What is history: it is the echo of the past to the future, the reflection of the future on the past. - Hugo
"Loess Pad Road, Clean Water Splash Street" was the standard when the Emperor of the Qing Dynasty traveled, which not only highlighted the royal privilege and prestige, but also behind this move was due to the dirtiness of the city streets at that time.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, large cities in the south such as Nanjing and other places mostly used stone slabs to build roads, while in the vast areas of the north, most of them were rammed earth roads, and even the imperial city of Beijing only had roads such as Zhengyangmenwai Street, Xizhimen to Yuanmingyuan that the emperor often traveled, and other areas were mostly dirt roads.
The road environment through the eyes of the literati
Shen Defu of the Ming Dynasty recorded in the "Compilation of WanliYe": "The streets are the most wide and pure in Jinling, and its most filthy people are not as good as the beams, and after the rain, there are many dung, mud splashing waist and abdomen... If the Beijing division is not as big as Nanjing, it seems to be slightly better than Kaifeng." Shen Defu used the comparison of Nanjing, Kaifeng and Beijing to implicitly illustrate the difference in Beijing's environment.
This situation lasted from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty, and in Mr. Lao She's autobiographical novel "Zhenghong Flag", the description of the road environment in Beijing City is "In the years of that civilization, the roads of Beijing City were uniformly gray and sandy, just like incense burners." Well, dressed up beautifully, and walking in the incense burner for ten miles and eight miles, to the home of relatives and friends has become a ghost, isn't it a big joke? ”。 And "but the wind came again, and it made people dizzy." Heaven, earth, and even the red walls of the Imperial City and the Golden Ruan Treasure Hall seemed to be trembling. The sun has lost its shine, and Beijing has become a place where flying sand and stones run rampant" This description also echoes the Ming people's "Yanshi wears a mask, rides a yellow horse, the wind takes off and the dust is full of strangeness, returns to get off the horse, and the two nostrils are as black as smoke".
Why was the street environment in Beijing so poor during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and where did the appearance of "just like an incense burner" come from?
In addition to the destruction of the natural environment outside Beijing at that time, it was more the reason for the construction of streets in the city. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Mr. Xia Renhu, a master of Traditional Chinese Studies in the early Ming Dynasty, recorded in the "Old Beijing Trivia": "Before the road was built in the city of Beijing, there were Yongdao in the center of its thoroughfares, which were not as wide as two zhang, three or four feet high, rainy and slippery, often overturned, and its situation was very dangerous."
Why is there such a road in the middle of the road that is three or four feet above the flat ground? This is the remnants of the "loess pad road" left by the emperor of the Qing Dynasty when he traveled, and every time the emperor traveled, the loess pad road was used up, and after it was used, the people dumped the ash on the loess soil, and over time formed such a "road on the road" in the middle of the street, which not only stretched across the long street, but also a flowing "incense burner".
However, what is more important is that the public health conditions at that time were low, and the environmental health awareness of urban residents was also poor, and people at that time "drowned a lot on the road", and even in front of the Tongren Hall located in Dashilar, there were many people who defecated here, but the host family was superstitiously believed that this was the place of "a hundred birds and a phoenix", the most prosperous, and did not think that it was wrong.
The road environment in the eyes of bureaucrats
Of course, in the eyes of masters such as Lao She and Xia Renhu, what they saw was a poor road environment at the bottom of Beijing City, so what kind of road traffic in Beijing City was in the eyes of the upper-class scholars?
In the "Diary of Weng Tonggong", it is repeatedly recorded that the city of Beijing has recorded "yellow sand rising heaven", "yellow sand sai heaven" and "yellow equestrian sky". For a southerner, Weng Tonggong is very uncomfortable with the "yellow and scattered" weather in Beijing. And he and his colleagues, the most painful thing is not the yellow sand on the road, but the rain. As Mr. Lao She said, "three feet of ash" and then through the "moisture" of the rain, the stirring of pedestrians, cars and horses, the city of Beijing has really become a big quagmire. At this time, the officials who need to travel are faced with a situation of "deep water and horse's belly", "three feet deep in mud" and "nine qu mud".
Even in such weather and environment, Weng Tonggong and his colleagues still had to kneel on both sides of the road to pay homage to Lafayette and the emperor. On the ninth day of the first month of June in the 20th year of Guangxu, Weng Tonggong and other ministers jointly received fans and clothing from the empress dowager, and according to the rules, they were to thank the empress dowager. So Weng Tonggong, Rebbe Shangshu Chongli, Bingbu Shangshu Jingxin, and others waited for the empress dowager at the gate of the Xiyuan Banana Garden, so that they could thank her in person. Unfortunately, the sky is not beautiful, the black clouds are like a cover that day, pouring rain, Weng Tonggong and his party had to kneel in the "mud next to the road in the west direction of the class buckle head" to thank Tian'en, it is reasonable to say that the West Garden is a royal garden, the road environment should be better, but a class of the country's cadre city can only kneel in the mud, enough to prove from the side that the road condition in Beijing city at that time was worrying.
As those in power, didn't the bureaucrats think about managing the road environment in Beijing, the first good place? Of course I thought about it! Both the emperor and aspiring officials had the idea of cleaning up Beijing's road environment.
During the Qianlong period, the country was strong, and the emperor allocated special funds to improve the roads in the capital, changing the dirt roads into stone roads "to observe solemnly and facilitate pedestrians", but such projects needed to be maintained from time to time, so in the late Qing Dynasty, when the national strength was weak and the economy was stretched, the roads lacked management and changed back to the "incense ash road".
What is even more hateful is that many lower-class officials will use the opportunity of road renovation and reconstruction to extort merchants. The Qing Dynasty stipulated that every spring the minister in charge of the ditch and river channel in the capital would lead the project of opening the ditch and ventilating the ground, that is, cleaning and dredging the ditches in each street. If the sutra is a good scripture, I am afraid that the "monks" below will be distorted, and many servants deliberately dig a ditch in front of the large shops to extort the merchants. In the early years of Guangxu, the secretary of the Ministry of Works proposed that the merchants on both sides of the street raise funds to renovate the roads in the capital, but they were blocked by Pan Zuyin, the right attendant of the ministry, saying that it is a good thing for you to do this now, but if the successor uses this as an excuse to extort and extort the people, it will become a disaster, so it will not be solved, so there are many dirt roads, garbage, and feces are still the norm on the roads in Beijing.
The road environment through the eyes of foreigners
When it comes to the comparison of urban road environments in China and abroad, some people often compare the neatness and uniformity of the Tang and Song dynasties with the dirty mess of the French Bourbon Dynasty, but after the late Qing Dynasty, the harsh road environment in Beijing made foreigners very surprised. An Italian diplomat was surprised by the road conditions in Beijing in the late Qing Dynasty: "The street is at least 40 meters wide, and the middle of the street, at least 1 meter higher than the other parts, is the real road, the road is about 20 meters wide, with a thickness of about half a meter of loess, and the wheels of horse-drawn carriages and the footsteps of pedestrians drown in it, like walking on the beach by the sea."
Not only the problem of dirt roads, but also foreigners were also concerned about the uncivilized behavior of the residents of Beijing at that time. In the twelfth year of Guangxu, a German banker came to Beijing and wrote: "All the streets and squares emit a stench that makes Europeans unbearable... All the excrement from the home or yard is collected in special containers or cesspools, poured into large buckets at fixed times of the day, spilled on the street with other dirty water, and mixed with dust as high as shoes... Thousands of coolies are also completing their digestion process in the streets, so it is not difficult to understand where this hellish stench comes from."
Since the Opium War, the Western powers have despised the "paper tiger" like the Qing government, and when they entered the capital of the country, what they saw made foreigners who called themselves "civilized and gentlemen" feel backward and ignorant. But for the emperor and empress dowager, who only did superficial efforts such as "loess pad road" and turned a blind eye to the road environment of the imperial capital, they were like ostriches, blocking the urban environment from Luan Driving, hiding under the loess soil, and deceiving themselves.
This situation was not until the construction of the first modern gravel road on Donghuamen Avenue in the thirtieth year of Guangxu (1904), as well as the laying of trams, and a series of measures, which gradually improved the road and traffic conditions in the main neighborhoods of Beijing, but more like "Longsugou", the environmental health problems that belonged to the corners of the city could not be effectively solved until the Republic of China.