The fifteenth day of the first lunar month is the most lively festival in the mainland folk tradition of the new year- the Lantern Festival. Yuan means "beginning" and "first", supper means "night", and lantern means the night of the first full moon of the new year. Folk also commonly known as "Shangyuan", together with the July 15th Middle Yuan, October 15th Lower Yuan collectively known as "Three Yuan".
The Lantern Festival originated from the Western Han Dynasty, the Shangyuan Zhang Lantern began in the Tang Dynasty and flourished in the Song Dynasty, and has been passed down to more than a thousand years today, in the traditional sense, after the Lantern Festival, it can be regarded as "a complete end of the Year". If the Spring Festival is compared to a big drama, then Chinese New Year's Eve is the climax of this drama, and the Lantern Festival is the finale of this drama.
Very different Lantern customs
"Mirages and seas are raining with stars, and fire trees and honeysuckles never sleep", which refers to the gorgeous and lively scene of the Lantern Festival. On the day of the Lantern Festival, the people of the whole country have the custom of eating a steaming bowl of tangyuan, but in Taizhou, the people eat not tangyuan, they eat bad soup.
The bad soup eaten by the people of Taizhou is divided into two kinds: salty soup and sweet soup. The main ingredient of the salted soup is rice noodles, and the ingredients are shredded meat, shredded winter shoots, shredded shiitake mushrooms, fungus, dried tofu shreds, oil bubbles, Sichuan bean board, taro, spinach or mustard greens. Stir-fry the ingredients in a pan and then mix the freshly ground rice flour to make a salty paste. Sweet soup is made of mountain kudzu powder, which can also be mixed with fertility powder (also known as mountain flour) to make a paste, plus rice cakes cut into small squares, winter shoot silk, shiitake mushroom shreds, cinnamon round meat, water chestnut silk, lotus seeds, red dates, sesame seeds, goji berries, osmanthus flowers, brown sugar and other ingredients, locally known as "mountain flour paste". In the past, due to the restrictions of living conditions, how many ingredients were placed depended on the family situation, and now the living conditions are good, and the bad soup ingredients can also be added according to personal preferences, such as seafood, pig ears, etc., but it is still inseparable from the traditional firing method.
Shoot | chirping autumn worms
Fifteen Lanterns fourteen times, do not eat tangyuan to eat bad soup, this is an old saying about Taizhou people celebrating the Lantern Festival. So, why are Taizhou people eating lanterns so different from all over the country? There are many legendary versions of this custom in folklore.
The Sui Dynasty Emperor and eat bad soup
Emperor Sui's father, Emperor Wen of Sui, was a Ming emperor who summed up the lessons of the turmoil in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, promoted the politics of the Wise Ming, and governed the country in an orderly manner in less than a decade. After the Sui Dynasty Emperor succeeded to the throne, he was very happy and wanted to make a greater cause than his father, and during his reign, he opened canals and fought Goryeo, abused the people's strength, and was extremely poor and extravagant, causing the common people to complain.
And where the brutal Sui Emperor sympathized with the people. On the fifteenth day of the first month of this year, the canal was completed, and the Sui Emperor ordered that the whole country should put on lights and eat sweets to celebrate the peace of the country and the people, and life was sweet.
How dare the people not listen to the emperor's holy will? So the people in the countryside used kudzu powder and some brown sugar at each household, stirred it into a powder paste, and ate it. The Sui Emperor thought that he had opened the Grand Canal, which could not only transport troops and grain, but also go down to the south of the River to play, but this became a fuse, triggering a nationwide peasant uprising, the world was in chaos, and the Sui Dynasty collapsed and collapsed.
In the fourteenth year of Daye (618), after the Jiangdu Mutiny, Tang Gaozu Li Yuan established a new dynasty, sui and Tang Xing, in order to show the great reunion of the world, the Tang Emperor ordered the people of the world to eat tangyuan in the first half of the first month.
Although Taizhou is located on the eastern coast of Zhejiang, compared with the Beijing-Hangzhou area, it seems desolate and isolated, and many ordinary people are fed up with the torture of the Sui Emperor and still have lingering feelings about the change of dynasty, but the emperor's words are irresistible, and the timid and fearful people put glutinous rice dumplings in the kudzu powder a day in advance, and celebrated the Lantern Festival, neither betraying the Sui Emperor nor violating the will of the current emperor.
Later generations of people prospered, the mountain kudzu powder is more lacking, it was replaced by sweet potato flour (also known as mountain flour), and later some people did not like to eat sweet, they added shredded meat, winter shoot shreds and other ingredients, made into a salty soup, Taizhou people eat bad soup gradually evolved into sweet soup and salty soup two, some switched to glutinous rice flour as a foreskin, embedded with brown sugar to make sugar round to eat. In this way, this custom has been followed to this day.
In addition to the legend of the Sui Emperor, taizhou Lantern eats bad soup and has different versions such as filial piety reformation, Qi Jiguang anti-Wu theory, and construction of the city. There are more than 20 kinds of legends about the Taizhou Lantern Festival, which are true and false, and there is no consensus. However, the custom of "the fourteenth day of the first month is the Lantern Festival, and the sixteenth of August is the Mid-Autumn Festival" has been passed down in Taizhou to this day.
A bowl of bad soup is good for the holidays
In Taizhou Sanmen, in the past, the Lantern Festival night had the custom of going to the streets to eat bad soup, and each family was better than who burned it, and no matter who could go to someone else's house to eat a bowl of bad soup that night, and the owner was proud that there were many people who ate bad soup at home.
Legend has it that on the night of the Lantern Festival, the bride who married in the previous year also had to burn a few pots of sweet soup, which is called "bridal bad soup" by the people to indicate that the day is sweet and sweet. The "bridal soup" must be made by the new daughter-in-law herself, and then firecrackers are set off to invite the whole village to eat, if the taste is good and everyone is happy to eat, then the new daughter-in-law has basically established her status in this village; if it is not done well, everyone will talk behind her back.
Nowadays, taizhou still preserves the custom of eating bad soup at the Lantern Festival, generally eating salty soup on the fourteenth day of the first month, eating sweet and bad soup on the fifteenth day of the first month, which means that the first salty is sweet, and the more sweet life is, the bad soup can be said to pin people's expectations and thoughts, stirring soup, stirring soup, in Taizhou home has not stirred the pot soup, then it is not called "fourteen nights".
Wet and cold weather, a steaming sweet soup, viscous and sweet, the temptation is hard to resist; a bowl of fragrant salty soup, giving people a unique flavor. The Lantern Festival had eaten bad soup, and when everyone met, they said that they had eaten the soup, and they also went to each other's homes to eat the soup. Then, people take to the streets to watch the lanterns, play with fireworks, watch the lion dances, guess the riddles...
There is no unified saying in folklore, it is conventional and customary, and naturally there is a reason for his existence. Folklore is a culture that has been handed down for hundreds of years and thousands of years, so that these traditional cultures have accumulated over the years, like a bowl of bad soup, fragrant and rich.
Producer | First of all, Hongming
Edit | Wu Jiahong
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