Town is the hometown of Mr. Zhang Fang. What kind of person was Zhang Fang when he was young? And how did he collect so many epitaphs? Zhang Fang, whose courtesy name was Boying and style name was Pengshi Laoren, graduated from Baoding Army Fast Training Hall at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In his early years, he joined the Tongmenghui and was one of the important planners of the Xinhai Revolution in the old army of Shaanxi. When Sun Yat-sen launched the Constitution Protection Movement, Zhang Fang served as the commander of the Shaanxi National Protection Army. In the 1930s, he successively held positions such as commander of the 20th Division of the National Revolutionary Army, acting chairman of the Hebei Provincial Government, and director of the Political Affairs Department and Construction Department. During the Anti-Japanese War, he did some beneficial agricultural work for peace in Sichuan. In late 1949, he staged an uprising in Chengdu. Before his death, he was a member of the second session of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He passed away in Nanjing in May 1966.
Zhang Fang loved gold and stone calligraphy and painting throughout his life, and had close interactions with Yu Youren, Zhang Binglin, Kang Youwei, and Wang Guangqing. Under their influence, especially encouraged by Yu Youren, Zhang Fang began to widely collect tombstone carvings, including steles and stone carvings, in late 1931, and transported them continuously to his hometown of Tiemen Town. Starting from 1933, he built a study on the northwest corner of his "Zhe Lu" garden, and embedded a part of the collected epitaph stones into the walls of fifteen cave dwellings, three wells, and one corridor. The remaining unembedded parts, except for hundreds of pieces donated to the Shaanxi Museum during the Anti-Japanese War, have undergone various changes and have been lost over time. According to the records in the "Catalogue of Stone Collections in Qian Tang Zhai" compiled by Guo Yutang and Wang Guangqing in 1935 and published by Xi'an Printing House, there were a total of 1578 pieces. Currently, Qian Tang Zhai still houses 1419 pieces of various stone collections, including one piece from the Western Jin Dynasty, two pieces from the Northern Wei Dynasty, two pieces from the Sui Dynasty, 1191 pieces from the Tang Dynasty, 22 pieces from the Five Dynasties, 88 pieces from the Song Dynasty, one piece from the Yuan Dynasty, 30 pieces from the Ming Dynasty, two pieces from the Qing Dynasty, seven pieces from the official states, and 19 rubbings of epitaphs, as well as other calligraphy, paintings, sculptures, stupas, and steles totaling 54 pieces.
Where do these epitaphs come from, and how were they unearthed? These inscribed stones were mainly collected by Zhang Fang from all over the country, especially around Luoyang. Luoyang is known as the capital of nine dynasties. From the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Song and Ming Dynasties, it has always been a place where talented people gather. The Mangshan Mountain in the south of the city stretches for hundreds of kilometers in the east and middle, majestic and winding, with fertile soil and high water level, suitable for burial. Therefore, the tombs of successive emperors, generals, and wealthy merchants are all here. Even those who died in Jiangbei or Northeast China instructed their descendants to bury them in Mangshan despite the long distance. Hence, there is a saying among the people: "Born in Suzhou and Hangzhou, buried in Mangshan," and "The endless soil on Mangshan is mostly the ancient tombs of Luoyang people" (from Wang Wei's poem "Mangshan"). Bai Juyi of the Tang Dynasty also wrote the poem "The tombs under Mangshan are towering," proving that "Mangshan has the land of sitting cattle" is not exaggerated.