Zhu Yuanzhang's Legend is a folk literature project in the second batch of representative projects of Huai'an's municipal intangible cultural heritage. The origin and spread of the legend "Zhu Yuanzhang's Legend" is mainly spread in Xuyi County, Huai'an City and surrounding areas. Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398 AD), formerly known as Zhu Chongba, was a native of Taiping Township, Zhongli, Haozhou (now east of Fengyang County, Anhui Province). When he was young, his family was poor and he worked as a cattle herder. It is said that when he was herding cattle, he counted the hills of Xuyi and counted the hills under his feet, and wrote a doggerel poem that has been passed down to this day: "Ten hills, nine heads, the river flows eastward; the rich have no three generations, and the honest officials have no end." Later, Zhu Yuanzhang's parents and brothers died of plague, and his life was hard. In order to survive, he became a monk in Huangjue Temple. After being bullied, he left the temple and traveled around, experiencing the sufferings of the world. At the age of 25, he joined the Red Turban Army led by Guo Zixing to resist the Mongols. In the seventh year of Longfeng (1361 AD), he was granted the title of Duke of Wu, and in the tenth year he called himself the King of Wu. In the 28th year of Zhizheng in the Yuan Dynasty (1368 AD), after basically defeating various peasant uprisings and sweeping away the remnants of the Yuan Dynasty, he proclaimed himself emperor in Nanjing, with the reign title of Hongwu, and established the Ming Dynasty, leaving behind many legendary stories. Basic content Zhu Yuanzhang's rich legendary experience has been passed down by the world, and evolved into many legendary stories, such as: "Feng Shui Treasure Land": It is said that Zhu Yuanzhang's ancestor was from Pei County, Xuzhou. During the Song Dynasty, the Jin soldiers invaded, and his family fled to Zhuxiang, Tongde Township, Jurong County, Jiangnan, and settled down. The government designated the Zhu family as a "gold digger" and required his family to pay gold every year. The Zhu family could not afford the gold, so they fled back to Jiangbei and settled in Sunjiagang, north of Sizhou. Zhu Yuanzhang's grandfather Zhu Chu's family was very poor and made a living by cutting grass. One day, Zhu Chuyi went to Yangjiadun in the east of the village to cut grass. When he was tired, he slept in the grass nest to rest. At this time, two Taoist priests came from the south and walked to the mound. After looking at the terrain for a while, the old Taoist priest said, "This is still a Feng Shui treasure land." The apprentice asked, "How do you know?" "The ground here is warm. If you insert a dead branch, it will sprout within ten days." After that, the apprentice casually inserted a dead branch into the mound, and the master and apprentice walked north. After listening to the two Taoist priests, Zhu Chuyi came here to cut grass every day and looked at the dead branch. On the tenth day, the dead branch really sprouted. He also wanted to give it a try, so he replaced a dead branch on the mound. At this time, the two Taoist priests he had seen last time walked towards the mound, and Zhu Chuyi hurriedly hid in the grass nest. The apprentice went forward and saw that the dead branch had not sprouted. He asked the old Taoist priest what was going on. The old Taoist priest pulled up the dead branch and took a closer look and said, "This branch has been replaced by someone." They found Zhu Chuyi in the grass nest next to him and asked him, and it was true. The old Taoist said: "You have heard what we said, and you can't tell others anymore. This is a Feng Shui treasure land. If you are buried here after you die, a noble person will appear in your family." Later, before Zhu Chuyi died, he took care of his son Zhu Shizhen and asked him to be buried in Yangjiadun after his death. After Zhu Shizhen buried him as instructed, he fled to Fengyang County, Anhui Province with his wife, and first fled to his brother's house in Taiping Township, Xuyi (now Jiashan County) to temporarily settle down. His wife gave birth to a little boy there. When the boy was born, he was red and auspicious. This boy was Zhu Yuanzhang who later established the Ming Dynasty. "Searching for the Tomb and Worshiping the Ancestors": After Zhu Yuanzhang grew up, he relied on the power of the peasant uprising to overthrow the Yuan Dynasty and became the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty. He thought, so many people fought for the world with me, why couldn't others succeed and only I became the emperor? It must be that the ancestors were buried in the Feng Shui treasure land, and a mausoleum must be built to worship the ancestors. Zhu Yuanzhang's father Zhu Shizhen died in Fengyang, and he buried him with his own hands, so he built the imperial mausoleum in Fengyang. So where was his grandfather buried? Zhu Yuanzhang didn't know. Hearing that his grandfather was buried in Tongde Township, Jurong, he went there to build a tall and large new earthen tomb. After it was built, he knelt down and bowed, and the tomb collapsed. This may also be related to the loose soil of the new tomb, but Zhu Yuanzhang thought, since it can't bear my bow, it proves that it is not my ancestral tomb. So he got up and severely punished the person who said that this was his ancestral tomb. Zhu Yuanzhang failed to find the ancestral tomb in Jurong, but he was still unwilling. Later, he recalled that when he was a child, his eldest sister Princess Xiaoqin once said that his grandfather was buried in Sizhou. But Sizhou is very large, with a radius of hundreds of miles, and finding the ancestral tomb is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There is no other way, so he had to practice "remote worship" to worship his ancestors, kneeling in Nanjing and kowtowed in the northwest direction of Sizhou. As for the problem of finding the ancestral tomb, he had to take a long-term view and slowly inquire. "Zhu Gui Presents a Picture": Zhu Yuanzhang had a small official Zhu Gui, who lived in Sunjiagang, north of Sizhou. One year during the Spring Festival, he asked for leave to go home and talked to people about Zhu Yuanzhang's visit to Jurong to look for his ancestors. The elders told Zhu Gui that the ancestral tomb of the current emperor was in Yangjiadun, half a mile east of the village, and told about Zhu Chuyi's residence and burial after his death. Zhu Gui felt like he had found a treasure after hearing this, and he made many inquiries and found that it was indeed correct. So he specially drew a picture and returned to Nanjing to present it to Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Gui also made up a story based on Zhu Yuanzhang's psychology, saying that in the past, there were three dragons in Zhongzhou Bianliang coming to the southeast, and the middle dragon stretched its head into the Huaihe River under Xuyi Mountain to drink water. After drinking the water, the dragon head tilted and stretched to Yangjiadun. The old forest mouth under the ditch is the old dragon mouth. Today, the nine hills and eighteen depressions in the north of Sizhou City, the undulating terrain is the incarnation of the dragon body. This place is beautiful with beautiful mountains and rivers, and it is a Feng Shui treasure land. Zhu Yuanzhang was very happy to hear this, so he sent the crown prince Zhu Biao to lead the ministers and craftsmen to survey the area. It took 28 years to build the grand Mingzu Mausoleum. There were three city walls, and the outer city was nine miles and thirty steps, as big as Sizhou City. There were pavilions and towers, all with green tiles, stone men and stone horses lined up opposite each other, and a sacred road led directly to the mausoleum Wansui Mountain. Because of his meritorious service in presenting the map, Zhu Gui was promoted to the first director of the Mingzu Mausoleum, and was awarded official uniforms, money, and residential farmland, and allowed his descendants to inherit the mausoleum. Therefore, until the demise of the Ming Dynasty for hundreds of years, the descendants of Zhu Gui were worshipped in the Mingzu Mausoleum, and they were all seventh-rank officials equivalent to county magistrates. "The Flooding of the Ming Mausoleum": In order to glorify his ancestors, Zhu Yuanzhang built a large-scale mausoleum, which not only cost a lot of money from the national treasury, but also harmed the Jellyfish Goddess. Legend has it that after the jellyfish came to the world, she lived with her husband and children near Hongqiao in the north of Sizhou City. The family of three made a living by fishing and lived a sweet life. When Zhu Yuanzhang was building the ancestral mausoleum, he forced the jellyfish husband to transport stones for him. One day, the wind was strong and the waves were high. The boat was small and loaded with a lot of water. The boat flipped in the center of Guishan Lake and the jellyfish husband was drowned in the waves. For this matter, the jellyfish took the orphan to Nanjing to find Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Yuanzhang not only did not give her a pension, but also used the Laojun cover that Laozi used to make elixirs to cover her son to death. This made the jellyfish angry. In order to avenge the murder of her husband and son, she decided to flood the Ming Zuling, the ancestral tomb of Zhu Yuanzhang for three generations. One day, the jellyfish disguised herself as a poor woman and carried a bucket of water to sell on the street. When the Jade Emperor heard about it, he was shocked. Because he knew that the jellyfish was carrying a divine bucket, which contained water from the four seas and three rivers, enough to flood the thirty-six counties of Kyushu. So the immortal Zhang Guolao was sent to rescue. Zhang Guolao turned into an old man walking on the street, leading his donkey to the streets of Sizhou. He said to the jellyfish, "My donkey is dying of thirst. Please sell me some water." The jellyfish thought it had a lot of water and said nonchalantly, "Drink it. It's free." Unexpectedly, the donkey stretched its head over and drank almost all the water in a blink of an eye, leaving only a little muddy feet. Seeing this, the jellyfish stretched out its hand and pulled the bottom of the bucket upside down. Suddenly, the waves surged, sweeping away the pavilions and towers of the Ming Dynasty Mausoleum, and even the tall Yangjiadun was submerged in a vast ocean. "Seeing the Light Again": The jellyfish took revenge, not only submerging the Ming Dynasty Mausoleum, but also submerging the ancient city of Sizhou, creating the Hongze Lake with a radius of hundreds of miles, drowning tens of thousands of ordinary people. Later, Guanyin Bodhisattva was afraid that the jellyfish would continue to do evil, so she disguised herself as a food seller and turned the iron chain into noodles. When the jellyfish ate the noodles and excreted them from her ass, she grabbed the two ends of the iron chain and captured her. She locked her in the octagonal glazed well at the foot of Guishan Mountain. The jellyfish was caught, but the stone men and horses in front of the Ming Zu Mausoleum were still in the water of Hongze Lake and had been submerged for more than 300 years. They were really bored, so they went to the Jade Emperor. The Jade Emperor gave them 24 big characters: "If you want to see the light of day again, you must liberate the whole country. If you want to see the light of day again, the jellyfish should change from evil to good." Legend has it that after the liberation of the whole country, the jellyfish really stopped making trouble. People released her and she remarried in Dongzhi County, Anhui. Later, the water of Hongze Lake receded automatically, allowing the stone men and horses to see the light of day again. After the stone men and horses emerged from the water, no one cared for them at first, so they went to steal people's food at night. There was a stone man and stone horse named Lama Shizhe who actually ran to Dongzhi County to eat the food of Jellyfish’s family. Jellyfish’s husband chased him to a place 50 meters away from the sacred road of Mingzu Mausoleum, cut off his legs with a knife, and fell there motionless. Later, the stone man and stone horse of Lama Shizhe were sent back to the original sacred road by workers with a large crane until the state allocated funds to rebuild Mingzu Mausoleum. Legend has it that Mingzu Mausoleum is located on the west bank of Hongze Lake in Xuyi County, Jiangsu Province. It is the cenotaph of the great-grandfather and great-grandfather of Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang and the actual burial place of his grandfather. The construction of Mingzu Mausoleum took nearly 30 years. It is located on the hill and facing the Huai River. It basically imitates the regulations of the imperial mausoleums of Tang and Song dynasties, but the upper and lower palace system of the Tang and Song mausoleums has been abolished, making it more compact. The mausoleum is rectangular in shape, with three walls: the outer wall is an earthen wall with a circumference of 3 kilometers; the middle wall is a brick wall with a circumference of 1.1 kilometers; the inner wall is the imperial city, with the main hall, county service hall, god kitchen, vegetarian room, storehouse, slaughter pavilion, jade belt bridge, etc. There are 21 pairs of stone statues on both sides of the sacred road in front of the mausoleum, arranged from north to south on the 850-meter-long central axis. The stone carvings are huge and finely carved. The largest one weighs more than 20 tons, and the smallest one weighs more than 5 tons. On both sides of the sacred road, from south to north, east to west, there are 2 pairs of unicorns, 6 pairs of lions, 2 pairs of lookout pillars, 1 pair of horse officials, 1 pair of horse pullers, 1 pair of horse officials, 1 pair of celestial horses, 1 pair of attendants, 2 pairs of civil officials, 2 pairs of military generals, and 2 pairs of eunuchs. These stone carvings are magnificent in scale, superb in craftsmanship, and smooth in lines. The overall style is different from the Fengyang Imperial Mausoleum, the Xiaoling Mausoleum, and the Ming Tombs, and is similar to the stone carvings of the Song Mausoleum. Although the Ming Zuling Mausoleum is extremely magnificent, it is unfortunately not located beside a high mountain, but on a hilly land known as "Nine Hills and Eighteen Sinkholes". In the seventh year of Ming Hongzhi (1494 AD), Liu Daxia built the Taihang Dike to block the northern branch of the Yellow River, so that the southern branch took over the Huai River and flowed into the sea. The river channel began to become disordered, and the middle and lower reaches of the Huai River were flooded year after year, and the Ming Zuling Mausoleum was constantly suffering from floods. After the 21st year of Jiajing (1542 AD), dikes were continuously built in the east of the mausoleum. In the 19th year of Qing Kangxi (1680 AD), the Ming Zuling Mausoleum and Sizhou City were finally swallowed up by the surging flood. After long-term erosion and impact of lake water, the tomb mound has been flattened, and most of the original brick and wood buildings on the ground have been destroyed. Only the Lingxing Gate, the main hall, the ruins of the east and west wings, and more than 30 large column bases and three brick-built vaulted buildings remain, but most of the 21 pairs of stone statues on both sides of the sacred road are intact. In 1963, the water level of Hongze Lake dropped, and the Mingzu Mausoleum was able to see the light of day again. However, the wooden buildings had disappeared, leaving only the outer Luocheng wall and the stone statues that were later excavated and restored. The discovery of the Mingzu Mausoleum provided precious information for studying the style of the early Ming Dynasty royal mausoleum architecture. In 1996, the Mingzu Mausoleum was announced by the State Council as the fourth batch of national key cultural relics protection units. Since 1997, the Mingzu Mausoleum has been restored several times, and the inner imperial city ruins, the stone five-offering altar, the South Red Gate, the Jinshui Bridge and other scenic spots have been rebuilt. A 2,706-meter flood control embankment has been built around it, of which 600 meters of dangerous sections are all protected by stone blocks, and more than 60,000 trees such as pine, cypress, metasequoia and sycamore are planted around it. New buildings such as the South Gate, Ming Culture Corridor, and Cultural Relics Information Exhibition Room have also been built. In particular, 21 pairs of large stone carvings, which are more than ten feet high, have been restored and renovated, standing neatly on both sides of the sacred road, restoring their former charm. (No pictures available, please provide them.) (No pictures available, please provide them.)