There are various debates about the origin of glasses, but one thing is certain, the first large-scale entry of glasses into China was in the Ming Dynasty, and the entry of glasses into the life world of Chinese began in the Ming Dynasty.
In the "Prosperous Meeting of the Southern Capital" painted by the Ming Dynasty, a person wearing glasses has appeared in the upper left corner
In the minds of the Qing Dynasty people, the glasses that have been firmly established are the image of the Ming Dynasty introduced to China, for example, Zhao Yi, a master of Qianjia historiography, once said in "The Examination of the Yu Cong":
"There are no glasses in ancient times, and there are always tomorrow."
There are also painters like the painter Lang Lang's "Painting Trivia" also said:
"People have glasses, from the West, began in the Ming Dynasty, and the system is not very ancient."
The records of the Ming people about glasses first appeared in the Jingtai period in the middle of the century, and increased slightly during the Chenghua and Hongzhi periods, which can probably be regarded as the beginning of the entry of glasses into China. For example, Wu Kuan, the secretary of the Hongzhi Dynasty Rites Department, who suffered from myopia, especially thanked his friend for giving him a pair of glasses from abroad, and wrote a poem "Xie Tugong Sends Western Regions Glasses", which praised the glasses as "once you get this, the old disease is lost". But in general, during this period, glasses were still unknown to most scholars, let alone society as a whole.
Tortoiseshell glasses from the Qing Dynasty
This situation did not change until the Jiajing period, when overseas trade increased sharply. During the Jiajing period, there were many records about glasses, and famous historical materials such as "Seven Revisions and Continuation" and "Liuqing Journal" all mentioned glasses with a curious mentality. For example, Tian Yiyun once praised the glasses in "Staying in the Green Journal" and said:
"Every time I read an article, my eyes are dizzy, I don't read the book, so I cover my eyes, my spirit is not scattered, and my strokes are doubled."
This is clearly a mentality of introducing a little-known secret recipe. The reason for this is that at that time, China did not have the ability to manufacture glasses locally, and all glasses came from foreign trade, and the quantity was small and the price was high, which also made glasses only an expensive luxury, limited to a few scholars and wealthy people. As for the source of imported glasses during the Jialong and Long periods, it is mainly the Manchurian country in Southeast Asia, that is, Malacca. Manraka connected the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, and had a long-standing trade relationship with the Ming Dynasty, and the country became a transit point for Western glasses to flow into the East. Written in the last years of Wanli, an important work on the history of maritime relations, "The Examination of the East and the West", when describing the Manchurian country, especially mentioned glasses, which has also become the most detailed record of glasses by the Ming people:
"Spectacles, commonly known as glasses. Huayi said: Big as money, thin and transparent, like glass, like mica. Every day, I am tired and do not read the fine books, so as to cover my eyes, my spirit is not scattered, and my strokes are brighter. Out of the country of thorns. It is a light cloud, like a cage of light clouds, the sun and the moon do not hide its light, if it is ambiguous. ”
After arriving in Wanli, with the large-scale arrival of Catholic missionaries in China, a wave of Western learning was set off. Among the various European gadgets brought to China by the Catholic priests were spectacles. In the early Qing Dynasty, when discussing glasses in "Yanshan Zhai Miscellaneous", Sun Chengze, a university scholar, once said this:
"Western Catholics miraculously say that the clouds have been in China since the beginning of the Wanli years."
It can be seen that the Catholic priests still had a certain degree of influence on the spread of glasses.
However, in general, due to the inability to mass-produce glasses, glasses in the Ming Dynasty were few and expensive, and could not be used as daily commodities for most people in society, and this phenomenon did not change until the end of the Ming Dynasty. In addition to the reason for mass production, there is another very important reason for the high price of glasses in the Ming Dynasty - materials. Before the Qing Dynasty, China's glass technology has always been at a very backward level, and people at the time thought that glass was harmful to the eyes, so they chose crystal as the material for glasses, which greatly raised the cost of glasses. The price of crystal is very high, glasses made of this material, the price can be imagined, before the late Ming Dynasty, "the only mirror is expensive, the price is quasi-horse" (Sun Chengze's "Yanshan Zhai Miscellaneous Notes"), glasses are expensive like this, it is impossible to become a popular thing in society.
At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the price of glasses fell sharply and became a daily necessities for the common people, but the stereotype of "noble" glasses caused by the high price of glasses in the Ming Dynasty still existed, so that glasses were often given by the emperor to his subordinates to show their popularity. For example, when Wang Shizhen, a great writer in the early Qing Dynasty and a scholar of the Criminal Department, recalled his experience in the palace examination in the fifteenth year of Shunzhi (1658), he wrote:
"On that day (Qing Shizu) asked the ministers about their teeth and subjects, and ordered them to take Western myopia glasses and order them to try." (Wang Shizhen's "Ju Yi Lu")
In the forty-second year of Kangxi (1703), Kangxi Imperial Gift Department Waiter Sun Yue awarded a pair of glasses, Jiang Tingxi, a famous minister who was a scholar in the future, was only a fledgling Hanlin at that time, he saw it very itchy in his heart, so he said to Kangxi: "My mother is old, old eyes are dizzy", Kangxi immediately gave Jiang Tingxi a pair of glasses. It can be seen that glasses can form such a "precious" cultural concept because glasses have always belonged to one of the symbols of the life of upper-class scholars in the Ming Dynasty.
However, it is such a valuable glasses, at the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties, suddenly became one of the most popular daily necessities in society, and later in the Kangxi period, it was already common for ordinary people to have glasses. The reason for this situation is nothing more than the "cliff-like decline" in the price of glasses. Ye Mengzhu, a Shanghainese in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, wrote a note called "Reading the World", which recorded the market conditions of Songjiang Mansion in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. He recalled with emotion the change in the price of glasses:
"Glasses, when I was young, I occasionally saw the elderly people use it, and I don't know the price, and then I heard that it is the best from the West, each pair is worth four or five taels of silver, with glass as the quality, elephant skin as the dry, and the non-powerful ones can not be caused. After Shunzhi, its price gradually became cheaper, and each pair was worth only five or six coins of silver. Recently, Suzhou and Hangzhou people make more of it, sell it everywhere, everyone can get it, each pair of silver is the most expensive only seven or eight points, and even four or five points, and there are two or three pairs of people, all of which are eye-catching, and are generally used. ”
When Ye Mengzhu was young, it was at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of Chongzhen, at this time, the price of glasses was not as exaggerated as "a horse" before, but it also required four or five taels of silver, and it was still unbearable for ordinary people to buy a non-essential item at this price. However, in the Shunzhi period of the early Qing Dynasty, the price suddenly dropped to five or six yuan, and by the Kangxi period, the price had dropped to the point of "selling everywhere and everyone can get it". Ye Mengzhu's words are about the process of the popularization of glasses in China, and it was in the early Qing Dynasty that glasses achieved the transformation from luxury goods to daily necessities, and from a rare thing that could only be spread among scholars and doctors to something that everyone knows.
There are two reasons why glasses became so cheap in the early Qing Dynasty: one is that they began to be mass-produced, and the other is that they are made of cheap materials and the cost is greatly reduced. In the historical examination, the earliest record of Chinese batch imitation glasses is Zhang Xuan, a person in the late Ming Dynasty, said in "Doubtful Yao" that "there are glasses makers between Fujian and Guangzhou", and Fujian and Guangzhou are the regions with the closest foreign trade, and I am afraid that it is also the easiest to know the mystery of glasses manufacturing.
After entering the Qing Dynasty, the manufacturing center was transferred to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as the so-called "recently Suzhou, Hangzhou people made more, sold everywhere", the development of the glasses industry in the south of the Yangtze River is inseparable from the leadership of some craftsmen, the most important of which is Sun Yunqiu, a native of Suzhou. He was a lower-class gentry, and because his family was too poor to continue the imperial examination, he had to make glasses to make a living, but his study of glasses was really the best in the world. He was proficient in physics and mechanical engineering, devoted himself to Western studies, and wrote China's first monograph on glasses, "The History of Mirrors".
As the manufacturing process of eyewear continues to mature, the cost of materials has also dropped significantly. At the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, glasses were no longer made of crystal as they were in the Ming Dynasty, and since the material was cheap, the price also dropped. In the middle and late Kangxi period, glasses finally took root in the life world of ordinary Chinese people:
"Today, all the noble and lowly men and women are not available, and there are real treasures! Everyone has to use it, but it becomes cloth, silk, and corn. (Liu Tingji, "In the Garden Magazine")
However, for the Ming and Qing dynasties, there are two major characteristics that are completely different from today.
One is that until the publication of Zheng Fuguang's monograph "Mirror Mirror Fool" in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese have never been able to understand the optical principle of glasses. This not only led to the fact that the Ming and Qing Chinese could not scientifically match glasses according to the situation of eye lesions, but also made a lot of jokes. For example, Nalan Yuxu, a native of the Kangxi period, once had such a discussion in "Miscellaneous Knowledge of the Gap Light Pavilion":
"Glass comes from the sea, and Westerners think it is glasses. When the child is 10 years old, he wears a pair of glasses to nourish his eyes, and he will not be faint until he is old. ”
This is really ridiculous, as the head of the Hanlin Academy, Nalan Yuxu, mistakenly thinks that the glasses themselves are conducive to the maintenance of eyesight, and it is conceivable how ordinary people think of glasses.
The second is that, unlike today's myopia glasses, which occupy the mainstream of the eye market, farsighted glasses were the main category of glasses in the Ming and Qing dynasties. There are many records in this regard, such as Kong Shangren's "Festival Preface and Wind Record", which mentions, "The old man tries to do it, and he can keep his eyes from fainting, and he is now known as glasses"; Liu Tingji, the envoy of Jiangxi, also said, "We have our own glasses, so that the faint can see clearly, the small ones see big, and the distant ones see close." Although the elderly can still be under the lamp, and the time can be according to their age, with twelve o'clock to match, it is even more strange", these refer to reading glasses. The reason is not difficult to understand, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, people did not face the electronic light screen for a long time, and the scholars who read and wrote were already the ones who needed the most eyes in life, and under such conditions, the incidence of myopia in ordinary people would not be too high; However, the existence of farsightedness in the elderly is very common, especially for scholars, reading and writing is one of the main activities in their lives, and the impact of vision decline is more obvious.
The popularity of reading glasses brought about the realization in the social trend of the time that glasses were limited to helping presbyopia and were ineffective against other eye pathologies, including myopia. For example, when Zhang Tai, the governor of Zhejiang, talked about the topic of eyes, Kangxi asked him why he didn't use glasses, and he actually replied: "The minister is a sick eye, not an old eye, and using glasses is a more obstacle" (Zhang Taijiao's "Shouhutang Collection"). It can be said that it was not until the late Qing Dynasty that modern Western medical knowledge was introduced, and the Chinese people could truly understand and correctly understand the imaging principle of lenses for the treatment of vision. However, this does not prevent glasses from becoming a very common daily commodity in the later period of traditional society.
Glasses are the most influential foreign products in Chinese society after the Ming and Qing dynasties, and the history of glasses in China is a portrayal of Western culture in China since it entered and spread.
In the eighties and nineties of the last century, crystal stone glasses used to be a luxury pursued by many men, if you get a pair of stone glasses on the bridge of your nose, you feel that you belong to a successful person who is rich and has status in front of everyone, especially those middle-aged and elderly men over forty or fifty years old who have some extra money in hand, and love to show off in their hearts, most of them will get a few pairs of stone glasses to wear in turn, just like the wardrobe of a wealthy woman in the village has a few satisfactory clothes, which are used to show people's beloved things. Even some very old and shabby old people can often be seen wearing a pair of stone glasses, and there is no inferiority complex in front of people.
At that time, on many occasions, you can see many men with a pair of stone glasses on the bridge of their noses, their faces full of hesitation, and the tone of their voices and expressions on their faces reveal a sense of confidence and pride. If two people who are familiar with each other and like glasses get together, it is indispensable to compare glasses with each other, take off the glasses on their faces, exchange them, look at them, and then change them back to wear them on their faces, and then start to start their conversation about glasses.
At that time, there was no such thing as a "circle" in society, but since ancient times, there have been circles in social life all the time, and those who love to play with glasses naturally also have circles that play with glasses. Those who can enter the circle are veteran players who love to play glasses, and everyone is a little particular about glasses. They will not hesitate to spend a lot of money to get their hands when they meet the eyes of them, and over time they will accumulate a lot of stone glasses of different styles and textures, and sometimes they will communicate with each other in the circle and communicate with each other.
No matter what people play, there are times when they get tired of a certain part of the playthings that they have been playing for a long time, and they will naturally eliminate some of them. For the expensive stone glasses at that time, even if they were tired of playing with them, they were reluctant to throw them away as garbage, so some people put the surplus glasses that they didn't want to play anymore on the street stalls to sell; Setting up this stall naturally attracts fellow fans, and if you are good at fooling, you may be able to take the opportunity to sell your glasses. In the future, when you see your favorite glasses, you may involuntarily buy new glasses to enrich and renew your treasures.
The glasses stall they set up was on the side of the street where I had to commute to work, and sometimes I passed back and forth several times a day, and what I saw was always those pairs of glasses from morning to night, and those people talked there with relish, and they didn't seem to mind if the business was hot or not. The slow-paced life makes people feel too much pressure regardless of whether they are rich or poor.
More than 30 years have passed in a blink of an eye, stone glasses have long been out of fashion, the old streets have long been renewed, and the people in the photos have also been ancient.
The "mirror friends" of the year discussed stone glasses together. (1992)
The Topic (1992)
The two elderly men were chatting together, and their clothes might not be as valuable as the stone mirrors they wore on their faces. (1992)
Although the "youth hair house" has appeared on the streets, the stone mirror is still the mainstream fashion of the year. (1992)
A young man who likes glasses is far away from the car and watches, maybe he is not qualified to enter the circle. (1992)