"Mirror" Derivative Project
This is the strangest part of the trilogy of "Ancient Matters", composed in the style of a dictionary, showing the strange role played by artifacts in Chinese history. The secret love between the highly skilled mirror guard and the beautiful mirror owner, the bloody fight for the magic mirror, the fighting and murder in the court, and the conflict between the two spaces inside and outside the mirror. Transformation, painted an extremely mysterious legendary color for this ancient bronze vessel......
The Story of the Mirror
There are two types of bronze mirrors in ancient times, one is vulgar mirror, which is an ordinary mirror, and the other is divine mirror, which people can use to enter another parallel space. Both Zhuang Zhou and Tao Yuanming were masters of such mirrors. Most of the people who own the magic mirror are the royal family and nobles. It is their privilege to have the magic mirror. They can freely enter and exit the other side of the world through the mirror.
Since the mirror is the door to the two worlds, it is extremely important to guard it, so a profession called "mirror guard" flourished. And the goggle guard with the strongest martial arts in the world is named Li Ah.
Princess Su E stole the best mirror in the palace, and fled to Li Ah's location. Li Ah accepted her request and became her goggle protector. This move became the root of all troubles later.
In order to recover the mirror, the emperor sent Luan Ba, the second killer in the world, to lead hundreds of killers out of Beijing to kill Su E and take back the mirror. He went on a killing spree along the way, killing most of the mirror guards and taking away most of the magic mirrors. His final goal is Li Ah, the world's number one killer and number one goggle guard.
Su E travels between two parallel worlds and brings backA pair of twin babies, apparently that's her on the other sideproducts of marriage. After he entrusted the child to Li A's upbringing, he disappeared again. Li Ah is obsessed with Su E and has no complaints about it.
Luan Ba's army attacked Li Ah's residence, and a fierce battle broke out between the two sides. As a result, Luan Ba fell into the maze arranged by Li Ah and the mirror caster Dou Shaoqing, and finally died.
Although the threat to the world on this side has been eliminated, serious turmoil has occurred in the world on the other side. When Su E returned for the last time, her clothes were covered in blood, as if she had experienced some murder. After making love with Li A for the last time, she drowned with her two children in her arms, and the magic mirror flew away overnight, and has never been heard from since. Li A forged a magic mirror by himself, trying to escape to the Utopian world, but was killed by the broken magic mirror the moment he entered the mirror. The great mirror caster just disappeared into the shadow of history.
Bronze Mirror
The legend about the largest treasure in the world hidden in the Forbidden City in Beijing has been circulating unscrupulously among the people and the court, and even Emperor Puyi believed in it. In the summer of 1941, he secretly ordered a task force to sneak into the Forbidden City from Manchuria to search for treasures, but found nothing. This incident alarmed the top authorities of the Japanese army stationed in Beiping. According to a file obtained by the US military in Tokyo, the Japanese army organized a secret team headed by archaeologist Ichiro Hosokawa, carrying sophisticated detection instruments, and spent 17 years. For months, every nook and cranny of the Forbidden City was searched, and several women's hidden jewelry boxes and some jewelry were found in the concubine's residence, but nothing else was found. In 1950, in order to raise funds to solve the famine, Zhou Enlai personally planned and sent people to conduct a three-year survey of the Forbidden City. In the gardens on both sides of the Qinzheng Hall, dozens of corpses were found secretly buried. Other than that, nothing more was discovered, but these cryptic failures made the fabled treasure all the weirder and more exciting.
The story I shall tell next was told to me by a dying man. In a rural hospital in Lu County, Shandong Province, I worked as a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner for two years, prescribing some cheap herbal medicines for poor farmers. On a dark and stormy night, I was on duty at the hospital, and some villagers brought an old man who was about to die. He survived two extra weeks in the ER because of my care. In the dead of night, he begged me to sit by his side, and he related the following shocking experience.
"Who I am and what my name is is irrelevant. What I want to tell you is that I served in the Manchukuo contingent in 1941, and the following year I was drafted to the Japanese Army Group. In 1950, I became a A member of Zhou Enlai's Forbidden City inspection team. I consulted all the court archives of the Qing Dynasty since Kangxi, and searched every rainy land in the Forbidden City. I became an authority on the Forbidden City research. But for decades, I have not made any progress in treasures. In the winter of 1968, in order to prevent the Forbidden City from being destroyed by the Red Guards, an army was stationed inside. As the main staff of the Forbidden City Research Institute, I was lucky to be protected, like an incense burner in the palace, gradually emitting some copper rust. Every day I stood in front of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest and watched the guards drill, the bayonets shining brightly in the sun. At night, except for the jeering voice of owls, the place was as quiet as a huge ruin. When I walked through the imperial garden, occasionally A woman's sobbing can also be heard, which is said to be the ghost of Concubine Zhen talking to herself. The hut where I lived was the bedroom of the former servants of the palace. It was dark, damp, and musty, like an empty tomb. (Click here to read the full article)
Another short story on the theme of bronze mirror——
Bronze Mirror
Cultural Interpretation of Bronze Mirror——
In the deepest part of the ancient mirror light
The Yellow Emperor's Century of Mirrors and Optics
The Yellow Emperor held a bilateral meeting with the Queen Mother of the West, the leader of India, in the Wangwu Mountain area, which became a famous diplomatic event recorded in many classics. Although we don't know its content, according to "The Yellow Emperor's Internal Biography", after the meeting, the Yellow Emperor cast twelve large mirrors, which were used in turn by month. The diameter of the first mirror is one foot and five inches, and it will be reduced by one inch every month thereafter. By analogy, the twelfth mirror should be only three inches, which is already exquisite and cute[1]. The Yellow Emperor often polished the mirror by the lake himself. For thousands of years, the mirror stone was smooth and no weeds grew [2]. This may be the oldest mirror in Chinese history. Its craftsmanship may have come from the Western Regions, and it is closely related to astronomy, calendar, power and state management, but we still have no way of knowing its original technology and functional details.
In this way, the material and function of the mirror are gradually perfected in the legend. It may be made of hard jade or iron ore at first, and then expanded to gold, glass or copper-iron alloy. However, considering the reflectivity of the mirror surface, the polishing process and the manufacturing cost, most mirrors must be made of doped mirrors. Bronze cast in tin, as this material is softer and easier to polish. It is one of the sources of light that eagerly transcends the physical limitations of optical reflection. It faithfully reflects the physical space outside, but creates an illusionary space inside. The whole world is curled up in the bronze mirror, sending an eternal smile to the Yellow Emperor and his subjects...(Click here to read the full article)
