Sticking to the stand of Chinese culture is the basic premise of promoting cultural self-confidence and self-improvement. Only by thinking rationally about the inheritance, borrow-in, development, and promotion of culture can we grasp the essence of sticking to the stand of Chinese culture. To inherit the traditional culture, we should combine the new practice with the requirements of the times and take its essence while discarding its dross. The key to learning from foreign cultures is to give priority to ourselves and use them for our purposes. We can not swallow it all down and blindly use it. To develop socialist culture, we should, on the one hand, respect the national cultural tradition and on the other hand, constantly innovate and create a new culture. To carry forward Chinese culture, we need to meet the people’s growing spiritual and cultural demands internally and strengthen the influence of the spread of Chinese civilization, promoting Chinese culture to the world.
Chinese civilization has unique characteristics in the world civilization history. Its most prominent characteristic is the continuity of the “5,000-year” civilization. Over 5,000 years ago, different civilizations appeared in different regions of China and the civilizations mainly included their different early-stage theocracy and reign modes. Among these civilizations, the civilization that was handed on from generation to generation was the states with a reign mode that originated in the Longshan culture of Central China and its successors such as the Xia Dynasty, the Shang Dynasty, the Zhou Dynasty, the Qin Dynasty, the Han Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty. This can be illustrated by the 5,000-year continuous inheritance of the country, people, and territory of China, proved by the 5,000-year inheritance and development of capitals, royal tombs, ritual and ceremonial buildings and vessels, and characters as the national culture (or major tradition) and resurrected by the capital’s centralization,“OneGate Three-Passage” pattern,“centralization of the main hall of the court” and the“Left Ancestral Temple and Right Altar” pattern, and the central axis of the capital, the four doors on four sides of the capital and court, etc. as the materialized forms of the core ideas of center and moderation. These materialized forms of the unbroken civilization became more and more in the past 5,000 years, which indicates that the ideas of center and moderation became stronger and stronger and were constantly deepened. The ideological roots of the 5,000-year unbroken Chinese civilization are the ideas of center and moderation, which are the ideological basis for the state identity and the core value of the Chinese national history.
Terracotta warriors are an important part of the burial system of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum and are the funerary objects of military themes. The appearance of terracotta warriors broke through the architectural structure of burial pits in early tombs, expanded the scale and object of burial, and realized the complicated and hierarchical concept of burial. Its emergence is related to the blending of the pre-Qin tradition and the concepts at that time, such as the change of the concept of human sacrifice, the rise of the burial of figurines, the change of the concept of funerary objects and objects for the living, etc., together with the ruling strategy of the Qin Empire and Emperor Qin Shi Huang himself, which contributed to the formation of terracotta warriors.
The system of Three Courts and Five Gates is an essential content of the designs of the capitals and palaces of ancient China. The Three Courts and Five Gates planning of the Daming Palace is the adoption of this rule and the application to the spatial designing of the palace city. The archaeological fieldwork revealed that within the Daming Palace, the Three Courts pattern with three walls as the borders, and Hanyuan Hall, Xuanzheng Hall, and Zichen Hall as the centers formed the outer court, middle court, and inner court plan, which was the embodiment of the new interpretation of the Tang Dynasty to the traditional Three Courts and Five Gates ritual system. Through the trimming of the archaeological data fetched in the past 60 years about the southern part, which is the official affair zone, of the Daming Palace, this paper discusses the spatial structure of the Three Courts and Five Gates pattern of the Daming Palace, and analyzes the substantial relationship between this pattern and the political demands of the ruling class.
An archaeological excavation was jointly conducted by organizations including the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute in the first half of 2017 in the Jiangkou stretch of the Minjiang River in Pengshan District, Meizhou, Sichuan Province, where more than two hundred gold and silver xiwang shanggong coins were unearthed. This was the first time that the existence of xiwang shanggong coins was proved by a systematic archaeological excavation, providing a scientific basis for solving the long-standing unresolved historical problem. By sorting out the academic history of xiwang shanggong coins, this paper points out that in the past seven years, these coins have experienced the transition from being dug by robbers to being excavated scientifically, and have turned from a hot topic in collection to one in academia. This paper summarizes the characteristics of these gold and silver coins and presents an idea that those coins may have never been officially issued. Some of the coins have residual traces of being burnt, which may provide physical proof to prove the event in historical records that the fleet of Zhang Xianzhong was burnt by the army of Yang Zhan in the early Qing Dynasty. By using these unearthed xiwang shanggong coins as the standard and comparing them with some of the handed-down counterparts, this paper makes an in-depth analysis on the authenticity of the handed-down coins and indicates that some of the gold and silver ones may be authentic while some copper ones may be counterfeit.