Research On The Characteristics Of The Legend Of The Summer Palace

The legend of the Summer Palace is an important part of Beijing folklore.In October 2007,it was included in the second batch of "Beijing-level Intangible Cultural Heritage List".However,the current research on the legend of the Summer Palace is still mainly in the stage of collecting and sorting out,and the results of specialized academic research are still blank.Studying the legend of the Summer Palace is not only a case study of Beijing's intangible cultural heritage,but also some new changes in ancient Chinese folklore in the late Qing Dynasty can be seen.This article takes the characteristics of the legend of the Summer Palace as the research object,starting from the three aspects of the characterization,narrative style and folk beliefs of the legend of the Summer Palace,and comprehensively uses the literature method and the field investigation method to conduct research.From the perspective of character shaping,the legend of the Summer Palace is characterized by shaping political and historical figures based on the perceptual cognition of the folks.The reason for this feature lies in the special time and space background of the legend of the Summer Palace.On the one hand,the Summer Palace itself,as a royal palace,is full of political and historical features.On the other hand,the Summer Palace has experienced the modernization process of China since the late Qing Dynasty,and also has experienced the period when the folk consciousness against the feudal monarchy was strongest.Therefore,the legend of the Summer Palace favors the shaping of political historical figures,and its own situation is closely related to the cognition of political historical figures.In the late Qing Dynasty,when the the people were stubborn,the rulers represented by Empress Dowager Cixi in the legend of the Summer Palace were almost all "harmful spirits".They not only focused on promoting their negative comments,but also committed some cruel crimes out of nothing.However,in the early Ming Dynasty,when the northern standard became clearer,the legend of the Summer Palace praised Zhu Di,the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty,for "loyalty",which was in contrast to the cruel image recorded in official history.From the perspective of narrative style,the legend of the Summer Palace is characterized by a fictional tragedy pointing to the real suffering of the same time and space,presenting a tragic style combining fiction and reality.This feature is embodied in two types of legends: love tragedy and heroic tragedy.The former uses the typified plots of Cowherd and Weaver Girl and Liang Zhu,pointing to the love tragedy between Emperor Guangxu and Zhenfei that happened in the Summer Palace;the latter is the story of hero using violence to resist the evil beasts and eventually die together,and points to the violent democratic upheavals in the late Qing Dynasty that happened one after another but all ended in failure.From the perspective of folk beliefs,the legend of the Summer Palace is characterized by a concentrated presentation of ancient Chinese folk dragon beliefs and their weakening trends.One of the important reasons why dragon beliefs have a long history and spread in ancient China is that the monarch under the feudal monarchy needs to borrow the image of the dragon to beautify himself.But at the end of feudal society,this kind of ideological rule naturally went downhill.The weakening of the belief in the dragon in the legend of the Summer Palace is embodied in the suppression of the political power of "Phoenix on the Dragon",as well as the dissolution of the monarchy by the people,and the belief in the dragon being defeated by the Luban belief with local characteristics and practical significance under the pragmatic attitude of the people..