The Palace Museum has a unique collection of royal paintings: The Map of Sea Mists.

This atlas was drawn by Nie Huang, a folk painter and biology lover during the reign of Kangxi.

Nie Huang suffered from the fact that there was no atlas of marine life circulating in the society at that time, so he traveled and recorded more than 3 kinds of marine life by himself. The whole painting spectrum is illustrated with pictures and words, and it is called Finding Nemo in the Forbidden City.

Emperors of all ages loved this picture album, and Qianlong attached great importance to this book. He had this picture album repaired, mounted and put it in his own room. Every day before going to bed, I have to turn it over: "I have been a horse for half my life, and this book has satisfied my imagination of the sea!" " Finally, it was included in the sequel to Shiqu Baodi, a collection of royal paintings and calligraphy treasures compiled by myself in the Qing Dynasty.

So, what kind of book is "Sea Mist Map", and does it really exist in the biological reality in the book? Or is it Zhi tales of mystery like Shan Hai Jing?

Zhang Chenliang, a naturalist, is as confused as we are.

As the editor of Natural History magazine, he has a strong interest in biology since he was a child.

In 214, the Palace Museum in Beijing compiled and published the ancient book "Sea Mistakes Map" into a book "Sea Mistakes Map of Qing Palace". He immediately ran to the sales point next to the Shenwumen in the Forbidden City to buy this book and read it.

from the perspective of biology today, he analyzed the creatures in Haicuotu, and went to Guangdong, Fujian, Japan and other places for textual research, and finally integrated 3 reading notes-Haicuotu Notes.

Notes on the Sea Miscellaneous Map

The Notes on the Sea Miscellaneous Map adopts the classification of China's traditional cursive script, and divides the creatures in the book into four categories, namely, ostriches, scales, insects and birds.

In these 3 articles, there are popular science about marine life, textual research in old paper piles, and anecdotes between China people and the sea.

At the beginning of each biological chapter of Notes on a Sea Fault Map, the contents in Nie Huang's Sea Fault Map will be attached: hand painting+text description+a poem. Then, according to these inferences, whether there is such a creature today, or whether it is purely hearsay by Nie Huang.

Some creatures, such as the grouper and the mackerel, are very detailed. At first glance, they are sketched in real life.

The grouper is the present large yellow croaker, named after its head with two "sagittal stones".

Nie Huang also drew a special picture in his paintings and noted that there are two stones in his head. It can be said that it is very detailed.

The Sea Mist Map also records the alias "Chunlai" of Pseudosciaena crocea, because its fishing season is in spring, and it is said that Pseudosciaena crocea mostly appears in the South China Sea, and spawns offshore in spring, where fishermen are waiting to catch fish.

Zhang Chenliang pointed out the inaccuracy: Pseudosciaena crocea is not only found in the South China Sea, but also in the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. They lay their eggs not in the general offshore, but almost all of them reach the shore. So there is a saying: "This man belongs to the yellow croaker-slip away."

The large yellow croaker

as detailed as the stone fish, there is also a horse mackerel picture. Nie Huang's horse mackerel picture is almost the same as the real thing, which makes people have to suspect that he painted it against the horse mackerel.

Nie Huang said: The tail of a horse mackerel is like the wings of a swallow. There are eight small wings on the back, six small wings on the bottom and three small wings on the tail.

Zhang Chenliang explained that the number of winglets of "up and down" is not fixed, some are "up and down" and some are "up and down", which are collectively called "off-fins". As for the three protrusions on the tail, they are not real fins, but raised flesh ridges.

the mackerel in The Sea Cuotu

However, not all the creatures in The Sea Cuotu were seen by Nie Huang himself, and some of them were hearsay and painted with his own imagination.

Zhang Chenliang said, "What he has observed is more similar, and what he has not observed is more imaginative.".

like a mermaid ... this is probably the ugliest mermaid we have ever seen.

Modern people are familiar with the concept of mermaid. Whether in China or abroad, the legend of mermaid is circulating.

Red rays and mermaids appear many times in Shan Hai Jing, saying that they have faces, voices and babies.

Jin Dynasty's Natural History recorded that Jiao Ren could spin, but his body was still fish-shaped.

The description of the mermaid in the Song Dynasty's Tales of Distinctions is more like a human being: red clothes with two breasts and messy hair.

In foreign countries, Andersen's fairy tale The Daughter of the Sea is deeply rooted in people's hearts. Everyone believed that mermaids must be "beautiful" mermaids when they were young.

However, this mermaid in The Sea Mist is really the ugliest in history.

When a Cantonese told Nie Huang about this creature, he didn't believe it. It was too strange and ugly.

However, when I saw that both Official Records and Zhengzitong recorded this kind of creature, which "looks like a human being, has five senses on all limbs, has dark hair and yellow flesh, and has red wings and a short tail on the back", I drew it into the book-a balding middle-aged man with fins on his back. It was really the "soul painter" of the Qing Dynasty.

The ugliest mermaid in history

It is said in The Map of the Sea Mist that someone caught a mermaid in Guangdong and kept it in a pond. "I can't speak, but laugh", which reminds people of dugong.

Dugong is the most human-like marine creature, and it is generally considered as a mermaid in people's mouth now.

It's just the mermaid painted by Dugong and Nie Huang. The difference is too big. It's really unconstrained!

In the process of textual research, Zhang Chenliang also found that some creatures only belong to myths and legends.

For example, arowana, Yanlong, etc. in The Map of the Sea Mist, and such anecdotes as "Sharks turned into tigers" and "Waque turned into clams" are also nonsense.

It's full of fun, which is the feeling of reading "Notes on Sea Mistakes".

Zhang Chenliang said: Humor is only an effective way of popular science knowledge, so that people can not only feel fun, but also gain knowledge.

And this coincides with Nie Huang's idea.

Turtle feet like "Don't" and "Yi"

Turtle feet, also known as cactus, turtle feet and bergamot shells, are crustaceans.

turtle feet in larval state can swim and crawl. Once a suitable reef is found, they will fix themselves and gradually become turtle feet.

the bottom should be fixed to resist the impact of waves, so it is particularly hard.

Its head sticks out "thin claws" to the finger-like shell plate to catch plankton in the water.

There is an anecdote about turtle's foot in The Map of the Sea Mist:

Because of its strange shape, people in the Central Plains don't know it.

A man from the Central Plains worked as an official in Xiapu, Fujian Province. When he saw a turtle foot in the market, he wanted to buy it and try it, but he wanted to ask others its name, so he wrote down "Buy me something that looks like a long word or is easy to read". After a long guess, his men were instructed to buy it. When the Central Plains people saw it, it was this!

turtle feet like "Don't" and "Yi"

It seems that Nie Huang's joke is as low as mine.

Dolphin: Greek spirit beast, China lazy woman

As the name implies, dolphin is a "pig in the sea". Because it is a mammal, its internal organs are more like pigs, so it is named "dolphin".

Coincidentally, Europeans have the same idea when naming dolphins. "dolphin" comes from the Greek word "uterus", that is, fish with uterus.

Dolphins are intelligent and lovely animals, which is basically the knowledge of modern people. However, in ancient times, people in the East and the West had different opinions on them.

In fact, the finless porpoise painted in "Sea Mist Map"

In the traditional culture of China, the image of dolphins is not good.

Fishermen think dolphins are unlucky, and they will get angry if they catch them when fishing. According to legend, dolphins are changed from lazy women. They use dolphin fat to light a lamp, and when they are placed in a place of play, the lamp will be bright, and when they are placed in front of a loom, the lamp will be dim.

This shows how much the ancients hated dolphins.

In contrast, Europeans have a very good attitude towards dolphins.

According to legend, arion, an ancient Greek musician, met a gangster on a boat and tried to kill him. He asked to finish singing a song and then jumped into the sea. A dolphin was moved by his singing and rescued him. Later, the dolphin became a "dolphin" in the night sky.

Europeans regard dolphins as spiritual animals. In ancient Greece, killing dolphins was even executed.

Eating is an important content of the original book Haicuotu, and it is also the most common entry point for China people to understand biology.

Zhang Chenliang's Notes on Sea Mistakes is also quite similar to this cookbook. Under many creatures, he talked about their cooking and eating methods in detail, accompanied by food pictures.

"You can't just look at animals as resources. I wrote clearly in the book that if an animal can be legally caught, I will write how to eat it; If an animal is rare or endangered now, I will write down its present situation and introduce how the ancients ate and used it.

The famous yellow croaker in the sea

Large yellow croaker has always been a favorite fish in China, with garlic cloves and less thorns.

The famous ones are dry-roasted yellow croaker with Shandong cuisine and large yellow croaker with snow cuisine in Ningbo. The swim bladder can also be made into yellow croaker jelly, which has nourishing and medicinal value.

The wild large yellow croaker whose price is higher than that of gold

Dried fish is called fish shark in ancient times.

It is recorded in The Map of the Sea Mist:

"Other fish are not beautiful for a long time ... but the fish on the stone head is treasured everywhere, and the longer it is, the better.

As a result, the large yellow croaker has become the first among the fish. Steaming the fish with wine or stew is a very delicious way to eat.

jumping fish in winter is playing with a river eel

jumping fish is playing with a sponge, but as a fish, it likes to stay on land.

This is because they have a high demand for oxygen, so they just stay on the ground and jump around.

There are several kinds of mudskippers in China, and people only like mudskippers, which have the best taste.

there's a saying in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, that "fish jumping is better than river eels in winter". They think that the mud-coated fish in winter is fat but not fishy.

Jumping mudskipper

Mud-coated fish should be made of fresh fish so as not to waste its delicate taste, and it can be wrapped in batter and fried to eat, that is, salt and pepper jumping fish;

You can also stir-fry pickles with soy sauce.

The best way is to fry it and cook it with tofu, that is, a pot of milky fish-jumping tofu soup, which is extremely delicious.

There are some creatures that once existed, but are now almost extinct.

for example, wan' e.

the map of the sea fault records a kind of bay-e that Zhancheng country (now southern Vietnam) paid tribute to An Nan Guo (now northern Vietnam) during the reign of Kangxi. It is six meters long, golden yellow and armored.

bay and Hubei are warm. During the Tang Dynasty, the climate was warm, and the bay and Hubei spread from Southeast Asia to South China, hurting people and animals. Han Yu, an official in Chaozhou, also wrote an article "Sacrificing Crocodiles" for this purpose.

In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, when the climate became cold and the population increased, the crocodile's habitat was invaded, and the bay and Hubei were basically not seen.

Nie Huang drew a picture of an alligator just after listening to others tell it about its appearance, and was very happy about it. He thought that he finally knew what the crocodile looked like, and quickly wrote a praise for it:

"Crocodiles spread in words, but its appearance is hard to see. Visiting Annan far away, it is enough to test.

and large yellow croaker.

there were a lot of large yellow croaker in Qing dynasty.

Later, due to the promotion of a childless fishing method "knocking", it was fished in both spawning grounds and wintering grounds.

There are very few wild Pseudosciaena crocea now, and they have been fried to sky-high prices.

Recently, a sky-high menu spread on the Internet caused a heated discussion. Eight people actually ate more than 4, yuan at a meal, and there were some valuable ingredients in the menu, including wild large yellow croaker.

Now, let's look at "Praise of the Stone Fish" in Nie Huang's "Sea Mist Map":

"The stone head of the sea fish is immortal. Well-known in the Central Plains, everywhere.

it's full of irony.

Zhang Chenliang said:

"In fact, everyone can make some efforts to protect endangered marine life. For example, the survival of land hermit crabs depends largely on the shells on the beach. If all the shells on the beach are picked up by tourists, they will have no "home", so you can choose not to pick up shells.

Three hundred years ago, because of his curiosity about the marine world, Nie Huang, a folk painter, explored the bizarre marine life world by himself in an era when flowers and birds were the mainstream aesthetic.

three hundred years later, Zhang Chenliang, a biology lover, followed in Nie Huang's footsteps, further researched and popularized the creatures mentioned in the book in detail, corrected and explained the unreliable places, and compiled a book "Notes on the Wrong Map of the Sea" to make it closer to reality, reviving the wonderful books of the Qing Dynasty with contemporary natural history.

The ocean is the cradle of life, and the ancestors of all life were born in the ocean. The ocean, which accounts for 7% of the earth's surface, from the sea surface to the seabed several thousand meters deep, is home to all kinds of creatures that are not familiar to us, and it is urgent for us to explore.

References:

Notes on the Sea Cuotu Map

Notes on the Sea Cuotu Map: A Cross-time Dialogue on the Science of Marine Biology.