There have been hundreds of emperors in Chinese history, and most of them actually did not have much to do, neither good nor bad, and very few can be called sage kings.
Of course, the tyrants in history are actually a minority. But when it comes to "tyrants", everyone must think of the infamous King of Shang, because the King of Shang can be regarded as the first place on the list of historical tyrants, and for thousands of years, he has been used as a negative teaching material to be constantly preached, so the King of Shang is almost synonymous with tyrants.
King Of The Bulge
Perhaps the allusions we are most familiar with about the King of Shang are "Digging Hearts of Bigan" and "Meat Forest of Wine Ponds". Bi Gan was the uncle of king Huan, and because he really couldn't bear to see the absurd and unscrupulous behavior of king Huan, he repeatedly and directly advised him in person.
At first, the king of Lu was still perfunctory, and then he became more and more impatient, and finally he was completely angered once, and Bi Gan said: Every day to annoy me, even if you are a saint, they all say that the saint has a heart of seven tricks, but you dig it out and show me! After hearing this, Bigan did not hesitate to cut open his chest and pull out his heart, and from then on, "Bigan Digging Heart" became one of the notoriety of king Huan.
However, compared with "digging the heart than gan", "wine pond meat forest" is the biggest notoriety of the King of Gong, and the history books describe this scene by saying that the King of Qiu: With wine as the pond hanging meat as the forest, for the drink of the long night. What kind of picture is this?
As you might immediately imagine, digging up pools in the woods that resemble hot spring baths, filled with fine wine, and then hung fragrant roast meat on the surrounding branches.
The king and his concubines chased and frolicked naked in this wine pond meat forest, and spent the night reveling in the carnival, drinking the wine in the pool when they were thirsty, and nibbling on the branches of the tree when they were hungry.
In history, whether there is such a thing as a wine pond meat forest is actually controversial, and there are many views that all kinds of evil deeds about the king of The Dragon are deliberately exaggerated, and the Analects also say: The evil of the King of the Dragon is not good, it is better to be even worse, it is the evil of the gentleman who is inferior, and the evil of the world is returned.
This may be the earliest justification for the notoriety of the King, which means that although the King of the King is bad, it is not bad enough to be so bad, when a person is discredited, then all the charges will be blamed on his head. The winner is the king and the loser is the Kou, as a king of the fallen country, the king is destined to be the negative teaching material of history.
Of course, here, we are not trying to defend the King of Gong, what we want to discuss is, if there is really such a thing as a wine pond meat forest, then what kind of meat and wine was put by the King of Qiu at that time?
There are two theories about the meat of the jiuchi meat forest, and the history books have described the scene at that time as follows: "Let the men and women be naked and chase each other." The King of Qiu led hundreds of men and women to chase and play naked, and it looked like the whole was a piece of white flowers, so some people believed that the meat of the jiuchi meat forest referred to the flesh.
However, we also mentioned earlier that the description in the historical record is "hanging meat for the forest", so the second theory is more inclined to this meat refers to meat used for eating.
The source of meat in the Shang Dynasty mainly relies on hunting and artificial captivity, hunting is mainly obtained from venison, and artificially raised animals, in the Shang Dynasty, at least there are "six animals", that is, pigs, dogs, horses, sheep, chickens and cattle, so the meat breeds of the hanging meat of the King of Shang as forests should be more diverse.
As for the type of wine, it is relatively single, basically belongs to the natural fermentation of fruit wine, at that time there was no distilled wine using grain as raw material, all kinds of fruits are put together for natural fermentation, the yield of wine is not high and the bottom number is very low.
If you want to satisfy many people to drink, naturally you need to dig a large wine pool for fermentation, so this wine pool in the wine pool meat forest should refer to this kind of fruit wine fermentation pool with a relatively large capacity, for the royal family at that time, having such a fermentation pool as large as a swimming pool should indeed be a fact.
Therefore, the Shang King's wine pond meat forest should be real, but perhaps some of these facts have been exaggerated by later generations, and people usually use the current understanding to apply to the scenes thousands of years ago, which is even more luxurious and shameful.