Author: Our team Zhang Lan
Yang Jisheng, a famous minister of the Ming Dynasty, once fondly recalled his early cold life in his collection of essays "Yang Zhongmei Collection": at that time, he was just a poor talent who rented alone in the temple to prepare for the exam, taking water and boiling porridge in the cold days, freezing and sticking to the bucket without paying attention, and it took half a day to break free. Due to the lack of oil and water in food, I often read and read until midnight when I was hungry, and my legs and stomach were even more frozen. You can only get up and walk around the house so that you don't freeze. It is really "just in case of suffering" that it is so hard.
Because of Yang Jisheng's later heroic impeachment of the traitor Yan Song at the cost of his life, this cold and bitter career has since been admired by many descendants and has become an inspirational allusion to many cold students. However, it also brings up a rather interesting topic: to be an ancient common man, what are the hardships of living conditions?
You know, at that time, although Yang Jisheng was cold and bitter, after all, he was a talent who enjoyed the state's money and grain subsidies, and his living conditions were much better than those of the real poor. Although in various "blockbuster novels" or costume dramas, the life of the ancients is either idyllic and beautiful, or the elegance of court etiquette, so that many enthusiastic audiences are eager to experience the past. But Yang Jisheng's "hard to say" bitter days have revealed another truth: If a friend who is accustomed to modern life really has the opportunity to "cross" to become an ancient people? I'm afraid it will be miserable.
How harsh were the living conditions of the ancient people? Not to mention the chaotic times when life is precarious and ordinary people's lives are like grass. Just looking at several periods of "prosperous" and "ZTE" Taiping era in ancient history, the real living conditions of ordinary people are very "challenging" for modern people.
Let's start with "Eating". For example, in the Two Han Dynasties, the "soup cake" eaten by ordinary people's homes was a kind of dead-faced hard cake, which could be digested by hunger but difficult. There is also "wheat rice", that is, dry cakes made of wheat, which are equally rough and difficult to swallow. It was also often used by the eastern Han Dynasty celebrities to put on a show at the table and flaunt their "integrity". As for the millet-fired "rice off the millet", or the soup soup rice, it is exclusive to the rich - eating a bowl of broth in the Han Dynasty to pour rice is the treatment of the magnate.
In the Era of "Huichang Zhongxing" in the Tang Dynasty, the rice eaten by the Tang Dynasty people was also renovated. The "Qingfeng Rice" made of glutinous rice and beef cheese, and the "Imperial Yellow Queen Mother Rice" made with millet mixed with meat and eggs, are exclusive to the magnates and even the emperor. Ordinary people usually eat "barn rice" and "millet rice". In particular, "millet rice", recorded in the "Record of Entering the Tang Dynasty to Seek the Law", was the daily staple food of the "mountain village county people" in the eastern Tang Dynasty at that time. Not only is it "astringent", but it also "eats and has chest pain".
Therefore, as a common person in the Han and Tang Dynasties, even if you catch up with the "ZTE" and "prosperous" era, this experience of "eating to the chest pain" is also a daily feeling.
After the Song Dynasty, the diet of the Chinese was finally enriched a lot. European missionaries who visited the Ming Dynasty, for example, often praised China as "far richer than Europe." But it is reflected on the table, in the winter of Beijing, ordinary citizens eat vegetables, generally only pickled cabbage. Fresh vegetables such as cucumbers and leeks are expensive and are exclusive to the rich rooms of officials and eunuchs. Be a commoner? It is common to nibble on a winter pickle.
Cooking oil is also expensive. Why is it that in Yang Jisheng's memories, he is a show talent, and he is still hungry to the point of lack of oil and water? There were many kinds of edible oil in the Ming Dynasty, the court often used expensive sesame oil, and the common people usually used vegetable oil and soybean oil, and their prices "have always regarded the price of meat as low", that is, linked to the price of pork. Ordinary people's daily stir-fry cooking, naturally to save use. Even in many places in the countryside of the Ming Dynasty, because the people could not afford to buy cooking oil, they used rice pots and rice soup to stir-fry vegetables every day, which was called "rice oil". Lack of oil and water? Too common.
What is more bitter than this "lack of oil and water" is the accommodation conditions of the ancient people. Even Yang Jisheng, who is a talented person, is frozen all over the house in winter. So why didn't he make a fire? Because throughout ancient China, making a fire for warmth was a luxury. For example, the firewood commonly used by the common people, in the Economically developed Songjiang area of the Ming Dynasty, every hundred catties of firewood is worth seven cents to one silver, which can buy a bucket of good white rice. Burning firewood? That's not far from burning money. In the "Guangzhixuan", it is even recorded that in the "off-season" when the rain is continuous, the rich people in many places even "crack the door to cook", that is, cut the door panel as firewood.
As for coal, which was widely used in the Ming Dynasty? During the Ming Dynasty, it was true that "Jiangbei burned coal and took fire from the soil", and the city of Beijing was "all paid with stone coal". The "water and charcoal" special heating for the palace is a fine product in coal. During the Jiajing period, Jiajing had to requisition 300,000 catties of "water and charcoal" from Suncheon Province every year. But most of this staggering consumption has nothing to do with ordinary people: according to the statistics in the "Ming Dynasty Ministry of Works Factory Library", the price of coal per hundred catties is one dollar and three silver. Open in the winter? For the families of ordinary people in the Ming Dynasty, it was actually a big economic burden.
Therefore, the exquisite "court heaters" in those costume dramas, and even the steaming stove braziers in winter, are actually far from the lives of ordinary people. In du Fu's cold and bitter "August autumn high wind and fury", the sadistic scene of "jiao'er lying down and cracking" is the portrayal of the lives of many poor people.
It is so difficult to make a fire, so what about the people's houses? Compared with the deep mansion compounds of the rich, until the Ming and Qing dynasties, the residences of ordinary Chinese people were still mainly huts. For example, in Guangdong in the Ming Dynasty, rich families would use bricks to build walls, and ordinary people could only use clam shells as building materials to build houses. The houses along the coast of Fujian are mostly made of terracotta tiles and tuansha. As for the northern Central Plains, thatched huts are more common. Looking at these building materials alone, compared with modern residential standards, the living conditions of the ancient people can also be imagined.
And worse than the living conditions, there are also ancient urban living conditions. Due to the excessive density of urban buildings and backward planning management, there are many potential hidden dangers. For example, a great fire in Sizhou in the 25th year of the Wanli Calendar burned down 4,400 houses in one night. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the city of Beijing was even more densely packed with buildings, the convergence of the population in all directions, and the backwardness of management, also known as the perennial filth of the streets of the capital, so that every summer, it was "the plague is still endless".
However, the vast majority of these harsh living conditions are still limited by the level of development of scientific and technological civilization. Even before the Qing Dynasty, the life style of ancient China had aroused the envy of many Europeans. However, during the Qianlong period, when the British Magarni mission visited China, the scenery of life they saw during the "Qianlong Dynasty" was still a world where it stood still: during the British mission's journey to the north, most of the houses on both sides of the strait were "grass huts with earthen walls and grass roofs." And when the British threw some sick and dead livestock from the boat, the surrounding lively Chinese jumped into the water madly, desperately competing for these "food"...
These seemingly inadvertent details in the eyes of Qing officials at that time deeply reflected the extreme poverty of the Chinese people in the late feudal society. In modern China, the details of life have been vividly condensed.
Compared with the vast history books, how many turbulent heroic pasts, the lives of these ancient people, but also how much history behind the extremely accurate footnote.