"As a man, you should aspire to travel in all directions. You should go out and travel! To the world to stretch the chest, broaden the knowledge. How can you be like a chicken in a fence or a horse on a carriage, staying at home and doing nothing because I am there?" Xu Xiake heard these words, very excited, determined to go on a long trip. Before his departure, he wore the far traveling crown that his mother made for him, shouldered the simple luggage, and left his hometown. He was twenty-two years old that year. From then on, until his death at the age of fifty-six, he spent the vast majority of his time on traveling expeditions.
In the complete absence of government funding, Xu Xiake traveled to sixteen provinces, including Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hubei, Hunan, Guangdong ___ Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan. East to Putuo Mountain in Zhejiang, west to Tengchong in Yunnan, south to Nanning in Guangxi, north to Panshan in Jixian in Hebei, covering half of China. What is more valuable is that, in more than thirty years of traveling and investigation, he mainly by foot trekking, even riding a horse by boat are rare, but also often carry their own luggage to catch up with the road. The places he visited were mostly deserted poor villages and remote areas, or frontier areas where people were rare. He did not avoid the wind and rain, was not afraid of tigers and wolves, with the long wind for company, with the clouds and mist, with wild fruits to fill the hunger, to quench the thirst of clear springs. He encountered several life-threatening situations, was born to die, and tasted the hardships of the journey.
When Xu Xiake was twenty-eight years old, he came to Wenzhou to climb Yandang Mountain. He remembered that there was a big lake at the top of Yandang Mountain, and decided to climb to the top of the mountain to have a look. When he climbed to the top of the mountain, he saw that the ridge was straight and there was no place to put his feet, so how could there be a lake? However, Xu Xiake still refused to give up, and continued on to a large cliff, the road is no more. He carefully observed the cliff, found that there is a small platform below, with a long cloth belt tied to the top of the cliff on a rock, and then grabbed the cloth belt suspended in the air, to the small platform only to find that the following bucket depth of 100 feet, can not go down. He had to grab the cloth belt, feet on the cliff, struggling to climb up, ready to climb back to the top of the cliff. Crawling, the belt broke, but fortunately he was smart enough to grab a protruding rock, otherwise he would have fallen into the abyss, broken bones. Xu Xiake knotted up the broken belt, and laboriously climbed upwards again, and finally climbed to the top of the cliff. Another time, he went on an expedition to Huangshan Mountain and encountered heavy snow on the way. The locals told him that the snow was waist-deep in some places, and he could not see the way to climb up. Xu Xiake was not deterred, he leaned on an iron staff to explore the road, halfway up the mountain, the mountain is getting steeper and steeper. Hill slope back of the shaded place is the most difficult to climb, the road into the ice, steep and slippery, feet step on, then slide down. Xu Xiake used an iron staff to cut a pit in the ice. He stepped on the pit and climbed slowly, step by step, and finally climbed up. The monks on the mountain were very surprised to see him, as they had been trapped on the mountain by heavy snow for months. He also traveled three dangerous trails in Fujian's Wuyi Mountain: the 100-foot staircase of Dawang Peak, the 1,000-foot wall of Baiyunyan, and the "chicken breast" and "dragon ridge" of Jiezhu Peak. When he climbed the Dawang Peak, it was already sunset, and he could not find his way down the mountain, so he grabbed the thorns with his hand and "fell down in a chaotic way". He was in Zhongyue Songshan, from too room on the top of the top is also down the mountain gorges down the suspension of slipping down. Xu Xiake amazing trails, can indeed show that he is a thousand years of wonders.
After a day's trekking, no matter how tired he was and no matter where he stayed, Xu Xiake insisted on recording the harvest of his expedition. He wrote more than 2.4 million words of travelogues, but unfortunately most of them were lost. What was left behind was organized into a book by his descendants, which is the famous "Xu Xiake's Travels". This book more than 400,000 words, is the science and literature together in a big "strange book".
Xu Xiake's travels were not purely for the sake of searching for wonders and attractions, but more importantly for exploring the mysteries of nature and searching for the laws of nature. An example of this is his examination of the water flow of Jianxi and Ningyangxi in Fujian. Liling and Maling are the birthplaces of Jianxi and Ningyangxi respectively, and the heights of the two ridges are roughly equal, but the flow of the two streams into the sea is very different, with Jianxi being long and Ningyangxi being short. Xu Xiake, after inspection, found out that the water flow of Ningyangxi was faster than that of Jianxi. "The shorter the distance, the faster the water flow. This famous conclusion in geography was made by Xu Xiake through fieldwork. His investigations and researches on mountain ranges, waterways, geology and geomorphology have achieved more than his predecessors.
He explored the watercourse sources of many rivers, such as the left and right rivers of Guangxi, the Xiangjiang River tributary Xiaoxiao and Binshui, the North and South Erpanjiang River of Yunnan, and the Yangtze River, etc., of which the Yangtze River is the most in-depth. The Yangtze River flows through half of China, where it originated is a mystery for a long time. During the Warring States period of a geography book "Yugong", the book has "Minjiang River Guide River", and later books have followed this statement. Xu Xiake was skeptical. With this doubt, he traveled to the north of Sanqin, south of the Five Ridges, west of Shimen Jinsha, and found out that the Jinsha River originates from the southern foothills of the Kunlun Mountains, which is more than 1,000 miles longer than the Minjiang River, so he concluded that the Jinsha River is the source of the Yangtze River. Due to the limitation of the conditions at that time, Xu Xiake failed to find the real source of the Yangtze River. However, he took an extremely important step to find the source of the Yangtze River. No one found it for a long time after him. It wasn't until 1978 that the state sent an expedition to confirm that the Yangtze's proper source was the Tuotuo River at Geladandong, the main peak of the Tanggula Mountains.
Xu Xiake was also the world's pioneer in scientific investigation of limestone landforms. Limestone is widely distributed in the southwest of China. Xu Xiake made detailed investigations in Hunan, Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan, and made detailed descriptions, records and studies of the different limestone landforms in each place. He also inspected more than a hundred limestone caves. In Jiuyi Mountain in southern Hunan, he heard about a Feilongyan, so he asked Mingzong, a local monk, to guide him and bring a torch to examine it. Flying Dragon Rock was a huge cave, twisting and turning, with holes within holes and pits and water inside, making it difficult to walk. Xu Xiake was so unconcerned that he kept going deeper and deeper into the cave that he didn't care if his shoes ran off. Ming Zong advised him to go back several times, but he didn't listen. It was only when the torch was almost burned out that he walked back reluctantly. He did not have any instrument, all by visual measurement, but most of his investigation is very scientific. For example, the records of the fifteen cave entrances of the Seven Star Rock in Guilin are generally consistent with the results of field surveys conducted by our geography researchers today. Xu Xiake died after more than a hundred years, Europeans began to study limestone landforms, Xu Xiake is the world's first limestone geomorphology scholars.
Xu Xiake made many contributions to geoscience. In addition to the above, he also studied geothermal phenomena such as volcanoes and hot springs, and made careful descriptions and investigations of natural phenomena such as changes in climate and changes in plants depending on the altitude of the terrain. In addition, he has vividly described and recorded the conditions of agriculture, handicrafts and transportation, the evolution of places of interest and the customs of ethnic minorities. His marvelous book is also of high literary value, and the pieces can be described as beautiful prose.
Xu Xiake's last trip was in 1636, when he was fifty-one years old. This time he traveled mainly in the southwest of China, reaching Teng Yue (present-day Tengchong, Yunnan Province) on the China-Burma border, before returning home again in 1640. Soon after his return, he fell ill. In his illness, he also looked over the rock specimens he had collected. Before he died, he was still holding tightly in his hands the two rocks he had brought back from his expedition.
Xu Xiake's love of the motherland, love of science, in the scientific cause of the spirit of the courage to climb, is worthy of future generations to learn forever.