The long river of history is running endlessly, there are calm waves, there are also waves, let Xiaobian take you into history and understand history.
As the saying goes, having children in the traditional Chinese concept of having children is completely incomprehensible without parenting. However, at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, such strange things occurred in the folk. What is even stranger is that this phenomenon occurs not only in poor peasant households, but also in a common atmosphere formed by the gentry. Where does this strange phenomenon come from? What are the social roots behind it? According to the history of the Song Dynasty, at the turn of the Southern and Northern Song Dynasties, there was a commoner in Chong'an, Fujian Province, named Hu Anguo, whose sister-in-law planned to drown a newborn baby boy because she had too many sons.
Later, Mr. and Mrs. Hu Anguo couldn't bear to take the baby boy home and raise him, so they named it Wu Yin to save a small life. Such a phenomenon of not having children is widely seen in the Southern Song Dynasty. The so-called birth of a child is to give birth to a child without raising, often drowning or abandoning the baby. According to records, the phenomenon of not having children at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty spread to Fujian and Zhejiang, Jinghu, North and South, Jiangnan and other places. Jianzhou, Chuzhou, Qingzhou, Nanjianzhou, Shaowujun, Yuezhou, Xinzhou, Raozhou and other places are the most serious. Moreover, this strange phenomenon is completely a spontaneous act of the people and has not been coerced by the government. Outside the gentle main line of China's more than 5,000 years of fatherhood and filial piety, it is shocking that such a primitive and barbaric phenomenon has emerged. The failure to give birth to children caused a large number of drowning babies and abandoning babies, which had a great negative impact on the population reproduction, economic development and social and moral atmosphere at that time. Before the Southern Song Dynasty, the phenomenon of not having children had already appeared. According to the New Book of Tang and the Biography of Tang Caizi, Lu Yu was abandoned by his parents because of his ugly appearance and stuttering. Tang Kaiyuan's 23-year-old lu Yu was abandoned by the West Lake and the abbot of The Lingling Longgai Temple, Zhi Ji Zen Master, passed through the river road here and picked it up indoors and raised him.
Lu Yu has been eager to learn since he was a child, but he does not love to learn Zen. When he was nine years old, Zen master Zhiji asked him to recite the sutra and recite the Buddha, but he asked rhetorically, the Buddhist disciples had no brothers before they died and no heirs after death, and Confucians often said that filial piety has three no descendants as great monks, can it be considered effective? When he heard this, Zen Master Zhiji was furious and punished him with the heaviest of things, forcing him to repent. Lu Yu was always reluctant to shave his hair as a monk, and repeatedly asked Zhi ji Zen Master to go down the mountain. Zen Master Zhiji retreated for the sake of the Ten Paths and the Difficulties, so he had to learn the tea art of Chu Cha Lu Yu Bitter Creek Tea. Finally, when he brought a cup of carefully cooked Kuding tea to Zen Master Zhiji, the Zen Master finally agreed to let him go down the mountain. Folk believe that the birth of a child in early May is an ominous sign, because May is the evil moon, and the first five days of May are the five poisonous days in February. A child born on this day may be reincarnated by the five poisons. There is also a folk saying that children born on the fifth day of the first month of May will be harmful to their parents. As the saying goes, a man who gives birth to a son on May 5 harms his father and daughter and harms his mother. Perhaps under the influence of the idea of male superiority and female inferiority, the folk are more jealous of the rumors of nanhai wealth, so for a long time, the layout of the first five words in May mainly refers to boys. At the beginning of May, the custom of not raising children for five years has a long history and has a wide influence, once affecting the upper class. It is said that Emperor Huizong of Song was born on the fifth day of the first month of May, so he was hermitted outside the palace from an early age. Later, because she was afraid of the influence of having a child, she had to change her birthday to the first ten days of October, and set the beginning of October as Tianning Festival.
By the time of Emperor Renzong of the Northern Song Dynasty, the phenomenon of folk births had spread, and this was the layout of life and death that was not limited to the first five days of May. Purple in the life and death layout also widely includes all newborn babies including baby boys and girls. At the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, this phenomenon spread more widely and had a deeper impact. Legend has it that at that time, the ideal state of a family in the countryside was two men and one woman, and if there was a fourth one, it would have drowned or thrown away. Under the influence of patriarchalism, rural families drown or discard far more female babies than male babies. This has led directly to a serious imbalance in the proportion of men and women, with men having no wives to marry on the one hand and the phenomenon of early marriage of abducted women on the other. The layout of life and death at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty has basically departed from the traditional custom of not having five children in early May. From the phenomenon level, the birth of children at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty is no longer limited to a specific time, nor is it divided into male camps and female camps. From the perspective of causes, the layout of life and death is not because of the superstition of the five poisons that harm fathers and daughters and mothers, but the result of the interaction of various factors in a specific social environment. It is generally believed that there are three main reasons for the strange phenomenon of not having children at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty. First of all, the layout of life and death is a last resort for farmers to be on the poverty line. During the Southern Song Dynasty, land annexation intensified, and the only land in the hands of peasants was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the gentry. By the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, peasants were almost faced with a situation of no land to cultivate, and the rural land in Fujian, southern Zhejiang, and east and west was originally barren, and the peasants' lives were even more miserable. Under these circumstances, the court of the Southern Song Dynasty also had to collect taxes, conscript soldiers, and set up various types of harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, such as the total system of money, the monthly pile, the money board account money, and so on.
No wonder, Zhu Xi sighed, the ancient method of carving and stripping the people was all available in this dynasty. The desperate peasants had to artificially control the number of their own population and cruelly dispose of their extra children. Secondly, the layout of life and death is a helpless choice in the era when obstetrics and gynecology is underdeveloped. Although obstetrics and gynecology developed during the Southern Song Dynasty and some measures beneficial to women's fertility and health care appeared, it was not possible to control pregnancy and childbirth through medical means. And women's contraception and abortion were extremely taboo at the time. According to historical records, there were also many women in the rural areas of the Southern Song Dynasty who repeatedly had bad births, that is, they were colorful, but they were considered to be ominous acts, and they would suffer karma and were not tolerated by society. At that time, many rural women had given birth to more than ten units in eight or nine stations, and they were almost pregnant and prolonged every year. Since they must have children and are unable to raise them, they have to drown and abandon their babies. In order to concentrate the family property, there is also a phenomenon of life and death in some gentry families, with the purpose of dividing the family property among fewer heirs. The prevalence of not having children caused a great blow to the court of the Southern Song Dynasty. By the end of the year, the Southern Song Dynasty was already poor and weak, with financial resources and military strength that were difficult to resist the rising Jurchen Mongols in the north. This was a slow increase in population, which further limited rural production wealth, taxation and conscription, which was undoubtedly worse for the Southern Song court.
Because of this, the Southern Song Dynasty was particularly active in promoting policies to encourage fertility. In order to curb the phenomenon of not having children, the Southern Song Dynasty court can be said to have exhausted its efforts. The imperial court adopted many reward and punishment measures to encourage childbearing, in general, mainly material measures and spiritual indoctrination. In terms of materials, the Court of the Southern Song Dynasty attempted to encourage peasants to have children through economic support. For example, subsidizing the lives of poor families, prohibiting infant drowning, and even stipulating that families who do not have children must hand over their assets. In the eighth year of Emperor Gaozong's Shaoxing Dynasty, the imperial court made a stipulation that after a woman with economic difficulties became pregnant, the imperial court subsidized four buckets of rice and increased the number of subsidies to one bag of rice seven years later. During the reign of Emperor Xiaozong, Zhu Xi and others proposed the establishment of an orange warehouse to help the poor who had children but could not afford to raise them. In addition, the Southern Song Dynasty advocated a theory based on Confucianism and integrated Buddhist Anderological thought. Whether it is the Buddhist five precepts or the Confucian five permanent ethics, the principle of non-killing is put first. As the imperial court gradually came to an end, various relief measures could not be implemented, and the phenomenon of not having children was still repeatedly prohibited.
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