"Station" book club
Take you to decipher the aesthetic wisdom of oriental women
Beauty, the most pleasing scenery in the world, she integrates the biological structure of genes, the spiritual temperament of the style, and the material conditions of clothing. True beauty can be encountered but not sought--this statement will probably not be denied, whether ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign.
The beauty of ancient China, Lou Ting on the screen, walking through the poems, swaying in the legend, so that today's people are full of excitement. The traditional Chinese literati's pursuit of supreme beauty has led them to take the initiative to filter out women such as unsalted mothers, making beauty the protagonist of pan-feminine theme literary and artistic works.
All this may make people overlook a harsh reality: in ancient China, it was extremely difficult to become a beauty!
Book club scene. Photo by correspondent Wu Chao
Recently, the third phase of the "Station" reading club was held at the "A Cultural Creation" on Chaoyang Road in the urban area. After walking through the fierce Water Margin and The Mysterious Mind, this issue of the book club finally focuses on women, taking ancient Chinese beauties as an analysis sample to decipher the aesthetic wisdom of oriental women.
She loves beauty, and she makes it a beautiful thing to share beauty
Book clubs naturally recommend books.
Guo Lidan, the main speaker of this book club, recommended Meng Hui's book "Beauty Map" and took the title as the theme of the book club.
This is a post-70s woman with a fanatical love for beauty, working for Zhejiang Puluo Biology, engaged in human resources and administrative management, amateur love to read, tea art, grow succulents, and play a good pipa. At the "Worldly" reading meeting 3 years ago, she shared with everyone the elegant beauty of the Song Dynasty men's hairpin flowers. After making the decision to share "Beauty Figure", she has been questioning herself: Is there any point in talking about this topic?
In fact, the "meaningful" topic is not intended to be related to the grand theme. Ancient history and quiet antiquities contain poetry from antiquity. At a time when China's traditional culture is becoming more and more hot, looking for Chinese spirit and Chinese values from ancient Chinese life, transforming into Chinese strength and Chinese responsibility, learning from the past and the present, and learning from the past and knowing the present, is an important part of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Meng Hui, the author of "Beauty Figure", is a prophet and foresight. She studied in the Department of Art History of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, established her academic status with the book "Central Plains Women's Costume History Draft", and then published a series of essays on the theme of women's material life civilization in ancient China, gradually transforming into a researcher of traditional Chinese material culture, and famous in the industry for her novel "Oban Change".
"If there is an imagination called nostalgia, then Guo Lidan's 'Beauty Map' can easily awaken our voyeurism of 'swing in the wall'." Ge Xuanwei, the initiator of the "post station" reading club, secretary of the party branch of Gezhai Village in Hulu Town, and director of the village committee, analyzed it this way: "I don't hear the sound of people's voices and footsteps"; "The silver grate with the head of the tungsten head is broken" is the voice of a woman. Men are self-indulgent, women are natural.
A few words aroused the desire of many people to listen, and also shot an irrevocable arrow for Guo Lidan to share beauty.
Civilization is the support of the "heart" of beauty
At the beginning of the book club, Guo Lidan threw out an elegant noun "spring in the sleeve". The audience suddenly looked at the words and mentioned that in the TV series "The Biography of Zhen Huan", the heroine deliberately hid the butterfly in the cloak in order to regain favor, and when the emperor arrived, she released the butterfly to dance with it, successfully saving the holy will. "Spring in the Sleeve" is also related to palace fighting. Feng Zhen of the Tang Dynasty recorded in the "Miscellaneous Records of Yunxian" that when Tang Xuanzong was still a prince, there was a concubine named Luan'er, "making pear blossoms with light luo, wrapped in moon incense", usually packing it in his sleeve, accompanying him, creating a sensational effect, and successfully attracting Li Longji's attention. This kind of drama of hidden flowers in the sleeve is named "sleeve spring", which provides a bridge section for the current palace fighting drama.
Guo Lidan did not simply follow the seven major sub-series of Meng Hui's "Beauty Picture" Douyan, Love Mail, Festival, Red Makeup, Clothing, Living and Fun, but started from the aroma that ancient women were good at using, from the perspective of fragrance, qingyin, lotus, thrush, sideburns, etc., around the makeup of ancient women, revealing the external basic material conditions of beauty, one by one corresponding to the cosmetics commonly used by modern women such as perfumes, jewelry, shoes, eyebrow pencils, wigs and so on.
Obviously, the highly developed material civilization is the most basic and powerful support for Chinese beauty. Taking incense as an example, in addition to the familiar incense powder, incense sticks, etc., "Beauty Picture" shows more diversified ways of using incense, including the sleeve spring, lipstick, butterfly incense, vulgar incense, four-leaf cake incense and so on. The four cakes are slightly similar to today's waste utilization, made of lychee shells, pine nut shells, pear peels, bagasse, etc., and are still popular in the court. The mountain-shaped ornaments carved with various incense materials were created in the hot springs of Huaqing Palace as early as the Tang Dynasty, and they were extremely capable of engraving the wrong treasures. Ancient Chinese beauties use a variety of incense sources to create overlapping fragrances, giving people a seductive aesthetic experience.
Huan Pei Ding Dang is another style of ancient Chinese beauties. The section "Qing Yin" begins with Li Juan, a palace man favored by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. The fourteen-year-old woman worked hard, hanging a string of pendants made of amber in a wide robe, and when she walked and danced, she was clear and clear, telling everyone that it was the sound of her own bone joints, so there was a saying of "bone joints". Guo Lidan thus extended, and the decorative means such as jade pendants, head pins, and bells tied on various streamers were included in the scope of Qingyin. "Mo is not a step to shake the treasure bun exquisite, Mo is not the skirt dragged around the ring", ancient Chinese beauties make full use of the sense of hearing, to create a special temperament to increase their charm, in every month to move the spring supper of flowers, in every corner of the willow dark flowers, the leisurely clear sound, let people full of expectations and imagination for the upcoming Xianshu liren, constitute an enduring memory in ancient Chinese literary and artistic works.
After talking about the steps of the lotus and the picking of the lamp and thrush, Guo Lidan cut the topic into the sideburns and explained the origin and classification of the ancient phrase "cicada sideburns" for everyone. Undoubtedly, the hair buns that occupy the heads of beauties in various forms and pearlescent hairs have never been shaken as the center of vision. Meng Hui showed the historical fact that americans decorated their sideburns with gold leaf in "Beauty Map", and also quoted Pan Jinlian's practice of pasting gold leaf on "a nest of Hangzhou savings" in "Golden Bottle Plum". What kind of hairstyle is this "a nest of Hangzhou saving"? Guo Lidan carefully examined the Han makeup hairstyle and finally came to the conclusion that it was the "pill head" that prevailed in Hangzhou since the Song Dynasty.
Kaleidoscope of flowers passed, picking three or five leaves. Reading a thick book thin requires a certain ability to summarize and summarize. Guo Lidan summed up the 5 main decorative methods of ancient women, from the perspective of smell, hearing, vision, and touch, revealing a universal but implicit common sense - in order to make their beauty be seen, heard, smelled, and perceived by all the sensory organs together, they grasped the essence of beauty most exquisitely through various practices, so that people had to mobilize various senses to accept the signal of beauty sent by her, so that psychologically, in consciousness, her beauty was established as a fact, established as strong and intense, Memories that cannot be retreated.
As Meng Hui said: "Beauty not only comes from the exquisite facial features and qianli shape, but also depends on the style, charm and atmosphere that a person can create." ”
The perfection of people and things creates beauty
Anything about beauty is meaningful.
After the book club, Guo Lidan finally accepted the rationality of the topic and also found the sharing meaning of "Beauty Map".
In fact, the conditions for ancient women to become beautiful people are by no means limited to dressed appropriately, but also include many high-energy skills, such as cooking, song and dance, calligraphy and painting, etc. Wealth and talent are indispensable for shaping beauty, which is also the realistic projection of the ancients on the ideal female standard "morality, tolerance, work, and speech". "Beauty Map" gives people in the world a glimpse of the "appearance anxiety" that prevailed in ancient women under the aesthetic system dominated by literati and doctors, but it also makes people awe-inspired by their wisdom of using brilliant material civilization and noble cultural cultivation to resist a single aesthetic standard.
Such aesthetic wisdom, in the eyes of the members of the "station", is not only based on life experience, but also on reading. "The impact of reading on us is everywhere, it's just that many times we don't pay attention. This shows that the influence of reading is more often the subconscious, which quietly helps us and transforms us. In this brief book club, Ge Xuanwei tasted more interesting details. He believes that Guo Lidan's sharing of the content of "Beauty Map" is ostensibly to talk about the relationship between people and things, but in fact, it is to tell the story of people and people, which can be summarized in one word, that is, "perfection" - women and materials are perfected, so there are beauty and long things; people are perfect with each other, but they can convey the warmth of the world.
So, what will happen to the fulfillment of man and the book? The members of the "caravanserai" gave the answer: "The more you read the book, the more its influence will be as ubiquitous as the rain that seeps into the earth." At the very least, reading can make women more beautiful and life better. ”
What ornaments did the ancient sister of Dongyang wear?
The Municipal Museum houses Jewelry from the Song Dynasty
Reproduction of Dongyang "Beauty Map"
Beauty is like a flower, ornaments are like bees and butterflies, trembling with the beauty sitting upright, ready to add style.
Dongyang ancient sisters, what ornaments do they usually wear? Not long ago, the Dongyang Museum held the "Gold and Silver Huacai" Exhibition of Song Dynasty Gold and SilverWare from the Three Museums of Dongyang, Yiwu and Pujiang, showing the low-key luxury, exquisite and elegant life of the Song Dynasty. Among them, the gold and silver jewelry such as hair pins, hair hairpins, bracelets, and pendants in the collection of the Middle East Yang Museum depicts a rich image of an ancient lady.
The plutonium and hairpin were indispensable ornaments on the heads of women in ancient China. Plutonium is often used in conjunction with skirts to refer to ancient women. When it comes to fa bao, many people will think of the famous song "Baotou Phoenix". Compared with the hairpin, the biggest difference between the plutonium is that it is synthesized with two strands of hairpins, so the volume is larger than the hairpin, especially the shape of the plutonium is spooky pictogram, the shape is huge, and the pattern is changeable.
▲Gold bamboo leaf pattern bridge plutonium
The gold bamboo leaf pattern bridge in the Dongyang Museum, the head of the bridge is bent with gold thread into a group of "m" shapes, a total of 15 strands, which looks like both comb teeth and bridges, and the "beam" is engraved with fine bamboo leaf patterns. The whole artifact is rich in image, such as the peacock opening screen. There are also two silver gilded floral pattern hair plates, double strands, and the flower patterns engraved on the beams of the plutonium, both rolled into 9 strands, in the shape of a fan. These two hairpins are refined by heavy industry at a glance, and the sideburns after inserting them are infinite and have a leisurely charm.
▲Silver gilded floral pattern hairpin
▲ Hand-shaped blonde hairpin
The hairpin form is simpler than the hairpin, but it is also carefully crafted. Among them, the hand-shaped blonde hairpin, the body of the hairpin is a slender cylinder, gradually refined, slightly curved, plain surface. The head of the hairpin is shaped into a slim jade hand, the fingers are clearly visible, and 3 circles are wrapped around the wrist, which is shaped like a bracelet. The whole piece of utensils is delicate and elegant, lively and cute. However, there are also complex shapes, such as a silver gilded floral pattern of 19.2 cm long, the head of the hairpin is engraved with intricate tangled branches and floral patterns, the flowers and leaves are three-dimensional, and a phoenix flying with wings spread between the flowers is interspersed, forming a phoenix-piercing peony pattern, forming a trumpet-shaped flower tube. The top is engraved with a blooming chrysanthemum-shaped flower cap, which is buckled to the flower tube. The lower end is plain and conical. The whole artifact reveals a palatial grandeur.
The bracelet is the most moving scenery between women's wrists, and its circular ring structure symbolizes the consummation of love and represents the repeated recurrence of love loops. It is said that women wearing bracelets can also play a role in massaging acupuncture points on the wrist and promoting health care.
▲Tangled floral pattern gold bracelet
The Dongyang Museum has 2 gold bracelets with tangled branches and floral patterns, and the ornamentation and decoration style are the same. The bracelet has a diameter of 5.6 cm and a face width of 3 cm. The surface is bounded by a concave line, which is divided into two decorations, one is engraved with a positive tangle flower pattern, and the other is engraved with a reverse tangle floral pattern, and the two patterns are facing up and down. The whole piece of utensils is gorgeous and exquisite.
▲Golden drapery
There is also a relatively rare gold pendant in the collection. Shaped like a chicken heart, it is 7.9 cm high, 7.1 cm wide and weighs 35 grams. The main ornament is a pair of Mandarin ducks held out of the lotus leaf, using the engraving technique to create a scene of mandarin ducks playing in the lotus pond, this theme pattern is also called "full pond jiao". The pendant is hammered, engraved and stitched together, with the same front and back patterns and exquisite craftsmanship.
The Southern Song Dynasty Wu Zimu's "Record of Dreams" once recorded: The southern Song Dynasty rich and noble families, when marrying, the dowry must have gold juddah, gold hammer, gold pendant, commonly known as "three gold". The golden drapery is also known as the "Xia Shuai Pendant" in the "Treatise on Ancient Chinese Public Opinion" written by Mr. Sun Ji. In the portrait of Empress Xuanzu of Song in the Portrait of the Empress of the Past Dynasties, xia shuai hangs from the back of the neck around her shoulders, and a gold pendant falls from the bottom of the xia. From this, you can get a glimpse of the role of this pendant.
Except for the gold pendant, which was excavated in May 1984 at the Luoqingjia Brick and Tile Factory in Huxi Town, the other gold and silver jewelry was excavated in 2009 at the Song Tomb of Jinjiao Chair Mountain in Yangdawu Village, Baiyun Street. At that time, a number of dragon-patterned artifacts were also found in the tomb, such as dragon-patterned bottles, double dragon-patterned plates, double-dragon-pattern ear cups, etc., which can be guessed that the identity of the tomb owner is valuable. Therefore, these golden and brilliant jewelry can be said to be the "top match" of Dongyang women at that time, creating not only beauty, but also more likely "goddess".
From these gold and silver jewelry, it can also be roughly seen that the gold and silver jewelry production process at that time was quite mature, and on the basis of the gold fine craftsmanship of the Tang Dynasty, combined with the excellent painting composition art of the Song Dynasty, there was greater development and refinement, which was very ornamental.
Reporter Wu Xuhua
Editor of this article: Yang Huiping