A Collection of Ancient Astronomical Stories for the Sake of Pilgrimage

On autumn nights as cool as water, I always like to lie on the windowsill of my hometown and count the stars. My grandfather traced the starry sky with his rough fingers and said that the seven stars connected into a spoon were called "Big Dipper" and were the carriage of the Emperor of Heaven. At that time, I didn't understand what an "imperial car" was. I just felt that there were endless stories hidden in those flickering light spots. Later, when I saw oracle bone rubbings in the museum, I learned that the Shang Dynasty people three thousand years ago also looked up at the same starry sky and carved the record of "new stars and big stars coming together" on tortoise shells. Star maps are coded letters written by ancient people to future generations. Zhou Gong built a platform in Luoyang to observe the stars, measured the sun's shadow with earthen kui, and established the wisdom of "heaven's workman takes his place"; when Zhang Heng created the armillary sphere, the sound of dripping copper leaks conveyed the cosmology of "the universe is infinite"; the monk and his party died of illness on the way to measure the meridian, and their bags still contained the unfinished draft of the star catalog. These stories were scattered in the corners of history books, like pearls half-covered by dust—until we started salvaging them. During the three years of compiling these stories, I often thought of my grandfather's words: "The stars can't speak, but they remember everything." When we used modern astronomical knowledge to interpret the "Canglong Qisu" in "Bu Tian Ge" and restored the instruments of Guo Shoujing's "Four Seas Test", those sleeping stars seemed to suddenly wake up. This may be the true meaning of "carrying on the knowledge of the past" - not to be retrograde and conservative, but to make the ancient wisdom rejuvenate in the contemporary era.