Architectural layout of Wu ancestral hall
Within the courtyard wall, six yi county bluestone slabs and eight stone pillars form the stone carving "Ten Scenes of West Lake", with a total length of about eight meters.
In terms of materials and carving techniques, it is a must for Huizhou stone carving. Huizhou stone carving began in Han Dynasty and flourished in Ming and Qing Dynasties. Limited by the carving materials themselves, Huizhou stone carving is not as complicated as wood carving and brick carving. The main carving themes are animal and plant images, Bo Gu patterns, calligraphy and so on. , while the carving themes of character stories and landscapes are rare. This group of stone carvings in Wu's Ancestral Hall is carved with the theme of "Ten Scenes of West Lake" in Hangzhou. The producers mainly use plane carving and relief, and the knife method is exquisite, simple and elegant. It was carved by Yu Shangxiang, a stonemason in Yixian County, by Wu Yingsheng, a great businessman, in order to let people who can't walk out of the mountains know the world, and settled in Hangzhou. I copied it for half a year and returned to Huizhou. Therefore, the Ten Scenes of the West Lake are comprehensive, authentic, vivid and beautiful, which is the perfect combination of landscape techniques of Xin 'an Painting School and stone carving art of Han nationality. Then there is the progress of the ancestral hall, also known as "Xiangtang". The moon beam and gold pillars of the Wu ancestral hall on the north bank are the largest in Huizhou. If you go further inside, you will enter at the back. The backward underground is a big pond. In the middle of it, there is a pond one foot and two inches deep, with spring water at the bottom and carp and lotus. The north fence of the pond is the famous White Deer Original Map. "White Deer Original Map" is another masterpiece of Wu's Ancestral Hall stone carving group map, and it is also composed of seven yi county bluestone slabs, but the darker yi county bluestone. Its sculptor has a strong three-dimensional sense, and a hundred deer playing in the wild jump out of the picture.
Above the patio is the "bedroom", which has two floors, the lower floor is the bedroom and the upper floor is the attic. In the old days, the back wall of the main hall was divided into a long and narrow room of about two meters by a partition, and there were three large compartments on the trapezoidal niche seat to worship the memorial tablet of Wu Zushi. There is a brick shrine embedded in the gable on the west side. Although it is not square, the carver is gorgeous and exquisite. It uses locally produced blue-gray bricks as carving raw materials. This kind of brick is made of fine soil, which is washed manually to remove impurities and sand, then made into a green brick and fired by a special process. If there are sand grains and impurities in the blue brick, it will affect the detail carving of the brick carving. Brick carving is one of the three traditional sculptures in Huizhou. It is mostly used in the gatehouse, doorframe and lintel of Huizhou school, showing the elegance and solemnity of the building. Brick carving shrines like Wu's Ancestral Hall are extremely rare in Huizhou, which is a classic of brick carving art of the Han nationality in Huizhou. Located at the entrance of the third floor underground of Wu Ancestral Hall, there are 53 ritual vessels around the pond. In the sixth year of Daoguang (1826), Wu Yingsheng, the eldest son of Jinglong Tea House, presided over the reconstruction project of the Wu ancestral hall on the north bank of Shexian County, where the Wu clan lived in compact communities. At the risk of deceiving the monarch, he carved 53 pieces of traditional ritual vessels for the royal sacrifice in ancient China on the inner wall of the underground pool of the third sleeping hall of Wu Ancestral Hall, offering them to his ancestors. An ancient folk ancestral temple is carved with royal ritual vessels, which is also very rare in the whole country. On June 27th, 2006, 165438+ China Daily News Photo Network "Huizhou Surprises Large Area Chinese Ritual Carvings" wrote: "When he built the ancestral hall, he risked bullying the monarch and carved 53 royal national treasure rituals on the fence of the patio pool of his ancestral hall, which was not available in Huizhou or even the Chinese ancestral hall." On June 27, 2006, Xinhua News Agency published the article "A Folk Ancestral Temple with Royal Sacrifice Ceremony in Shexian County": "Wu's Ancestral Temple was built in Daoguang for six years, and Wu Yingsheng, the ancestor of Wu, who built the ancestral temple, wrote a book for the Imperial Temple Fair ceremony of the Qing Dynasty at that time. Carving royal sacrificial vessels in their ancestral halls was suspected of trespassing at that time. "
On June 27th, 2006, the photo of 1 18 was also published on People's Photo Online.