After the Ming Dynasty army invaded the city of Beijing, it destroyed all the palaces built by the Yuan Dynasty here. At the Battle of Jingnan, the Yongle Emperor Zhu Di, who defeated Emperor Jianwen, once again decided to establish an imperial city in Beijing, and began to build an imperial city in 1406, which took 12 years to complete a new imperial palace in 1420, which is the Forbidden City we see today. The palace inside it is surrounded by a high palace wall and a moat on the side. Subsequently, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, successive emperors continued to renovate and expand the Forbidden City, and now 600 years have passed, the Forbidden City has long been unknown how many times it has expanded, compared with the yongle Emperor when it was first built, it has long been unrecognizable, but the only constant is that the Forbidden City will always stand in the center of Beijing City.
At the same time that the Forbidden City was extremely grand, in addition to the emperor and his harem, it was also full of palace women, eunuchs and imperial guards, and the total number of people should be conservatively estimated to be around 10,000. With so many people living in the Forbidden City, in addition to eating and living, there is a very real problem in front of them, that is, people have three emergencies and must go to the toilet to excrete. But there were two monsters in the Forbidden City, and that was "no chimneys, no toilets." "So is there really no toilet in the Forbidden City?"
According to the eunuch who served the Guangxu Emperor in the "Narrative of the Qing Palace", "The palace where the toilet is located, the tin night pot is used for urination, the waist round basin is used for defecation, or the tin or magnetic or wooden basin is used." There are squat foot frame basins. The toilet is in charge of the self-chiming bell. ”
Therefore, the toilets of the Qing Emperor and the harem were guarded by special personnel and summoned to the palace when needed. Therefore, no toilets were built in the Forbidden City of the Qing Dynasty, and everyone used a bedpan to go to the toilet. According to the records, the potty was filled with some burned incense or charcoal ash, and after the matter was resolved, it was proposed to be disposed of.
The bedpans used by the emperors and harems were mostly rectangular, oval openings, and cushions around them. There is also a soft backrest on the toilet stool, and the feeling of sitting on it is not worse than the current toilet, but what to do with the excrement left behind is still a problem.
As mentioned earlier, according to the records, incense ash or charcoal ash was placed in the bedpan, but if only the emperor and the harem used it in this way, it would not hurt, but the permanent population of the Forbidden City was tens of thousands, even if the palaces kept burning incense for 24 hours, they could not guarantee the supply of incense ash and charcoal ash. Besides, with so many people excreting filth indoors, the air in the palace was not smelly, how could the emperor and the harem endure it?
But unfortunately, based on the royal privacy, there are not too many records in the literature, and the Qing Dynasty belonged to foreign tribes to renovate the Forbidden City many times, so the records of toilets in the Forbidden City are almost zero.
But isn't there really no toilet in the Forbidden City, as we see it now? The answer is clearly no.
The Ming Dynasty eunuch Liu Ruoyu has such a record: "Within the walls of the Qianqing Palace Gate, the south half of the left and right corridors, that is, the east sandwich wall, the west sandwich wall, and the west and other places of the Cining Palace, are all places where the officials of the palace are drowned, and outside the palace walls, the brick ticket gate, the Anda stone is on the top, the chiseled overhang hole is hanging, and each has a pure army under the sun." On the fourth, fourteenth and twenty-fourth days of the first month of each month, the Kaiyuan Wu Gate and the small doors are cleaned. ”
From here, we can see that within the walls of the Qianqing Palace in the Ming Dynasty, toilets are specially used by people in the Forbidden City, and the "Clean Army" in charge of toilets in the Forbidden City is cleaned and cleaned at a fixed time every month.
So since there used to be toilets in the Forbidden City, how did people wipe their butts after going to the toilet at that time? We know that in ancient China there was something called "toilet chips", which was a special piece of wood or bamboo, which was used to shave the buttocks after defecating.
Of course, as one of the four most proud inventions in China, although papermaking has appeared in the Han Dynasty, the real use of paper for wiping butts is in the Yuan Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty as a foreign nation did not have the Han people to worship paper as a reading holy relics can not be desecrated, need to cherish the burden, so without hesitation to take the weak paper to wipe the ass.
When the Forbidden City was established in the Ming Dynasty, a special treasure banknote department was set up to be responsible for the manufacture and use of straw paper in the palace. In particular, the hand paper dedicated to the emperor to wipe his ass was copied by the Inner Palace Supervisor Paper Room, which was pale yellow, soft and thick, and each sheet was cut to the size of about three inches.
Therefore, the "no toilet", which is known as a monster in the Forbidden City, is actually not the case, but disappeared after many reconstructions in the Qing Dynasty. In the 600-year history of the Forbidden City, there have been toilets in the Forbidden City, and there should be more than one.