I watched a great documentary called "Daming Palace" today. I haven't seen such a good documentary in a long long time. The music and picture is fantanstic, let alone the narration. Daming Palace was once the central of the largest city in the world, around 7th century A.D. I was deeply touched: A city that embraced all kinds of cultures, ethnities and thoughts. A palace that was magnificent, solemn yet open-minded. People from all over the world travelled to here, learned something and went back. Some peole spent there whole life there, like Abeno Nakamaro. It was exactly like a US society, but an empire version, plus a major culture. Why, after over 1000 years, we still struggle for the openness and tolerance our country once achieved?
Sometimes when I'm at a museum I gaze at a vaze, or a dancing figures, my thoughts would fly a thousand years back to imagine what the life and world was like back in that time. Isn't that amazing? Everyone could only live a limited time of his/her life, but hundreds of thousands of people of a time create a thing called history. Some unknown crafter made a pottery figure for fun, he/she would never know that many many years later someone would gaze upon it with surpise and being touched at the same time. Ah, fanscinated.
I know that the palace is no longer there, only the ruins. But I still want to go to the city, just to walk on the same soil of the once greatest empire or to touch the ruins of the past. I can understand why people like to film those movies where a person travels back to the history - it is really fanscinating, just to think about it.
The past is the past, but the lively stories of the people from the past will go to the next generation on and on, until the end of the civilization. Maybe many years later, a child, with his innocent eyes, would gaze upon my belongings. I shall see my world again in his eyes.
A computer generated picture of the original Daming Palace
