In the previous article, I have introduced to you how people in the pre-Qin period took a bath and how to escape the summer, and from these small stories and common sense, we found many interesting brain holes. Therefore, today, in order to help you open up your brain a little bigger, I will introduce to you how people in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods solved the problem of internal urgency.
Before talking about the way people went to the toilet during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, we still have to cover the history of Chinese toilets before the Spring and Autumn Warring States. As early as the new era, the Banpo people invented the toilet, they are not as most people think, very rude solution, but will dig some earth pits to cover up the ugliness. This shows that as early as that time, Chinese already had the concept of shame.
By the time of the Xia Shang Zhou, Chinese gradually had complete toilets and toilets. During the Xia Dynasty, the ruler ordered slaves to build a small hut in the pigsty, which was called a small hut. This is because with the advent of the family system, women, in addition to their appearance as a secondary sex, were also regarded as private property by men, and men and women could no longer dig pits and avoid them like neolithic people. In order to create a fixed etiquette between men and women, people gradually put the toilet in privacy, so that the house is also built to avoid men and women accidentally offending each other.
During the Shang Dynasty, the "toilet paper" used by people changed from stones and leaves to earth blocks, although it was very simple, but it has shown that people at that time began to have the consciousness of making toilets, which was a kind of progress. With the passage of time, as the time entered the two-week period, the etiquette for going to the toilet became more and more stringent, and the size of the toilet room and the material of the toilet also changed with the development of the times. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, people began to optimize the configuration of the pit, the prototype of the dry toilet began to appear, people began to put wooden boards on the original simple pit, and set up leaky wells in the depths of the pit to ensure the multiple use of the pit, is this way very similar to the dry toilet we see in the countryside today?
In the Spring and Autumn Period and warring states period books "Ritual Rites and Rituals", there was once such a sentence called "Subordinate Nirvana Toilet." "The so-called subordinate refers to the prisoners we often see in costume dramas, and Ne makes a verb here, meaning digging. Through such an explanation, it is not difficult for us to find out how humble the status of prisoners in the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period was, and what might have been good civilians could only dig toilets for people once they committed crimes. The quality of this simple dry toilet is actually very bad, the degree of firmness depends on the weight of the wooden board, once the wooden board can not bear the weight, the toilet person will fall into the dark well and fall to death.
The Jin Jinggong in the "Left Biography", who was seriously ill in his later years, could only borrow a doctor from the Qin state because he was worried about the harvest of the Jin state. Before that, he had a nightmare, the content was extremely terrifying, Jin Jinggong was worried about his future, so he invited the wizard to inquire, and the wizard told him that he could not eat the new wheat of Jinguo. The borrowed Qin Guo Taiyi, after diagnosing his pulse, also believed that Jin Jinggong's illness was already very serious and could not be cured. Thinking that he was about to die, Jin Jinggong decided to eat the new wheat quickly, so he ordered the cook to make a bowl of wheat rice for him, and before eating the wheat rice, he also had the wizard killed. Who knows, there is an unexpected storm in the sky, Jin Jinggong suddenly bloated before eating wheat rice, so he immediately ran to the toilet to change clothes. As a result, because his health was already bad, coupled with bloating and discomfort, his eyes fell into the dark well as soon as he went black, and he died on the spot, which was really laughable.
Learning this lesson, in the Warring States period, people replaced the more dangerous dry toilets with Gong buckets. And the toilet room was also renovated, and it was recorded in the Zhuangzi Gengsangchu that "the viewer of the room is in the temple, and it is suitable for him." "It means that before buying a house, we must first look at the toilet, and this habit is also reflected in our modern people when buying a house." In addition to private toilets, during the Warring States period, people also began to build public toilets.
The "Mozi Banner" records the public toilets of the Warring States period relatively completely, and this kind of toilet is generally set up outside the road barrier, which can be said to be the prototype of today's public toilets. In addition, in terms of toilets, people in the Warring States period began to clearly divide the hierarchy according to toilets, and cloth similar to paper could only be used by nobles, while ordinary people could only use tiles, heaven and earth, very pitiful.
People have three anxieties, of which the internal urgency is originally a filthy thing, but in the minds of people in the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period, even such a thing can be used as a tool to distinguish between the other party and their own status. They seem elegant, rustic, open, and uninhibited, but in fact they are just prisoners of etiquette. Traveling back to ancient times and returning to the present day, we seem to find that freedom and equality are really very precious things, worthy of our eternal love and cherishing.