Today is World Book Day, "Chiseled wall stealing light", "hanging beam thorn strands", "sac fluorescent snow"... Since ancient times, stories of hard reading abound.
But have you heard that the ancients usually used "toothpicks" when reading books?
"Toothpick"? Yes, you read that right, and there is poetry and truth!
In the Tang Dynasty Han Yu's "Sending Zhuge Jue to Suizhou to Read", there are such a few sentences: "The Hou family has many books, and inserts 30,000 axes." One by one, hanging toothpicks, the new hand is not touched. Remember it strongly, and never read it again. Wei Zhaoqun Shengwen, Lei fell into his belly. ”
This means that the books of the Great Talent li bi of the Tang Dynasty are full of cattle, but they are as clean as new. This is not because Li Bi took books to decorate the façade, on the contrary, these books are full of bookmarks, indicating that they have been read, but Li Bibo has heard strong memories and never forgotten, so the books are preserved "new as if the hand has not touched".
Li Bi's bookmarks are also exquisite, "Jing" uses red toothpicks, "Shi" uses green toothpicks, "Zi" uses green toothpicks, and "Set" uses white toothpicks, which is basically the same as the classification method of official collections. This shows that the four-part method was already widely recognized in the Tang Dynasty.
Writing this, you may ask again: "How can a bookmark, a toothpick, be written wrong?" "No, there's a lot of cultural knowledge in it.
Bookmarks originated in the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period, when it was made of bamboo pieces, and rich people will generally use ivory bookmarks, which will be carved with beautiful patterns, and then put on different colors of silk threads, and whenever people who read books see very important places in the scroll, they insert "toothpicks" at one end of it, so that they can look back later.
Now you understand that the "toothpick" used by the ancients to read books is not the "toothpick" that we use after dinner today.
In addition to reading with a toothpick, there are many interesting stories of ancient people reading. For example, if an ancient man said to you, "Come and sit at my chicken window." "Where would you think it is?"
Could it be... Next to the chicken coop? Of course not. This also begins with a story in "Youminglu".
It is said that the Jin and Song Dynasties had a very favored long-song chicken that was always closed by the window. Suddenly, one day, this chicken spoke human words and often talked with Chu Zong, which greatly increased Chu Zong's speech skills. Therefore, later, people used "chicken window" to refer to the study.
It seems that "talking to chickens" is much better than "playing the piano to cows"!
For more interesting facts about the ancients' reading, please pay attention to the program "Listen to More Knowledge and More Knowledge"
Executive Producer/Jiang Manjing
Editor-in-Chief/Bei Zhang
Editor on duty/Zhu Hongna
Proofreading / Wan Zuyan