Nengyuan Bo

[Nengyuan Bo]

Nengyuan Bo has a height of 40.8 cm, a width of 31.8 cm and a weight of 18.84 kg. Unearthed in Ruizhou (Gao’an County), Jiangxi Province, in the 16th year of Guangxu’s reign in the Qing Dynasty (1890), it was allocated to the Forbidden City by the Cultural Relics Bureau in 1956
The button used to hang the Bo is made of two animals opposite each other. There are 36 flat uddings on both sides, forming the main body of the Bo tattoo, and the rest is decorated with coiled cobra
There are 20 lines of 48 characters in the inscriptions on the two sides of Bo and on the lower left and right corners:
The Yi Ju Shi Yuan Zuo said: “Self praying □ said: □ call labor to benefit, even Yu Dazhu, the leader of the big □ Yue.” The line said: Yu joined the state, made profit □ small, and the other □ □ □ □ in the son. “The line said:” Self Yu “
Nengyuan Bo is a group of Bo weavers, which is composed of several inscriptions. This inscription is only one of them. It is difficult to check how many pieces of Bo are in this group. It is known that in addition to the Forbidden City, there is also one in the Forbidden City of Taipei. From the content of the inscription, the number of the whole group of Bo is far more than these two pieces. The characters on this set of instruments are extremely difficult to interpret. In the past, scholars vaguely recognized the word “Nengyuan”, so it was named “Nengyuan Bell”, or simply admitted that it could not be interpreted, so it was called “Qizi Bell”
During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, a kind of extremely exaggerated artistic style characters, known as “bird and insect calligraphy”, flourished in southern China (such as Chu, Cai, Xu, Zeng, Wu, Yue and other countries at that time), which is characterized by mixed writing of character strokes and bird paintings. After the research and analysis of several generations of scholars, the writing rules of most numbers in this style of calligraphy have been mastered, but some characters cast on the musical instruments and weapons of the State of Yue are variant bird and insect books, which are still difficult to interpret. “Nengyuan Bo” is one of the typical artifacts
Recently, in order to solve this problem in the study of inscriptions on gold, our institute launched a discussion on “Nengyuan Bo” in the journal of the academy, which has received wide support from the academic community. Among them, Mr. Cao Jinyan’s paper put forward an interpretation of the overall content of this group of inscriptions, Now his analysis of the content of the Bo inscription is reproduced as follows:
“As the State of Ju expanded its territory and invaded the State of Zhu, the State of Yue intervened for it, presided over the territorial division, and took the opportunity to expand its territory and build cities, connecting the two countries of Zhu and Ju at its feet. The inscription records the contents of the alliance words of the three parties of Yue, Zhu and Ju.”
(Yue: During the Spring and Autumn Period, the southern ancient country once dominated the south of the Yangtze River and went north to seek the Central Plains. This inscription reflects one of its actions in the north to the Central Plains.)


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