Textual research on Baoding in Zhaoling, Shenyang

On top of the huge treasure, an elm tree grows justly. It is said to imitate the species of yongling. There are many interesting stories about this elm tree among Manchu people. Among them, the most widely circulated and influential story is the following one.

One day, after a long journey, Huang Taiji's father Nurhachi came to rest under a big elm tree. He untied the urn of his parents on his back, put it on the right side of this elm tree, and then went to the hotel to stay. When I got up early the next day to get the urn, I found that there was no tree facing the ground, so I buried the urn. He dug up the dirt and tried to take out the urn, but he couldn't pick it up anyway, just like it grew on a tree. He found another big axe and cut off the branch. With each axe, the cut part of the tree shed blood, and the "wound" of the tree soon healed. Nuerhachi was very surprised and thought it was a sacred tree, but God hinted to him that it was a treasure house for burying his parents. So, he obeyed God's will, reburied the urn in the tree, buried it with mud, marked it, settled down here, set up camp and started business. Later, he built the yongling in the place of this tree.

In the 19th year of Qianlong (1754), Li Hong, a learned and versatile emperor, made a second trip to the east to pay homage to his ancestor Yongling, and wrote the imperial book "Ode to the Book of Gods". In the forty-three years of Qianlong (1778), the third time I paid homage to my ancestor Yongling, I remembered the poem Ode to the Tree of God written twenty-four years ago. I was deeply moved, so I ordered it to be engraved on the stone tablet, and it was engraved the next year. "Shenshufu" symbolizes this elm tree in Long Mai in Qing Dynasty and attaches great importance to it. It is said that General Shengjing reported to the emperor once a month about the protection of Shen Yu. From the photos taken in Baoding, Zhaoling in 1930s, we can still see this sacred area. In the early 1980s, Baoding was covered with a canopy. In the late 1980s, Shen Yu died of old age. Now this new elm tree is 20 years old.