If you knew that these two things were kept by Hezhen, would you still hate him so much?
When it comes to the person of Hezhen, many people's first reaction is that of the first corrupt official of the Qing Dynasty.
It is true that Hezhen's corruption is famous in history, but corrupt officials are not necessarily equal to traitors, and we will not say whether Hezhen is a traitor or not, but he still did some good things.
For example, when you usually eat a hot and delicious hot pot, will you thank you a little in your heart?
In the fifty and sixty years of Qianlong, a "feast of a thousand sons" was held respectively, that is, the emperor did the east and invited the elderly from all over the world to the banquet, so as to flaunt the so-called "prosperous world". The first feast of a thousand monks, because the old people waited for the emperor, made the meal cold, and it was a little disappointing. At the second Feast of the Thousand Sorrows, the Emperor entrusted it to Hezhen to handle. He Yan learned the lesson of the last time and deliberately changed the banquet to a hot pot feast. There is a silver hot pot and a tin hot pot on the first class banquet seat, and two copper hot pots on the second class banquet seat.
The hot pot method of eating, at least there will be no situation where the meal becomes cold, and the guests are old and weak, just to supplement with lamb. This trick did have a good effect, and the Qianlong Emperor and the old people from all over the world were very happy at the banquet.
In fact, the hot pot has appeared very early, and can even be traced back to the "Tongding" of the Sui Dynasty Emperor period, and after a series of developments, the court hot pot of the Qing Dynasty retained the pure northeast flavor. The Local Chronicle of Liaoning Records "Fengtian Tongzhi" records that the hot pot "is made of tin, divided into upper and lower layers, not as high as a ruler, with red copper as the barrel of charcoal, when the soup is boiling, cook all the meat, chicken, fish, its taste is delicious", eat hot pot "with ginseng tendons, accompanied by pigs, sheep, cattle, fish, chicken, duck, pheasant, shrimp, crab and other meat."
At the birthday feast, He yan added the old small hot pot to the large hot pot chimney, which received a miraculous effect. As a result, hot pot gradually spread and is still popular today. It can be said that the origin of this kind of thinking of hot pot is very early, but the origin and spread of modern hot pot, and Yan has a great credit.
He Yan left us not only hot pot, but also a famous book that has weight in Chinese's heart - "Dream of the Red Chamber".
During the Qianlong period, the prison of words and the destruction of books reached their peak, and "Dream of the Red Chamber" was listed as a banned book because the word "red" was synonymous with "Zhu", and at that time it was the Qing Dynasty, and "Zhu" was the surname of the Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, which was suspected of being anti-Qing and restoration. At this time, He yan was already the chief compiler of the Siku Quanshu, and was ordered by the emperor to collect folk books. At that time, the manuscript of "Stone Record" was popular in the folk, and He yan managed to get one, and after reading it, he felt that this book was simply a strange book, and it would be a pity to add it as a banned book.
So I thought of a way to get the best of both worlds: first ask someone to make the sequel "Stone Record" complete, then delete and revise it, and then ask Gao Hu, Cheng Weiyuan and others to continue to make up for the last forty times. After Hezhen thought that all this had been done properly and satisfactorily, he presented the book to the Qianlong Emperor's imperial court, thus obtaining the approval of the Qianlong Emperor. After that, "Dream of the Red Chamber" was spreading brightly.
There are a few more corroborating points about this:
First of all, in Hezhen's poetry collection, there are many verses that are basically the same as "Dream of the Red Chamber", or similar to the same. At the same time, in his poems, he often quotes the stories and characters in "Dream of the Red Chamber", for example, "The Twelve Huns of The Golden Nobile are idle, and the comic plans to go hand in hand with the car." ”
Secondly, Gao Hu once said in Cheng Weiyuan's "Introduction to the Book of Stones": "It is a new and elegant meaning of the book, and it has long been appreciated by famous princes and juqing." The "Minggong and Juqing" referred to here certainly includes Hezhen, because Heyan was serving as an official under Hezhen at that time, so he knew the inside story, and soon after completing the "Dream of the Red Chamber" forty times, he passed the jinshi examination and Cheng Weiyuan was also promoted.
Finally, the red scholars examined that the circulation of "Dream of the Red Chamber" began almost at the same time as the "Four Libraries of the Whole Book" was written.
If it were not for He yan recommending this book to the Qianlong Emperor, the book would not have been published nationwide, nor would it have been passed on to future generations. So sometimes, determining whether a person is a good guy or a bad guy is really hard.