Machu Picchu, the city of the sky

I first learned about Machu Picchu on the train from Tianjin to Beijing.

Half an hour's journey, if you don't do something, it's really boring. So I opened MP4, clicked on a movie and watched it. This is the city of the sky in Miyazaki Hayao. After watching it for more than ten minutes, I feel a little sore in my neck. I opened my seat and leaned back against the magazine. What caught my eye were several striking Chinese characters: "City of the Sky" Machu Picchu-exploring the lost Inca civilization.

How can such a coincidence happen? It turns out that there really is a "city of the sky" on the earth, but it is not "Laputa" in the movie, but "Machu Picchu" on the ridge at an altitude of 2 kilometers in Cuzco, Peru.

There are two ways for a person to know the world: one is to read thousands of books, and the other is to take Wan Li Road. Reading in modern society is not only as simple as reading paper books, but also includes reading e-books, watching movies, watching documentaries and so on. If I didn't watch that movie, I couldn't have known the concept of "the city of the sky", let alone the ancient civilized city of Machu Picchu.

Watch a movie, learn about a city and explore a civilization. This may be the meaning of reading!

The "City of the Sky" in the movie is an aerial castle built by a royal family named Laputa. They have an aerial civilization that has surpassed the ground for thousands of years. Ancient nations, mysterious spells, fortresses floating in the air, huge robots and advanced technology are my first impressions of Laputa. Machu Picchu is called "the city of the sky", perhaps because it is built between the top of the mountain and the clouds. It is also an ancient and civilized city, and it is so far away and mysterious.

Cuzco was the capital of the ancient Inca Empire. In their official language, Cuzco means navel, extending to the center of the world. Although it is a bit exaggerated, during the 500 years of Inca Empire, a steady stream of gold and silver treasures from various tribes gathered there every year, contributing to the prosperity of Cuzco.

As an empire, if you want to rule a vast territory and control a million people, you must unify your thoughts and beliefs.

So did the Inca Empire! The Incas thought they were descendants of the sun god, so they built a high altar. The closer they are to the sun, the more they can represent their worship of the sun god. This is how Machu Picchu was built.

Every winter is the season closest to the sun in the southern hemisphere, but the Incas don't know these modern scientific common sense. They felt that the sun god gave them the warmest light at that time, and they gathered together to thank the sun god for giving them abundant crops and giving them the reproduction of human beings and animals.

The Inca king led his people to Machu Picchu for a sacrificial ceremony. The ancient empire seems to have a tradition of offering sacrifices to the living, regardless of region and time. No matter the Shang and Zhou Dynasties in China or the Inca Empire in South America, although there has never been any intersection, they all tacitly followed the same tradition.

The Inca king ordered his soldiers to throw many young men and women who were bound into the burial pit, shovel the earth and bury them alive, and sacrifice human souls to the sun god. Although bloody and cruel, the sun god will bring more glory and greater gains to the country in the coming year and make the country prosperous forever.

The magazine cover on the train is printed with pictures of Machu Picchu terraces. Before that, I always mistakenly thought that terraced fields were a unique landscape in the southwest mountainous areas of China, but I didn't expect that the Incas had invented terraced fields a thousand years ago. It is not convenient to grow cereal rice in mountainous areas, but it is a necessity for people's life. So the local residents reclaimed the sloping hillside into small, winding, narrow and flat fields, and planted grain on them. The fields were made of stone ridges of different sizes, which not only prevented soil erosion, but also guided the rapid diversion of rainwater.

From a distance, terraces are like steps, which is one of the greatest achievements of Inca civilization. Not only that, the Incas also built houses on more open mountains, also in the form of terraces. They have no cement, no sediment and no steel. All buildings are made of stone. Superb cutting technology makes the stones perfectly butted together, even the gaps can't be seen, even with a knife.

This reminds me of the Great Wall in China and the pyramids in Egypt, which are world wonders built by ancient working people with stones. After thousands of years of erosion, it still stands at the top of the world and is admired by people.

Since the beginning of the last century, an American historian has discovered Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca city that has disappeared. Hundreds of tourists come here every year to witness the elegance of ancient civilization. The increasingly commercialized behavior has brought serious damage to the ancient city. Once, a Peruvian beer company came to Machu Picchu to shoot an advertisement. A photographer accidentally knocked down the lifting frame and smashed the sacrificial Lari stone. Since then, Larishi has been tied with ropes and tourists are forbidden to approach. The hapless photographer was sentenced to six years in prison. Even Bingham, an American who first discovered the ancient city, has repeatedly made destructive excavations at Machu Picchu and brought more than 5,000 cultural relics back to the United States, which has not been returned yet.

The tourism of Machu Picchu is still developing, and the Peruvian government plans to build an international airport there to attract more tourists and bring higher income to the country. I don't know how many times Machu Picchu can withstand "sightseeing damage" in the future.

Laputa in City in the Sky is also doomed to be destroyed. After the greedy Musca and the army found and landed in Lapda, they plundered the treasure crazily and tried to use the robots in the castle to rule the world. In order to stop the plot between Musca and the army, Hida and Baru (the heroine and the hero of the film) read a spell to destroy everything and destroyed Laputa. At the end of the movie, the huge flying stone carrying Laputa's tree of life slowly rises to the end of the sky.

Good things are like this. Once discovered by human beings, greedy people want to take it for themselves, while utilitarian people plan how to maximize their value. They don't think this is a symbol of human civilization, a witness of human history, and it has nothing to do with them, just like the murals in Dunhuang, Japan and the cultural relics of Machu Picchu in the United States.