Chapter 254 He has a good memory
All 30 people in the four groups were transferred over.
Tian Jie led three groups to Guzhen, while the remaining group stayed on the plateau.
Gao Zhangyi, travel-worn and with his hair covered in dust, asked, "Teacher Lin, how do we investigate?"
"Find the kiln first!" Lin Sicheng pointed to the map he had drawn on the ground with the probe. "If nothing unexpected happens, it should be at the intersection of the extension lines of these three ash pits."
As he spoke, Lin Sicheng looked up, but the ditch turned a corner ahead and was blocked by the terrace, so he couldn't see anything.
He recalled for a moment: "Captain Gao, do you remember? After you turn this corner, there's a chicken farm on the terrace. I guess the kiln location overlaps with the chicken farm. You should find Secretary-General Tan first and have him communicate with him."
"If you can find it, have Secretary-General Tan organize people to uncover the truth, and then you can come back and explore these three pits."
"clear!"
Gao Zhangyi immediately arranged for the team to start work. Lin Sicheng opened his bag and took out all the materials: planar, satellite, surveying, hydrological, all kinds of maps, as well as aerial photographs.
With the help of his assistant Fang Jin, the magnetic closure was attached to the hood of the pickup truck, and Lin Sicheng examined it with a pen in hand.
Wang Qizhi looked at the diagram on the car cover, then looked around and suddenly realized: he finally understood why Lin Sicheng had asked Tian Jie to search for the ancient riverbed at the bottom of the ditch that had already been dug four or five meters deep.
Look at these aerial photos of the nearby plateau:
The higher terraces have a drop of twenty or thirty meters to the bottom of the ditch, while even the shallower ones are seven or eight meters deep.
The drop here is only four or five meters deep, which is already very shallow.
The reason why the ash pits and kilns here are buried so deep is because the terraces are entirely composed of loess. Whenever it rains, the loess is washed down with the rainwater, and over the years, the terraces become lower and lower, while the bottom of the gullies becomes higher and higher.
Whether it's an ancient riverbed or an ash pit at the bottom of a ditch, it will naturally be buried deeper and deeper.
In a flash, Lin Sicheng picked up a pen and tapped a few times on a flat map.
Wang Qizhi peeked out and looked around: Xipo Town, Laoyaotou, Beiwuqin, Guduo, Guzhen.
After a slight pause, Lin Sicheng added a question mark below Guzhen and then colored Bei Wuqin's triangle black.
After a little thought, Wang Qizhi understood: the reason why Beiwuqin Tangyao was black was because it was not in the same water area as the other places.
The Xipo pottery site in Xiangning County, the Laoyaotou Qing Dynasty porcelain kiln, the Guduo Yuan and Jin Dynasty porcelain kiln, and Guzhen, which is currently under exploration, are all located in the Zhemayu River Basin.
Only Beiwu celery is found in Guayu.
However, the five sites are all connected by a common lineage: Beiwuqin is the earliest, dating back to the Tang Dynasty. Laoyaotou is the latest, dating back to the Qing Dynasty. Guduo is in the middle, with one site dating back to the Yuan Dynasty and another to the Jin Dynasty.
What about Guzhen, which remains unexplored? Was it from the Song Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, or both?
Thinking to himself, Wang Qizhi watched Lin Sicheng sketch and draw for more than two hours.
He didn't go back to the village committee at noon; he ate a boxed lunch on-site. After eating, Lin Sicheng continued drawing.
At first, they could understand what was drawn on a map. But when Lin Sicheng switched to blank paper, Wang Qizhi and Sun Jiamu couldn't keep up with his thinking.
The key issue is that he doesn't recognize them: Lin Sicheng could distinguish a triangle symbol in more than a dozen ways, including up, down, left, right, hollow, solid, and semi-hollow, and in red, green, black, blue, and purple...
Besides triangles, there are also squares, dots, trapezoids, dashed lines, solid lines, arrows... dozens of different shapes and sizes, along with densely packed numbers, making it feel like looking at a codebook.
After observing for a long time, Sun Jiamu frowned: "He should be calculating the location of an earlier site, right? But this algorithm... Professor Wang, did you teach him this?"
Wang Qizhi puffed out his cheeks, wanting to curse: "He can't even understand it, what kind of teaching is he supposed to give?"
Just as he was muttering to himself, Lin Sicheng's walkie-talkie crackled to life: "Teacher Lin, the kiln has been found, but it's badly damaged!"
"Thank you, Captain Gao. What's the exact location?"
"Southeast corner of the chicken farm!"
"good!"
After replying, Lin Sicheng told Fang Jin to pack up the documents, then turned and went up the slope to the terrace.
Sun Jiamu and Wang Qizhi followed closely behind, but just as they reached the top of the platform, they suddenly froze:
Not far away, about 100 or 200 meters away, there was indeed a chicken farm in the middle of the terrace, and the stench could be smelled from afar.
Further south, there is a Catholic church.
But that's not the point; the real focus is on the two archaeological chambers to the south of the church.
Hearing the commotion, several people rushed out of the cabin, glanced at Sun Jiamu from a distance, and then quickly scurried back inside.
The two looked at each other in bewilderment: No... how could they be so close?
The straight-line distance from the Neolithic archaeological chamber to the three ash pits was only about 300 meters. It was even closer to the kiln location found by Gao Zhangyi, just over 200 meters away.
Subconsciously, the two thought of the shovel Lin Sicheng had inadvertently found at the Neolithic site: if he had just gone a little further north, he would have found this place a month ago…
Just as they were marveling at this, the two of them were stunned again: Lin Sicheng told Gao Zhangyi to leave work first, saying that he would explore the three ash pits directly tomorrow.
It's almost seven o'clock, time to leave work, but shall I stop exploring here?
Looking up, the two suddenly understood: from here to the church, only a hundred or so meters away, there were hundreds of holes drilled, each hole excavating more than ten meters of soil.
There is indeed a cultural layer of porcelain kiln ruins, but it is pitifully thin: the thickest part is less than half a meter.
Especially the area where the kiln was located, only a charred bottom remains, about 20 or 30 centimeters deep.
Look closer: below the cultural layer is raw soil, and above it is all construction waste...
Tan Wu sighed: "I asked the village elders, and they speculated that some of it was destroyed during the land reclamation project in the 1950s, and another part was destroyed in the early 1970s when soil was taken to build canals. Later, the construction of a church and a livestock farm destroyed another part..."
Sun Jiamu really wanted to ask: So how did you conduct your preliminary research?
But after glancing at Tan Wu, he swallowed his words.
Lin Sicheng only had a few men under his command, not enough for reconnaissance and trial surveys, so the backup plan must have been organized by local people.
It's probably because the era is too ancient and the difficulty too great, so it wasn't done in great detail. Besides, given the background of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when people were struggling to feed themselves, who cared about historical sites or porcelain kilns?
Without any written records, we had to ask door-to-door. But even from the early 1970s to now, nearly forty years have passed. How many of these elderly people are still alive?
As for the church and the farm, they probably concealed them initially to avoid delays in construction. Later, fearing fines if discovered, they became even more hesitant to report them…
Lin Sicheng remained calm and examined each of the excavated soil layers.
"There's more wood ash and less coal ash, so this kiln should mainly produce black porcelain and earthenware pillows. Celadon and white porcelain only make up a small portion..."
To put it bluntly: the kiln site for the egg white jade is not here, so even if it is damaged, the loss is not significant.
The key is whether Tian Jie has discovered it.
Just as I was pondering this, my phone rang. Tian Jie called and said: No kiln site remains have been found yet, but ancient riverbed remains have been discovered at the bottom of a ditch on the terrace west of Guzhen Village.
Suddenly, the slightly quiet atmosphere relaxed.
In Lin Sicheng's words: "As long as the river channel is explored, no matter how deep the site is buried, it will be as transparent as if it were transparent."
Lin Sicheng waved his hand: "Off work!"
A large group of people were gathered there, some packing up tools, others shutting down machines.
Tan Wu quickly arranged for someone to take the night shift.
...
Three days later, a group of people stood beside a large pit west of Guzhen Village.
Neither the archaeological team members nor the experts from the cultural relics bureau, who had been given a day off by Sun Jiamu to come and visit, looked particularly pleased.
Good news: Lin Sicheng is absolutely certain that the Guzhen Village site he has been longing for has been found.
The two locations, one above the other, are both situated in farmland on a terraced hillside next to the village. The upper one is called Upper Eight Mu, and the lower one is called Lower Eight Mu.
There are three kiln sites alone, plus four workshops including washing pools, shaping rooms, and drying yards. There are also remains of wells, ash ditches, stone millstones, and piles of porcelain clay.
The bad news: the area is not large, just over 1,000 square meters. It is still a Jin Dynasty kiln site, but it is even later than the breeding farm site, probably dating back to the mid-Jin Dynasty.
Although most of them are white porcelain, they are all coarse white porcelain, and their quality is not even as good as the celadon porcelain unearthed in Guduo Village.
Worse news: The site is severely damaged, slightly better than the Guduo Village farm and church ruins, but the improvement is still limited. In particular, only the bottom sintering surface remains of the kiln, making it impossible to even guess what the kiln actually looked like.
The best-preserved site is Workshop No. 4 on Shangbamu. The stratigraphic profile after excavation looks like this:
T represents the soil layer, H represents the ash pit, and F represents the workshop.
The area marked "F" on the right is where the underground workshop was buried under an abandoned cave dwelling. Before the cave dwelling was built, there was a small brick factory here from the 1950s to the early 1980s.
They then used local soil to make bricks, turning the terrace, which was originally the same height as the foundation of the houses, into a large pit nearly four meters deep, leaving only the bottom of the site.
In those days, such things were quite normal. What angered Wang Qizhi was: why didn't the investigation find that a brick kiln had been built here?
If the locals had been more observant, Lin Sicheng would definitely have taken a look at this brick kiln, and if he had, he would have definitely made a few bricks. At the very least, it would have been discovered a month earlier.
There was no need for him to brave the heavy rain to go up the mountain to check the flood ditch, let alone deduce the course of the ancient river from that Song Dynasty tomb.
How much effort did Lin Sicheng go through in the past month to finally find this place?
Lin Sicheng was in a relatively good mood. As the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining: if he had found this place earlier, he would definitely have missed the Neolithic site at Nantai. He also wouldn't have recognized Director Wu, Section Chief Sun, and so many other experts.
Furthermore, although the kiln site was severely damaged, there were numerous ash pits on the platform and at the bottom of the ditch, totaling as many as thirty. Thousands of complete and restorable porcelain pieces were unearthed, along with porcelain shards and kiln tool specimens weighing as much as six tons.
Although the unearthed white porcelain shards were all coarse white porcelain, he speculated that this was because the war caused technicians to flee, the coking technology was interrupted, and the kiln temperature could not be controlled.
Other techniques, such as clay refining and glaze preparation, have been largely inherited. Even if an earlier kiln cannot be found in the end, these samples can basically be used to reconstruct the egg-white jade.
It's simply a matter of doing more trial and error, and taking a little longer.
Most importantly, a large number of porcelain pillow fragments were unearthed from the abandoned piles at the upper part of Workshop No. 4, namely F4① and F4②.
These include an octagonal pillow with carved and filled black peony pattern, a pillow with carved and filled black characters, a pearl-ground carved oval pillow, and a low-temperature glazed tricolor lotus pattern pillow.
These porcelain pillow fragments are sufficient to prove the most representative porcelain-making techniques of the Hejin Kiln during the Jin Dynasty: sancai pottery and porcelain pillows.
With more time, Lin Sicheng could re-establish the original locations of many porcelain pillows collected by major museums both domestically and internationally.
The results Zhao Xiuneng found during this period include: the Capital Museum, Shaanxi History Museum, Henan Museum, Hebei Museum, as well as the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, USA, and the Seikado Bunko Art Museum in Japan... This is the result of Zhao Xiuneng's month-long search; there are many more that he did not find.
But there's no rush.
First, there is a lack of key technological links: since the sites from this period are so badly damaged, we need to find earlier sites to at least prove the source of their technological inheritance.
Secondly, even if you changed the original location of all the Hejin porcelain pillows in museum collections, they still couldn't compare to the one in the Palace Museum:
Emperor Qianlong personally wrote a poem about it and slept on it for many years, so its influence is self-evident.
So ultimately, we need to find Song Dynasty kilns.
In a flash, Lin Sicheng took out the drawing he had made three days ago. It was covered with densely packed symbols that no one could understand.
At the northernmost point of the map, there is a large triangle with two Chinese characters written on it: Beijian.
This was something Wang Qizhi strongly urged Lin Sicheng to write down, because if it wasn't written down, no one would be able to understand it. They wouldn't even be able to distinguish east from west.
Many people have seen this picture and know that this is the final location of the Song Dynasty kiln site that Lin Sicheng deduced based on four sites: terraced fields, a breeding farm, and the Upper and Lower Eight Mu sites.
After so many experiences, no one doubted Lin Sicheng's ability to speculate and calculate. He was certain that there were ruins in the Beijian area.
They were just a little worried: what if, like here, they unearthed a Jin Dynasty or even a Ming Dynasty structure?
However, Tian Jie and Gao Zhangyi led all four groups to that area. Lin Sicheng said: "Whether it's true or not, we'll have the results today..."
"Secretary-General Tan, the follow-up excavation here is in your hands. Workshop No. 4 needs to be handled with extra care, especially the bottom remains; try to preserve them as intact as possible! If we don't have enough manpower, we should seek support from the city and provincial departments..."
Tan Wu was a complete novice, more like a liaison officer, and while taking notes, he asked, "Teacher Lin, could you be more specific?"
"Yes! Workshop No. 4 should be considered a representative unit of the Hejin Kiln, and it is the birthplace of the most representative carved, engraved, and low-temperature sancai porcelain pillows of the Jin Dynasty Hejin Kiln... So, you can just write it like this..."
Lin Sicheng paused briefly, then pointed to the unearthed fragments of the porcelain pillow:
"According to the restoration center's investigation, major museums in China, such as the Palace Museum and the Shaanxi History Museum, as well as museums in the United States and Japan, all have similar rare porcelain pillows from Hejin in their collections. Whether it was produced in Hejin still needs further verification..."
Tan Wu paused, his pupils contracting slightly: Which restoration center?
Of course, it's the Yuncheng branch of the Northwest University Cultural Relics Restoration Center...
A group of experts from Beijing stared wide-eyed: So many museums have Hejin kiln porcelain pillows in their collections, how come we didn't know about them?
Sun Jiamu looked at him strangely: "Don't tell me you don't know, even I don't know?"
No, it's more likely that none of the major museums know...
Just as he was about to ask, Wang Qizhi sighed, "Director Sun, you haven't seen General Manager Zhao for a long time, have you? A month ago, Lin Sicheng sent him to Beijing..."
Sun Jiamu was skeptical: at that time, they had just found the Beiwuqin Tang kiln, which had absolutely no connection to the Jin Dynasty or porcelain pillows. How could Lin Sicheng be sure which museum or exhibition institution had a Hejin porcelain pillow in its collection?
Wang Qizhi thought for a moment: "He has a good memory, he probably saw it somewhere before!"
Sun Jiamu really wanted to curse: Wang Qizhi, have you no shame?
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