What is the living fossil of Beijing Road?

The living fossil of Beijing's roads is: Shimenguan: the living fossil of three thousand years' traffic.

On "Five Parallels" from the Ruins of Wuchi Road in Qin Dynasty. From left to right in the picture are Daguan River, neijiang-kunming railway, Kunshui Highway, Qinwuchi Road and Shuima Expressway.

The longest existing ancient post road of Qin Dynasty in China.

The site of Qin Post Road is about 350 meters long and has 243 such horseshoe prints.

Shouwang home

A tiny place, but at the same time there are Qin Yi Road, waterway, railway, national highway and expressway "five roads" strewn at random. On this huge staff, different means of transportation, different sounds and shock waves jointly staged a traffic variation between Gaoling Gorge. This is Shimenguan, the gateway to Yunnan and Sichuan.

Shimenguan, located in Doushaguan Town, southwest of Yanjin County, northern Yunnan, is the only tunnel between the ancient Central Plains and the southwest frontier. The longest Qin site and Wuchi Road in China are preserved here. Wuchi Road, which is different from the thoroughfare of the Qin Dynasty, was the main mountain road on the eastern route of the Southern Silk Road more than 2,400 years ago.

There is the Sui and Tang Pass in the mountains.

Shimenguan is located in Doushaguan Town, Yanjin County at the northern end of Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. Surrounded by mountains and rivers, there are steep cliffs and deep gullies everywhere Traffic has been inconvenient since ancient times. Even today, the transportation network extends in all directions, and it is not easy to go there.

At the end of June 2020, I took my family by bus to Doushaguan Town, entered Yunnan from Leshan City, Sichuan Province via Qianwei County, and then arrived at Doushaguan Town via Shuifu County and Yanjin County. It took more than seven hours to drive. Along G85 expressway, Lengshuixi and Chuansi Township, there is a long downhill slope of more than 20 kilometers, with narrow roads and many bends. You can see a "self-help ramp" every few kilometers by the roadside, which is very different from expressway I have seen in many places, and even makes me suspect that this is not expressway at all. It is hard to imagine how difficult it was for the ancients to take this road from Sichuan to Yunnan, and even how many lives they had to pay.

Doushaguan Town is an important post station between southern Sichuan and northern Yunnan on the ancient southern Silk Road, but I am more interested in Shimenguan, the gateway of Yunnan and Sichuan nearby. At present, in the misty valley at the foot of Wumeng Mountain, thousands of towering city walls stand, breaking the natural barrier that Xiongguan locked Yunnan and Sichuan, and a natural barrier locked the ancient Yunnan-Sichuan artery, which is Shimenguan.

Shimenguan on the stalwart tells the world the historical vicissitudes of Nansi Road, with the key in the south and the throat in the west. After stepping through the stone gate, it has advanced into the Central Plains. Yanjin County Records edited by Chen Yide 1945 said that in ancient times, in addition to people on duty, there were heavy troops stationed upstairs, which can be described as "one person guarded it, and ten thousand people could not force it."

Shimenguan is called the precipice. In ancient times, whenever soldiers went out to war, their families would wait at Shimenguan, expecting their loved ones to return. At the top of Shimenguan, stands a towering castle, which the locals call Guanlou. Below Guanlou is a bucket arch building, which was built in the Song Dynasty.

The longest Qin Post Road in China.

Under the Shimenguan Gate, the longest existing Qin Yi Dao remains in China are preserved. Walking on it, the lightly rained road surface is smooth and bright. The ancient post road is paved with bluestone strips. After years of abrasion, there are several rows of moss-covered pits, and the rain in the pits reflects the swaying trees on the edge of the rock.

From time to time, you can see the explanation board erected by the local cultural relics department on the postal route. According to the above information, this is the longest, best preserved and most horseshoe prints in the site of Qinwuchi Road in China-about 350m long,1.7m wide, with 243 horseshoe prints, some as deep as three or four inches. Over the years, I have been to many sites of the South Silk Road, and rarely have I seen such a long post road and rough horseshoe prints. Every stone ladder on the ancient road is a mottled historical chain.

How was this road built? After Qin destroyed Shu, Li Bing was appointed as the prefect of Shu County and was ordered to build a post road from Chengdu to Yunnan. Most people in China only know that he built the famous Dujiangyan, but they don't know that he also built a passage from Sichuan to Yunnan in southern Sichuan with the ancient method of burning stones with accumulated wages. Later, because the rocks in Sichuan were hard and hard, Li Bing only built a section from Chengdu to Yibin and named it "_ Road".

In 22 1 year BC, when Qin ruled the country, Qin Shihuang sent the general Chang _ to Shu, and then this unfinished Sichuan-Yunnan Grand Passage was built. Chang _ not only widened the old road in the era of Li Bing to five feet, but also connected Xianyang in the north and Shudi in the south, stretching for more than two thousand miles. Therefore, people call this road built by Li Bing and Chang Relay "Wuchi Road", also called "Qin Road".

When the ancients built roads, they paved them with hard limestone. Limestone is a kind of calcium carbonate rock, which can be seen everywhere in karst mountain areas of Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and is mostly used for burning lime by the people. The existence of calcium carbonate rocks seems to be born to compete with the years and coexist with mountains. It is no wonder that after thousands of years of preservation, it is still rarely deformed and damaged. Only in the distant past, the caravan of Sichuan and Yunnan carried cloth, salt, rice, mountain products, medicinal materials, tea, silver, copper and other items back and forth on this ancient road in an endless stream, and the sound of hooves continued.

The ship of time not only wears away the memory, crushes the history, but also covers up the original appearance. I reconstructed it word by word in my mind.

The weather is clear and the visibility is high. Standing on the closed roof and looking at the cliff 50 meters away from the other side of the river, you can clearly see that there are 89 hanging coffins in the cliff cracks 100 meters away from the water surface. Looking through the camera lens, hanging coffins are mostly carved from whole wood and placed in rain-proof crevices with wooden poles. Although it was damaged in the earthquake in July 2006, it was not damaged. It is understood that from 2065438 to June 2005, the cultural relics and archaeology department of Yunnan Province found these 89 coffins in a cliff with a slope 10 meter high and a width of more than 4 meters. The funerary objects in it are several pieces of wood products and linen fabrics, and you can't see the original shape.