Winter solstice, a yang birth.
Taoists believe that on the day of the winter solstice, the cathode declines and the heavens and the earth return to the yang. The ancient Romans also regarded the winter solstice as the birthday of the god of light, and even identified it as Christmas. This is no accident.
Like the poet's thoughts rising in the brazier, like the gift of a child drilled out of the fireplace, at the solstice of winter and the peak of the yin, people never give up on approaching the warm, so that new hope is always born at the end of the day.
This article is from B03 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's December 24 feature "Winter Solstice".
For details of the topic, please refer to:
Around the winter, I met the gentlest of you
A handful of stories in winter
Written by | Qiu Shi
01
Clay stove solitude: the winter life of medieval otaku
"The Three Gorges Nanbin City is the farthest, and the winter solstice night is long every year." Many years later, Bai Juyi, who was the Shangshu of the Punishment Department and The Marquis of Feng Yi County, almost forgot about the night of the winter solstice that made him cold to despair.
At that time, Sima of Jiangzhou, who was weeping wet and green shirts, moved to Zhongzhou (present-day Zhong County, Chongqing), and after a serious illness, his beard was white, and his frustrated eunuch traveled endlessly. On the night of the winter solstice, the wet and cold weather in the Yangtze River Basin adds to the despair. "The heart is less than the fire in the furnace, and the sideburns are more than the frost." On those cold nights, he and the small stove were shadowy, not only warming the body, but also dissolving the frost on the heart. "Alone for a long time, it is not difficult to be sentimental, who can speak together in heaven, and send four hours of cold for a long time."
Two years later, Bai Juyi returned to the Beijing Division, and the number of feng lu gradually increased, and he began to consciously purchase heating equipment from all over the world. The cotton of Lingnan, stuffed into the silk of Suzhou and Hangzhou, is woven into a "silk jacket", "in the morning, it is good to sit in the sun, and it is advisable to wear a snow trip when going out at night", which is both coldproof and quite gorgeous. At the end of the year, the first choice is still the cold suit of the saibei soldiers - fur coats, leather boots, jacket hats, green felt. Therefore, if they met in Luoyang, when Liu Nineteen was invited to "have a drink together", he saw Bai Juyi who looked like this: "The hat is long and covers the ears, and the heavy qiu is wide wrapped"; "Qiu is lightly white, and the boots are warm and felt".
An old friend of seventy years old, Eun Hai's life, in exchange for a velvet wrap, a hat to cover his ears, invite you to accompany him to once again warm wine and talk about life. You leave the evening breeze behind you and follow him into the warm pavilion of spring, the charcoal in the copper stove is hot, and the frozen ink on the brick table is gradually melting. Your numb fingers came alive, so you also took off your coat, and with the owner's interest, entered his green felt tent that had been "brought in" from Saibei, the chessboard and musical instruments were ready, the small red stove was warming the wine, and the wine noodles were glowing with green hops. "Like a fish into the water, like a rabbit hiding in a deep cave", the joy of winter home, but so. "Drink a cup of sleep, what is not leisurely in the world."
As for the royal children, it is difficult to be satisfied with just roasting the fire. According to the "Testament of Kaiyuan Tianbao", King Shen, the brother of Tang Xuanzong, "every winter when there is a bitter cold in the wind and snow, the palace prostitutes are secretly surrounded by the sitting side to resist the cold, calling themselves 'whore'". His brother King Qi was lustful and did not use the fire to roast his hands in winter, "but in the arms of the prostitute, he carried his skin, called 'hand warmer', as always." And the royal family's wind of poverty and extravagance often ends up in the "homes of all officials and nobles, all of which are effective." No wonder Du Fu sighed, "Zhumen wine smells of flesh, and there are frozen bones on the road."
If it is convenient, braziers, copper smokers, and red clay stoves cannot be carried, let alone brought into the bed. After the Song Dynasty, the invention of the foot stove and the hand stove finally liberated the bodies of the maids. Unlike the stove, it is a copper stove filled with hot water, and when used, it is wrapped in a cloth to avoid burns. Su Shi once said, "Every night the hot soup is filled, stuffed in its mouth, and still wrapped in cloth, it can reach dan and not be cold." Huang Tingjian was much more frank: "Xiao Ji warms her feet and lies down, or she can raise her heart." Thousands of dollars to buy footwomen, sleep night and night. "It is said that this foot warmer bottle is better than a maid's foot warmer, and if it is the latter, it will make him full of lust."
Hand stove
02
Nanshan salary: the temperature difference between inside and outside the palace wall
Bai Juyi's fire is a literati and elegant, but after all, it is the life of retired high-ranking officials. In his hometown of Weinan, "the north wind is as sharp as a sword, and the cloth is not covered." Burn only the fire of artemisia thorns, and sit in the night and wait for the morning." The poor can only burn weeds for warmth, why is there a lot of charcoal? Because charcoal has long been monopolized by the court.
In the Feng Lu of Beijing officials such as Bai Juyi, the heating cost is the most important. The Tang Dynasty issued at least 720,000 pieces of firewood to Beijing officials every year; the Northern Song Dynasty stipulated that officials below the prime minister could receive 2,000 kilograms of charcoal and 600 kilograms to 200 kilograms per person in the winter, and in 1065 alone, 17.13 million kilograms of firewood and 1 million scales of charcoal were transported into the capital.
Sheng Tang Chang'an "Million Homes". Even according to the average of 500,000 people in the city, the annual living charcoal consumption of Tang Chang'an City is about 91,250 tons of firewood, which can be roughly converted into about 1 square kilometer of forest. During the first year of history, the northern slope of Qinling Mountains was "near the mountains without giant materials". Large-scale soil erosion, frequent droughts, the Bahe And Weihe rivers are often cut off, and the Fertile Fields of Qinchuan are no longer there.
The more scarce the resources, the more high-level officials are needed to deploy and control them. In the later Tang Dynasty, Jing Zhaoyin concurrently served as a charcoal envoy, and set up a palace city to purchase charcoal from the people. The encounter that Bai Juyi saw when he was young was "selling charcoal" happened precisely when charcoal was in short supply and the palace officials and eunuchs forced to buy and sell. The charcoal sellers who are "poor and clothed" provide the warmth of the palace like a spring breeze, and in the end, "the palace envoys will not be spared." Han Yu's "Records of Shunzong" records the end of the real "charcoal seller" incident: the charcoal seller fought with death and beat the eunuchs; the eunuchs were dismissed from their posts at the imperial court, and the charcoal sellers got ten silk horses, and the maladministration of the palace was finally abolished.
In the winter and spring of the fourth year (1059) of Emperor Renzong of Song, the rain and snow did not stop, the price of charcoal food doubled, and even in Kaifeng City, "people who froze and died a lot" were lost. In Ouyang Xiu's request to suspend the Yuan Lantern Festival, he said that he saw some people hang themselves because their wives froze to death, and some people committed suicide by throwing themselves into a well because they did not want to be frozen again. Emperor Renzong of Song promised to stop the Festival of Lights and "avoid the temple and reduce meals" to show his concern for the people.
As the Northern Song Dynasty began to mine coal, the problem of energy shortage eased. But high calorific value fuels have only brought about another round of high population growth, only slowly crashing into the next resource threshold. To save the masses from the cold of winter and hunger, of course, we cannot rely on the benevolence of the king, but also need a change in lifestyle.
When the Qianlong Emperor happily chanted "People suffer from short winter days, I love long winter nights", he was standing on the exquisite floor heating fire road of the Forbidden City. He was supplied with a million catties of high-quality charcoal per year for the winter heating of his court. He would not have imagined that this kind of heating could one day be shared by all people.
03
Fireplace Revolution: Elves inside and out of the chimney
The typical image of Santa Claus must have been born after the fireplace. His rounded body burrowed into the chimney of the brick roof, climbed down the spacious ventilation ducts without staining the black and red jacket, and as soon as he came out of the hearth, he was in the center of the living room. Such fireplaces did not appear before the 12th century.
Western Europeans, like the rest of the Old World, warmed themselves by the kitchen stove or brazier. From the 15th century onwards, there were tiled stoves in the halls of German inns, where travelers could dry wet laundry, rest on benches by the stove and even stay overnight. Soon, however, the custom of installing fireplaces in living rooms spread along the coastal port cities along the trade network, from Venice to Lübeck, from Novgorod to Bruges, and households began to install brick fireplaces. Painters in Venice and the Netherlands began to depict towering fireplace chimneys.
During the cold snaps of the 17th century, the rivers Thames and the Seine froze every year, and the commoners of Paris "froze to death like flies" and "at the king's table, the wine in the glass froze into ice".
The severe cold has forced people to speed up the study of heating technology. The rich began to cover the hearth of the fireplace with metal plates and decorate it with elegant patterns; the hearth was equipped with hooks, and an iron pot could be set up on the stove to cook vegetables, and the crackling flames left warmth in the house, while the burning black smoke went straight up with the flue. Around 1720, furnace workers discovered the principle of ventilation, reducing the furnace bed, lowering the furnace table, bending the chimney pipe into an arc, and leaving more heat in the house.
Every October, the city of Paris is crammed by vehicles transporting heating timber, a large part of which is destined for Versailles. By 1783, there were 1,169 fireplaces in the Palace of Versailles, almost all burning wood rather than coal. The palace of Versailles has been renovating and installing fireplaces to make their bedrooms more comfortable, but the narrow flue is torturing the ladies who live on the second floor. Their bedrooms were blackened by the smoke from the stove that had jumped upstairs, and they had to repaint the furniture every year.
On the other side of the ocean, especially in New England, people were not afraid of being blackened. Rows of detached houses, cut through the inexhaustible forest, stretched out neatly. In 1742, Benjamin Franklin invented the movable cast iron stove, which could be placed anywhere in the house, fitted with ventilation regulators, and more fuel-efficient. This became his great invention second only to lightning rods, permanently changing winter heating and cooking habits. In 1778, the Palace of Versailles also began to install the "Franklin Furnace", which, although simple and rough in appearance, did reduce black smoke. By 1897, a regular stove in North America was sold for $5.97 and was available at department stores.
When fireplaces heated homes in Western Europe, window and door materials were also phased out of formwork and oil paper in favor of glass. In 1779, glass windows were widely used in even the low-income workers' quarters of Paris.
Steam and fire forced back the cold, but they could not help the poor. On Christmas Eve 1845, Hans Christian Andersen met the 5-year-old girl in Italy, who used her frozen fingers to sell matches to passers-by, but never sold a single one. The matches in her hands, the fireplace and the Christmas tree that she could see through the glass window, were all industrial products of a century. And she was isolated.
In a dark version of the fairy tale of later generations, matches end up igniting the house. And that's the accident that people most often encounter when they warm up in winter.
04
The Stove as Home: Stove Worship and Its Modernization
Perhaps since the flint wood was made for fire, the fires of the cold night have formed the basic unit of the human collective.
Between the bashan and Shu waters, it is difficult to be wet and cold in winter. The Yi and Naxi ethnic groups have already had fire pond houses for winter heating. The most common is the three-stone Dingzu fire pond stove, with three stones to support the pot to burn the fire, around the cover of the mat and residence, a fire pit stove is a family, and the pond fire is the god of the stove, and the common sacrifice.
In the northeast, at least during the Jin Dynasty, the houses had "ring houses as earthen beds, under which fires were burned." Living on it with food and sleep, it is called kang, in order to warm it" (Northern League Compilation). Stoves, stoves, beds three-in-one fire kang has been popularized, the family of men, women and children, all sit on the kang. Holding up a stove for food and clothing, he was also given the divine personality of "Stove King" and sent a welcome around the New Year.
Modern Yang LiuQing wood engraving "Stove King".
The Anglo-Saxon complex for fireplaces is also not far away. The Franklin furnace was initially frustrated by the fact that the flame was enclosed in the furnace. American families are accustomed to believing that an exposed flame is a sign of family warmth. Mrs. Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, once said that the open hearth "burned noisily and cheerfully as if inviting an invitation," inspiring the soldiers of the Civil War who would never "die barefoot in the snow to defend airtight stoves and pot stoves." "For two centuries, fireplaces have been the spatial center of the American family. Even President Roosevelt's series of broadcasts in response to the harsh economic winter were dubbed "fireside talks" as a sign of closeness.
The advent of plumbing pipes and cast iron heat sinks changed all that. The hot air transport of the palace fire and fireplace was replaced by hot water to dissipate heat, and the pot of hot water in the former foot stove "Tang Po" became a water transmission network that ran through the city's thousands of homes, while the self-burning coal stoves converged into a thermal power plant on the outskirts of the city, towering over the rugged chimney, and the heat from its own stove all came from the big coal stove that was booming in the distance.
The small stove becomes a big furnace, and the small family naturally does not leave everyone. As the older generation who walked down the kangtou said, take the factory as the home, the city as the home, and the country as the home. After hundreds of thousands of years of fighting the harsh winter, humanity finally bid farewell to the cold in this gesture.
What about the old Vesta? Or what about the nostalgia for the extended family that we plant as we continue to search for winter warmth? What to expect from your neighbor? What about that hazy caution that eventually goes away?
It didn't hide too far. Maybe close to the heating pipe, you can hear the laughter of the distant and near; maybe turn on the hot water faucet and you can hear the whimpering of the air; light the gas stove, you can still see a light that has never stopped.