The prime minister of the Song Dynasty, Lü Mengzheng can be regarded as one of the most famous people.
This fame, on the one hand, comes from his origins.
Over the centuries, people have pursued the title as straight as the stars holding the moon and the mountains looking up, especially in the Song Dynasty, which was extremely literary, and the Song Dynasty's book "Rulin Gonghui" recorded the results of the scientific expedition at that time, and the people of the capital Beijing when the emperor rewarded the emperor on horseback riding the streets to see the grand situation of the yuan: "Since the Chongzheng Palace came out of the Donghua Gate, the call was very favored." Spectators crowd the thoroughfare, and the shoulders of people cannot be crossed, and there are those who climb up to the house and look down. "Thousands of people are caught in the way, shoulder to shoulder, the people in order to see the style of the yuan, even risk climbing on the high roof, it is really crazy, and the enthusiasm of the current boys and girls to chase the stars is even worse." Lü Mengzheng was admitted to the first place of jinshi in the second year of the Taiping Revival of the Song Dynasty (977) and was awarded the honor of being a high school official.
The other aspect comes from his three-ascent phase.
In the Song Dynasty, there were not many people who came to the position of Xiangyuan, and I searched the list of prime ministers of the two Song Dynasties, and found that the prime ministers from the Yuanyuan were only Lü Mengzheng, Chen Yaosu, Wang Zeng, Li Di, Liang Kejia, Wen Tianxiang and a few others, and among them, there seemed to be only one Lu Mengzheng.
Moreover, it is because of his cultivation and conduct.
Yuan RenTuo commented in the "Song Shi Lü Meng Zheng Biography" that he said: "The quality is thick and simple, there is great hope, and he maintains himself with the right way", indicating that Lü Meng is a generous and upright prime minister, and his reputation among scholars and doctors is extremely high.
Lu Mengzheng is indeed generous and elegant. It is said that when he was transferred from the local government to the post of deputy prime minister and governor of the DPRK, many senior Confucian courtiers did not sell his accounts, and once when he was above the court, a minister pointed at him and said, "Is this person also participating in politics?" "Full of disdain. Lu Meng was pretending not to hear him and walked past this man. Colleagues were upset about him and wanted to ask for each other's names, but Lu Meng was busy stopping him and said, "Once you know his name, you may not be able to forget it for life, or it is better not to know." Colleagues sighed.
Another point that Lu Mengzheng admires is that he knows that he is wrong and changes it.
Lü Mengzheng was a young man whose parents died, and his family was in a cold and miserable situation, and he lived in a thatched hut and studied hard to become a talent. Later generations entrusted his famous work "Broken Kiln Endowment" in the article, which includes: "I used to be trapped in Luoyang, begging for monks and food every day, staying in broken kilns at night, thinking that clothes could not cover his body, thinking about food could not fill his hunger, avoiding the cold in winter and exhausting the fire in the furnace, seeking coolness in summer and losing his hands under the bridge, hating the upper people, hating the lower people, and daowu being lowly..." Although he was forged by the name, his family situation and experience were more or less the same, and what he said was not bad, it is said that when he was hungry and panicked when he was a child, he also picked up melons discarded by others to eat.
Later, Lü Meng was in a position of dominance and ascended to a high position, but he was not greedy for goods, and his life was also frugal, but when he was old and weak, his teeth were loose, and he fell in love with the soup made of chicken tongue stew, commonly known as "chicken tongue soup", and he had to drink it every morning. Once, when he was walking in the garden, he suddenly caught a glimpse of a hill in the corner of the wall, like a hill, and asked the waiter who had built it. The waiter replied that this was not a mound, but a pile of chicken feathers and bones discarded by the chef for the "chicken tongue soup" on the day of the fairness. Lu Mengzheng was shocked when he heard this: "How can I eat so many chickens?" The waiter said, "A chicken has only one tongue, how much chicken tongue should be used to drink a bowl of soup?" How long did you drink the chicken tongue soup? ”
Lu Meng was listening to it, a look of shame on his face, and he never drank "chicken tongue soup" again.