Source: Pomegranate Cloud
Recently, a piece of news has attracted people's attention: the Tang Dynasty Dun ruins in Qitai County have found a large-scale bath site.
According to experts, this 300-square-meter bath is more likely to be used as an urban public bath, on the one hand, to meet the daily cleaning needs of urban residents, on the other hand, it can be used for tourists to bathe and rest.
Curiously, in ancient times, when there was no modern soap, shower gel, or facial cleanser, how did people in the baths bathe and shampoo?
Outside the curtain wind comes bath bean fragrance
Before the rise of bath beans, soap clips and soaps, the means used by people to wash and remove grease were basically only rice soup made of tao rice water, which is one of the oldest cleaning products found in the literature.
However, this rice soup is not a little leftover water after the rice is panned, but a slightly sour slurry water that is first boiled and then brewed, and the decontamination power is very general.
Bath beans appeared in the Wei and Jin dynasties by no means accidentally, it was the era of "spice discovery" in Chinese history, spices from all over the world arrived in the Central Plains, and with the introduction of Buddhism, a small thing called "bath beans" made people's lives look new.
The main ingredient of bath beans is peas, which seem to be a very common grain today, but it was originally grown in the western region, and as late as the Tang Dynasty, it was a specialty of this region. Bath beans are ground into fine pea noodles as the main ingredient, mixed with several precious spices and Chinese herbs, to make a fine ball shape, so named.
In ancient times, bath beans can be said to be an all-round cleanser, because it is rich in saponins, use it to wash hands, wash face, wash hair, bath, wash clothes, clean and thorough and smooth skin, and even have such a verse to describe the clean face effect of bath beans: "Lan Tang Jing Xi Yi Wen Yu, the wind outside the curtain to bath bean fragrance." Muscle snow clean, face wavelength. ”
The Qi Min Zhi Shu Miscellaneous Sayings also records: "If the old silk is washed with ash juice, the color is yellow and the texture is crisp, and if the mashed beans are juice, they can be white and flexible, and they are far away from the soap pods." "It means that the silk veil washed with bath bean water is not only clean but also very flexible and smooth, better than soap pods. It can be seen that it is mild.
All in all, all the stains, grease, bath beans are all done, and the aroma is elegant. At that time, if people ridiculed a person for being rustic and lacking good hygiene habits, they would often say that the person "did not know bath beans".
In the Tang Dynasty, the use of bath beans reached its peak. The famous doctor Sun Simiao recorded in the "Thousand Golden Fangs": "Face fat hand cream, fragrant bath beans, scholars and noble victories, are all wanted", which is enough to show that bath beans are one of the necessities of the nobles, and the common people generally use mung beans, white beans and other potatoes to make cheap versions of bath beans.
In the Yuan Dynasty, a very interesting cleansing product appeared- bath bean wheat bran, and in the meta-drama "Xie Tianxiang", a singing lyric detailed the whole set of steps for women to clean their skin after makeup: "The person who sent the protective clothing as the head, first made the bran pulp fragrant bath beans, and the warm swill cleared the hand surface and kneaded it." ”
Bath beans made from wheat bran ingredients have a strong peeling effect and a natural grassy fragrance. And this "pulp" is made of flour washed from bran.
From soap pods to soap balls
Back in time, in the era of the rise of bath beans, there was also a cheap and convenient cleaning product - soap pods. Also known as soap horn, is the fruit of the soap tree, because it contains saponins, water will produce a lot of foam, has a strong detergent, in the folk is used as a pure natural detergent is widely used. To this day, soap horns are still commonly used in some remote mountainous areas and villages.
In addition to bath beans and soap pods, the "Chicken Rib Compilation" also records that southern women use grass and wood ash to soak in water to wash and destain.
It was not until the Southern Song Dynasty that the finished soap products really appeared - "soap balls". The Ming Dynasty Li Shizhen recorded the manufacturing method of "soap balls" in the "Compendium of Materia Medica, Mu Er, Soap Pods": "In the high mountains where soap pods grow, their trees are tall, and their leaves are like sandalwood and soap pod leaves... October pods are picked, cooked and mashed and white noodles and incense pills, and the bath body is dirty and greasy, better than soap pods. ”
This soap pod, folk called "fat bead", is an alias for the Chinese herbal medicine "Wu Zi". In late autumn and October, the pods of "fat beads" are harvested, cooked and mashed, spiced and bean noodles are added to make orange-sized balls, sometimes called "soap balls". Soap pods have more oil than soap pods, and the scaling effect is better than that of soap pods.
I checked the information and learned that although the word "soap" originally referred specifically to a kind of fruit pod, the word has been completely transformed to refer to the solid cleaning and hygiene products made by this kind of fruit pod.
In the Song Dynasty's elaborate "Past Affairs of Wulin" (vol. 6), "Little Brokers", it is also recorded that there were businessmen in Lin'an, Kyoto, in the Southern Song Dynasty, who specialized in "soap balls". The development and maturity of the Beauty And Cleaning Soap of the Song Dynasty can be confirmed.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the ancient "bath beans" did not completely disappear. Folk have also made improvements to the bath beans, the sugar, animal oil, animal pancreas, spices and other ingredients are blended and ground in proportion, and heated and pressed to form, which is the "pancreas".
"Pancreas" is also the predecessor of today's soap.
It is said that in the late Qing Dynasty, there were more than 70 pancreas shops in Beijing. The fragrance of pancreas is also abundant: for example, osmanthus pancreas, rose pancreas, sandalwood pancreas, jasmine pancreas, etc.
Xinjiang soil soap becomes "golden lump"
Black soap "Karasaben" stone in the Altay pastoral area. Photo by Jiang Dawei, reporter of Liuyun/Xinjiang Daily
Altay herders often graze and hunt in the wild, and when using fire, they occasionally find that the fat blocks produced by mixing grease with grass and wood ash have a washing and decontamination effect, which is a soap-like substance. Herders then mixed mutton oil and grass and wood ash to make a solid soap mass, although it is also called "sheep pancreas", but it is not actually made of sheep pancreas.
This solid soap dough is still used in some parts of Xinjiang today, namely "Tohasi Sufu" in Kuqa and "Karasaben" in Altay.
"Tohasisufu" means round soap, also known as "pimple pancreas" and "Kucha pancreas". This earthy yellow, trumpet-shaped, nest-like thing can be seen everywhere in the bazaars of southern Xinjiang.
Kucha soil soap, which has continued the traditional process for more than a century, has a simple ingredient and production method: only cottonseed oil, fire alkali and soil salt are used as raw materials, and after 3 times of repeated boiling, and then use mold solids to dry. Its production process is also included in the first list of intangible cultural heritage in the Aksu region.
At present, nearly 20 soap-making family workshops are concentrated in The Old Town of Kuqa and Ucha Town, with an annual output of more than 500 tons of local soap, and Kuqa has become a veritable "land of soil soap".
Another black soap, called Karasaben, which is shaped like camel dung, is produced in Altay. "Kara" means black, while "Saben" means soap. Because it is usually made with sheep's tail oil, it is called "sheep pancreas". The ingredients are slightly different from kucha soil soap, which is made of sun-dried fennel grass, "hala sea" (nettle) and other grass ash fired from several pastures, and then with mutton oil or butter. To make it durable, add a little wool to the mixture, put it in the mold and let it dry. It is said that this "black soap" can dispel acne, relieve itching, and maintain the skin.
Artists in the Altay pastoral area make the black soap "Karasaben". (File photo)
To this day, some elderly people in Xinjiang still refer to this soil soap as "sheep pancreas" and "Kucha pancreas". Pancreas was once the daily life of the Central Plains people, when the words Hara Sea, pancreas, soap crossed the Silk Road, passed between people, fused and precipitated, and gradually became the common tradition and common sense of all ethnic groups.
At present, various bath products are emerging in an endless stream, and the ancient Xinjiang soap has also kept pace with the times and improved the formula. According to the report: Kucha Wushi Town Erwucha community farmers Reheman, Toheti, the natural lavender, charcoal, goat milk added to the formula of the soil soap, added marble patterns to the soap surface, and also carried out modern packaging of the product, which is very popular with consumers. His family's daily production of soil soap is more than 700 to 800 kilograms, and the annual income reaches 100,000 yuan.
In the summer pasture of Chagangol Township in Qinghe County, Altay Region, the women in the village make "black soap". Since 2017, the "Visit Huiju" team in the village and an environmental protection public welfare organization have jointly developed the black soap public welfare project to promote the beautifully packaged "Montei and their black soap", and the villagers not only make money from black soap, but also become a special experience project for the development of tourism in the village.
Xinjiang's small earth soap has become a "golden lump" and a big industry for local people to get rid of poverty and get rich – but this is another story.
Bathing next year is called a body
"I came back here and bathed next year to weigh my body." The Chinese nation is a country of etiquette, and since ancient times, it has attached great importance to grooming and appearance, and regarded it as a kind of etiquette respect for others. Even, regular bathing became a vacation system for officials in ancient times.
From the ancient "Tao rice water" and "bath beans" boiling water purification, to "fat beads", "pancreas" and "soap" maundy surface descaling, with the progress of science and technology, the domestic washing and care formula technology has advanced to the extraction of biological enzymes and compound enzymes.
From the historical evolution of the above toiletries, it can be seen that their functions are to clean and taste the body and clothes, but the raw materials and processes used by each are different, showing the unremitting pursuit of instrument civilization by people from ancient times to the present.
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