◎ Lee Kai-joo
Every year, a few days after Children's Day, it is the mango seed, and before and after the mango seed, it is the day when the northern farmers harvest wheat. I remember when I was a child, combine harvesters were not yet popular, and sickles were still the main tool for harvesting wheat, and adults and children came out in unison, and everyone bent down and waved their scythes.
In addition to the sickle, at that time, the tomass, also known as the "skimmer", was occasionally seen, consisting of a sickle, a knife shaft, a handle, a rope loop, and a large dustpan with a net pocket. To cut wheat with a sickle, you must bend over, and after a long time, the child also cries out that the waist hurts. Cutting wheat with a machete, standing upright throughout the whole process, striding with your head held high, will not hurt your waist, and can improve the efficiency of cutting wheat. It is said that after the tomass is cooked, a person can cut more than ten acres a day, which is simply a miniature harvester. However, the tomass also has great flaws, only suitable for dealing with those wheat that are not well harvested, and it is easy to pinch the knife when encountering high-yield wheat that is now planted with dense stems and thick stalks.
In addition, the swing of the tomas knife is too large, the sweeping and impact of the wheat tree is too fierce, and when it encounters the ripe wheat, it will knock the wheat grains into the soil and waste the grain. It is for these reasons that the tomass has not been able to replace the sickle. In fact, in my childhood memories, cutting wheat with a machete has always been non-mainstream. As for today, this thing is almost a cultural relic, you take out a set of machetes to show people, let alone people in the city, even the younger generation of peasants do not know.
As a farming tool, the tomass has a long history, at least dating back to the Song Dynasty. But the point I'm going to talk about today is not the machete, but another invention of the Song Dynasty: the wheat cellar.
You've definitely heard of wheat hoarding, but you may not have heard of wheat cellars. After the peasants finished harvesting the wheat, they would certainly not be able to eat it, and if they did not sell it at that time, they would have to store it. How to store? The easiest way to do this is to put it in a wheat hoard. A layer of plastic is laid on the ground to prevent moisture, surrounded by white iron sheets, and the sun-dried wheat is put in, and another layer of plastic is covered with another layer of plastic, which is a simple wheat hoard. Use wheat hoards to store wheat, the period can not be too long, at most two years, you have to take it out and turn it over, otherwise it will produce insects, mainly grain weevils, local commonly known as "wheat cattle (read ou) seeds" Even more terrifying than the weevil is the rat, you think that the wheat hoard is calm, after a year or two to open, often hiding a nest of rats, dozens of large and small, each with a fat head and big ears. If wheat cellars are used instead of wheat hoards, the storage period can be up to ten years, and there is no need to worry about bugs and rats.
I have lived in the countryside for more than ten years, and our family has never used wheat hoards, it has always been a wheat cellar. In the past, our family had two wheat cellars, one in the yard and one in the room. The mouth in the yard was dug out by my father with a shovel and a shovel, a round well, three meters in diameter and four meters deep, and the bottom of the well was sprinkled with lime, and the lime was laid on the straw, and the straw was covered with plastic, and the plastic was covered with a huge plastic thick cloth, and bundled into a huge cylinder. After harvesting the wheat, drying it until it was dry, pouring it into the plastic cylinder, it didn't look big, but it could hold more than 10,000 pounds of wheat. But don't fill it up, leave some space, tie the top of the cylinder tightly, cover it with another layer of wheat straw, press another layer of wood, press another layer of stone slabs, and finally seal it with dry soil, step on it firmly, and step on it into a flat ground. On the flat ground, there is no delay in drying crops, no delay in leaving, and even no delay in planting flowers and vegetables.
The wheat cellar in the room is designed when building the house, similar to the basement, boxy, the bottom is a cement board, surrounded by a cement wall, the wheat can be poured directly into it, the cement board is covered, and a bed is placed on the cement board, without delaying sleep. When I was in junior high school, I slept in that bed, and I knew that under the bed was a wheat cellar, and there were tens of thousands of pounds of wheat hidden in the wheat cellar, so I slept very steadily, just as the so-called "grain in my hand, my heart is not panicked."
In recent years, my parents have contracted out the fields and stopped growing wheat, and the wheat cellar in the yard has been abandoned, and the wheat cellar in the room has lost its value for storing grain, but it can still store other things. What to store? Wine. Our father and son love to drink, so every year with grape wine, after brewing, filter twice, the skin residue filtered clean, and then steamed through the water, so that the microorganisms do not continue to multiply, and then let cool, into the tank, sealed, marked with the date of brewing, put in the wheat cellar, aged for two or three years, and then moved out to drink. Why use wheat cellar wine? Because the wheat cellar is underground, the underground is constant temperature, the winter is not cold, the summer is not hot, the most suitable for long-term aging. In other words, my family's earlier wheat cellar has now become a wine cellar.
Whether it is a wheat cellar or a wine cellar, it is not the invention of my family, but the crystallization of wisdom for thousands of years. I read in the notes of the Song dynasty that as early as the Northern Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, farmers in Shaanxi were widely using wheat cellars. There are relevant records in the upper volume of the "Chicken Rib Compilation", allowing me to excerpt two paragraphs:
The land of Shaanxi is both high and cold, and the soil pattern is vertical, and the grain in the official warehouse is not used for materials, although the wheat is the most difficult for a long time, and there is not a single moth in twenty years.
The people's family only made a cellar in the field, opened the land like a wellhead, three or four feet deep, and stored more grain under the weight, and spread it around. If the soil is golden, there is no sand and stone, and it is burned by fire, and the grass is twisted (gēng), nailed to the four walls, and the valley is as many as thousands of stones. With the soil solid in its mouth, it is still planted on the top, and the grass is lush in the old. Only the sound of the ground, the snow is easy to dissipate, so that it can be known.
The general meaning of the first ancient text is that Shaanxi has a high altitude, low temperature, excellent standing of the loess, and digging wheat cellars on the Loess Plateau can store wheat for twenty years without being mothed.
The second ancient text records the method of digging wheat cellars at that time: they dug in their own fields, first dug a shallow well, three or four feet deep, and then dug to the side, small mouths and large bellies, like an inverted funnel, which could hide more grain. After digging, it is roasted over fire to burn pests and microorganisms. And then what? Many wooden stakes were nailed into the walls of the wells, and hay ropes were wrapped horizontally and vertically on the wooden sleighs in order to avoid landslides and isolate the moisture. OK, now a mouthful of wheat cellar is done, pour the wheat into it, you can hide thousands of stones. Then seal it with soil, and do not delay the planting of crops on it. The difference between this land and other places is that if you stomp your feet on it, you can hear the echo from below, and when it snows in winter, the snow in this land will melt first.
I wrote a book, The Scale of the World: A Brief History of Global Weights and Measures, which examined the size of the standard capacity of the Song Dynasty. "Stone" is a unit of capacity, a stone in the Song Dynasty is equivalent to sixty liters now, which can hold more than 100 catties of wheat. The "Chicken Rib Compilation" records that a wheat cellar "shenggu up to thousands of stones", converted into weight, is thousands of hundreds of pounds, that is, hundreds of thousands of pounds. Compared with the two wheat cellars in our family, the wheat cellars dug by the Shaanxi farmers in the Song Dynasty were much larger in the fields. I think it's thanks to their inverted funnel-type design, the cellar mouth is small, the bottom is big, so the capacity is amazing. When our family digs a wheat cellar, why don't we learn this design? Not because of stupidity, but because the soil there is different from the soil of the Loess Plateau, our side is a triad of soil, the standing is not good, if you dig from the four walls to the side, it is easy to collapse.
There is a famous air raid shelter outside the north gate of my hometown of Kaifeng, which was also a famous grain reserve, equivalent to an oversized wheat cellar, known as the "underground granary". The granary was built in the 1970s and its design was extended throughout the country. Shaanxi County, Lingbao, and Yichuan in western Henan, Shangcai in southern Henan, Yuanbao Mountain in Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, and even Phoenix Mountain in Hangzhou have also built similar underground granaries. Today, the underground granary of Hangzhou Phoenix Mountain is still in normal use, and with the blessing of modern technology, the use of advanced electronic control system, precise control of air, humidity, to ensure that the grain is in the best storage conditions. During the new crown epidemic the year before, grain from other places was blocked from entering Hangzhou, and it was only because of the grain in the underground granary that the people of Hangzhou would not be short of food.
Go back to the Song Dynasty. When I was looking through the historical materials, I read a long poem written by the Southern Song Dynasty official Li Zengbo in the third year of the Song Dynasty Emperor Baoqing, saying that in 1227 AD, Temujin occupied Western Xia, and at the same time sent a cavalry to invade Gansu and Shaanxi in the Southern Song Dynasty. When this invading army reached Shaanxi, it slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people, and also excavated the wheat cellars dug by local farmers ("quite rich in cellars, I know that wheat has been issued"), and the peasants who survived by chance fell into a grain shortage and had to flee to the relatively stable Sichuan.
Of course, it is important to have grain in hand, but this is not the most reliable guarantee for people's livelihood, and only when the country maintains strong military strength and is not invaded by foreign enemies is the most reliable guarantee.