Next year will be the 600th anniversary of the completion of the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the recent variety show "Shangxin Forbidden City" is also very popular. It is conceivable that in the past year, the attention of the Forbidden City will continue to heat up. Readers who do not know who have been to the Forbidden City and who have only appreciated the style of the Forbidden City on TV have ever paid attention to a detail, that is, the Forbidden City has so many gates, and there are many "knots" on each gate, and it is also covered with a glass cover.
Obviously, this is a protective measure to prevent tourists from touching it. So, what exactly are these bumps? Why do tourists who come and go want to touch them?
For modern people, this question may not be easy to answer, but in the eyes of the ancients, it was really rare and common. Those "knots" are called door nails, not only on the gate of the Forbidden City, but also on almost all high-gate households.
This kind of door nail, at the beginning, did not have special significance, mainly practical value. It turned out that the ancient gates were all made of wood. However, at that time, there were no composite planks, and it was impossible to have such a large tree, which could be directly made into a gate, and the method of splicing had to be adopted. The taller the building, the more grand the gate, and the problem that follows is the need for more wood chips to be spliced.
In this splicing process, wooden nails are needed, and even the wooden board needs to be chiseled through the rope to make it stronger and more beautiful. At this point, the head of the nail is exposed to the plank. However, the nail head is too sharp, which is not good-looking and easy to hurt the hand. So people came up with a way to get the nails up.
It is said that this process was completed by two great god-level figures on the building. Lu Ban first opened this brain hole and made the prototype of the door nail, while Mozi improved it, which was not much different from the door nails seen today. The only change was that people found that wooden door nails were too easy to break. As a result, copper door nails gradually replaced them.
Originally, this was an ordinary practical product, the crystallization of the wisdom of the working people. However, in the hierarchical Qing Dynasty, it was used as a status symbol. The rulers of the Qing Dynasty stipulated that only the gate of tianzi's palace could use a total of 81 door nails in nine horizontal and nine vertical nine. The royal palace can use a total of 49 door nails in the horizontal seven vertical seven. The rest of the people, etc., decrease in descending order.
The wonderful thing about this rule is that not only does it divide the high and low under the door with a simple number, but also allows people who are not ranked to actively reduce the size of the mansion. This is because after the number of door nails is specified, the size of the door is relatively fixed. Even if the rich family is entangled, the grade is not enough, limited to door nails, it is impossible to build a larger house.
The origin of the door nails should be clear at this point. But why should the door nails of the Forbidden City be protected by a glass cover?
In ancient times, the door nails originally had the intention of prosperity, and the door nails of the Forbidden City were not only mysterious in the eyes of the people, but also increased the domineering spirit of the emperor, which could suppress evil demons and remove disasters. According to the notes of many Qing people, on the day of the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth day of the first month, the court also allowed ordinary people to go to the door of the palace and touch the door nails to get happy.
At that time, touching the door nails a year was harmless, and it didn't matter if it was broken, it was changed. However, the situation is very different now. Many tourists have heard of this legend, and with curiosity, they also have to touch the door nails of the Forbidden City. However, at that time, it was not a new door nail, but now it is a cultural relic, which is a witness to the evolution of the Forbidden City in the past six hundred years, and it cannot be said that it can be changed.
Moreover, the number of tourists in the Forbidden City is too large. Although the flow restriction has long been implemented, only 80,000 tourists are received a day, but the number of tourists with more than 30 million people a year is still too large. If left unchecked and left untouched, there is really no guarantee that they will last long. Therefore, the management of the Forbidden City decided to protect all the door nails with a glass cover.
In fact, to let Xiao Jue say, the door nail has little to do with giving birth to a child. With so many door nails, Kangxi could have dozens of sons, while the three emperors of Tongzhi, Guangxu, and Xuantong were childless. Tourists do not care about these histories, and the Forbidden City has to be quite helpless to make this decision.