Around the time of the Qin and Han Dynasties, there was a bitter girl named Ye Zhi in the southern coastal clan tribe.
Her father, Wu, was a local tribal leader (cave lord), known as "Wu Dong". Lord Wu Dong married two wives, and Ye Jie was the daughter of zheng's wife. Ye Ji's mother and little mother died of illness one after another when she was very young. Ye Zhi is skillful and good at crocheting clothes with gold thread, and her father is particularly fond of her. Later, the father married another wife, and this stepmother gave birth to a younger sister. Soon, his father died of illness, and from then on, Ye Zhi began to suffer from all kinds of abuse by his stepmother, going to the mountains every day to cut firewood and fetch water in the rapids, and the work was bitter and tiring.
One day, Ye Zhi went to the river to fetch water and saw a beautiful small fish, two inches long, red and bright fins, and golden eyes. Ye Ji quietly packed the fish in this small basin and raised it. The fish grew rapidly every day, and she had to change larger containers frequently, and there was no suitable container for the very open, so she had to quietly put the fish into the pond behind the house. This fish is very sensible, usually sinking under the water, only when the leaf limit comes to feed, it swims over to rest its head on the shore, and the fish food is the ration that the leaf limit secretly saves every day. Although the fish only surfaced when Ye Zhi came, he was still spied on by Ye Zhi's cunning stepmother.
As soon as she saw that this little girl had actually raised a giant fish behind my back, she immediately became evil. First of all, when the leaves were not there, they also went to the pond to feed, but the fish did not come out. So there was another plan. One day, she said to Ye Ji: You work so hard, it's time to change into new clothes. With that, he took out a new piece of clothing and changed the worn-out dress on Ye Ji's body. Then he said to Ye Ji, the new clothes are changed, go fetch water. By the way, the river that usually draws water has not been clean recently, and you must go to the river on the other side of the mountain to fetch water. Ye Ji obediently got up and went to the distant river to fetch water, which was a hundred miles away, and it took almost a day to go back and forth.
The stepmother immediately put on the old clothes that Ye Zhi had changed, grabbed a fast knife, and came to the pond behind the house, while feeding the fish food, while learning Ye Zhi's voice to call for fish. The red-tipped goldfish did appear, already more than a foot long, and it swam over as usual, resting its head against the shore to eat. The stepmother suddenly drew a fast knife to kill the giant fish, then called her daughter, dragged the body of the giant fish into the kitchen, and began to cook. The fish is ready, the aroma is overflowing, the two people tasted, wow, never eaten such a fresh fish. The two of them had a full meal, and the rest of the meat was hidden for tomorrow to eat.
But what about the long fish bones? The stepmother thought that she had it, and asked her daughter to drag the huge skeleton to the fertilizer manure pile outside and bury it.
Ye Zhi came back very late and found no abnormality. The next morning, she quietly came to the pond to call for food, but she never saw the giant fish come out. She realized that the giant fish was more fierce, and ran into the secluded field alone and cried. Suddenly, a strange man descended from the sky, with his hair scattered and dressed in coarse cloth, and said, "Don't cry, your mother has killed the fish, and the skeleton is hidden in the dung pile." You can quietly put away the fishbone and pray to it if you want anything, and it will be fulfilled. Without waiting for Ye Ji to react, the strange man suddenly disappeared.
When her stepmother and sister went out, Ye Ji cut open the dung pile, and sure enough, she found a huge fish bone, and she took a lot of effort to drag the skeleton to the edge of the pond, clean it, and then drag it into her own house. Her house was dilapidated but large enough to accommodate the fishbone, and she covered it with a lot of debris.
After the murder of the giant fish, she was more cautious, one day, to make sure that her stepmother and sister were not at home, she tried to make a wish to the fishbone, first to eat it, a table of food immediately appeared on the table; then tried to wear, and then appeared out of thin air a beautiful dress; to jewelry is not OK, wow, gold jewelry is also available... It turned out that the words of the strange man were true.
One day is an important festival of the tribe, and people will travel in costume and gather to celebrate on this day. The stepmother would not let Ye Zhi go, she only took her daughter-in-law to entertainment, and let Ye Zhi take care of a fruit tree in the yard at home. When the two were gone, Ye Zhi quietly made a wish to the fishbone, allowing it to give the most beautiful clothes. Immediately, a jade-colored silk tunic and a pair of gold-encrusted shoes appeared.
The stepmother and daughter were singing and dancing at the rally, and were having fun, when they overheard people exclaiming, only to see a beautiful girl who attracted everyone's attention, the girl was wearing a green dress, stepping on gold shoes, beautiful and extraordinary, as if the heavens were under the heavens. The two looked at each other for a long time, and the daughter suddenly said to her mother: How can this girl look more and more like my sister the more she looks? After saying that, the two shook their heads in disbelief.
At this time, Ye Ji, who had unlimited scenery, also noticed the gaze of his stepmother and sister, and thought to himself, it is time to go back. He immediately flashed into the crowd and quickly rushed home. Because she was in too fast, a golden shoe was actually lost, she stopped, but she couldn't find anything, didn't dare to delay, or went home first, just changed into rags, hid the green clothes and gold shoes, and heard the footsteps of the mother and daughter. The two of them pushed the door and saw that Ye Ji was holding the fruit tree and dozing off, so he let go of his suspicions.
The golden shoe that Ye Zhi lost was picked up by a hawker who rushed to the market, he was very rare in this treasure, he thought it should be able to sell for a good price, unfortunately there was only one. This area is adjacent to the sea, and there is an island country on the sea called Tuohan. King Tuohan was strong and powerful, ruling over dozens of islands and thousands of miles of water. The peddler often went to the Tuo Khanate to trade, and this time the golden shoes he had brought for sale soon reached the king. The king played with this golden shoe, weighed it in his hand as light as a feather, and knocked on the stone silently, which was a rare treasure. He thought again, this is a women's shoe, I don't know who its owner is? Summoning the concubines in the palace to try on them, no one could wear them, and the concubines with the smallest feet had to be an inch larger than this shoe. Simply, the women of the whole country were ordered to try it, and still no one could put on this small golden shoe.
He ordered someone to find the shoe seller, who thought there was a reward, but instead received a severe torture, forcing him to ask where he had stolen the shoes. The peddler was miserable, admitting that it had been picked up by the festival rally, but when he could not be tortured, the king believed him, and sent his soldiers away from the island by boat to the place of the assembly to find the owner of the shoe. A large number of soldiers found all the women in the four miles and eight townships, asked them to try on them, and finally found someone who could wear it, Ye Zhi.
Ye Ji was not in a hurry, and took out his green robe and another golden shoe, and dressed them neatly, and in a flash, he changed into the appearance of a fairy again. The crowd was stunned. The soldiers did not dare to be idle, and respectfully invited Ye Zhi to go to the Tuo Khanate to meet the king. Ye Zhi calmly agreed, and asked the soldiers to take out the skeleton of the giant fish in the house and bring it back to the island. Everyone hugged Ye Zhi and left, and the stepmother and sister regretted it.
Later, Ye Ji became the favorite princess of king TuoHan, and her stepmother and sister were not so lucky, and for some reason, they were hit by flying stones and both died. Some say that the king listened to their evil deeds and sent people to punish them, while others said that it was the retribution of heaven. Fellow villagers buried the bodies of the two in a large stone pit and built a tomb, named it "Tomb of the Remorseful Woman", that is, "the grave of the remorseful woman". Over time, the people of the tribe slowly discovered that the goddess mound sacrificed to pray for the heir, and only asked to give birth to a girl was bound to be magical.
Ye Ji told the king of TuoHan the secret of the giant fish bone's needs, and the king also went to pray, and sure enough, the gold and silver treasures came and piled up. But the king was too greedy, and he kept asking for treasure from the fishbone. By the second year, the fishbone had failed, and no matter how much he asked for it, he did not respond. Reluctantly, the king had to bury the giant fish bones in a safe and hidden place on the shore, along with a hundred pearls and a secret marking line made of gold. The king thought very well, once the country had a war, it could dig out these golden pearl treasures as military expenses, which had thought that people were not as good as heaven, one night, suddenly a huge tide broke out, the place where the treasure was buried was completely submerged, and after the tide receded, the gold pearl treasure and the giant fish bones were gone.
This story was told by Li Shiyuan in the countryside of his hometown of Yongzhou (in the area of present-day Nanning, Guangxi).
"Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks" sequel "Zhinuogao"
"Ye Limit" is from the tang dynasty Duan Chengshi's "Youyang Miscellaneous Tricks" sequel "Zhinuogao" (probably written in 860), is a famous "Chinese Cinderella" story type.
Cinderella, the most famous story in the German "Grimm's Fairy Tales", originally included the French writer Charles Perot's work "Cinderella Cinderella" released in 1697, which is what we often call "the story of the crystal shoe".
It tells the story of a girl named Cindy Leela, abused by her stepmother and bullied by her two younger sisters, who lives in a pile of ash. She planted a hazelnut tree at her mother's grave, and the birds on the tree could do as she wished. One day the stepmother went to the court ball with her two biological daughters, she prayed to the birds, got a beautiful pair of dancing shoes, and the servants and carriages, and she also went to the ball, and beauty conquered all the people, and the prince fell deeply in love with her. She always hurried away at the end of each dance, and the prince designed one of her gold shoes (or crystal shoes), and finally found the owner of the shoe by looking for the girls to try on the shoes. The two were married, and the stepmother and two daughters were pecked by the sacred bird into one-eyed.
Modern Chinese scholars Zhou Zuoren, Zhao Jingshen and others have long discovered that "Leaf Limit" is China's "Cinderella type" story, more than 800 years before the widely circulated story in the West, and should be the earliest such type of story in the world.
In fact, similar "Cinderella type" stories circulate around the world, according to scholars statistics of no less than a few hundred, only China's various ethnic groups have a large number of similar stories, discussion and analysis of Cinderella type stories has therefore been an academic hot spot.
Interested readers can look for relevant information. Here I would like to talk about my feelings about reading "Ye Limit", purely personal views, not picking up the wisdom of previous scholars.
There is a special angle in the Leaf Limit, which very subtly emphasizes the unparalleled importance of marriage to women.
It is reasonable to say that Ye Zhi has a baby fish bone, not only is there no worries about food and clothing, but also a lot of wealth, but her value cannot be completed, her ultimate value is to find a Ruyi Langjun to marry herself. In fact, if I were Ye Zhi, I would shout directly to the skeleton of the giant fish: Give me a husband and a home, and it will be over. Yes, just so willful, trying to find a son-in-law who has money to plug the door upside down. But if so, the meaning of the whole story collapses completely.
Her wish must be concretized into a pair of shoes, what the shoes are for, what they are for walking, and the value of shoes is in walking, or even in "running away from home".
The shoes in the story are extremely small, but they are still used for walking. Only by marrying out and leaving the family where she grew up can a woman have a destiny. A woman's ultimate home is the home where her husband is. Shoes became a relic of marriage and dowry. Couples match each other, like two shoes together.
This is the ancient concept of marriage. (In fact, the foreign "Cinderella" also means more or less the same.) ）
In addition, what is more interesting is that the marriage between Ye Zhi and the king is actually not a legend of the ugly duckling marrying into the rich, the two are originally the door-to-door pair. Although Ye Zhi's life was very miserable, he did not forget that her deceased father was originally a "cave lord" and a tribal leader, and he was on a par with the king of the island. If his father is still alive, the marriage between the two will be very grand, and Ye Zhi's dowry will be very rich. However, the dowry was finally realized by relying on the skeleton of the giant fish. Thinking about it carefully, it was not so much that the divine fish's mana helped Ye Limit realize his dream, but rather that this was originally the fate of Ye Limit.
The reason why the skeleton of the giant fish can be preserved is partly because Ye Ji has enough courage, wisdom and kindness, and on the other hand, she is not afraid of being dirty and has found it from the dung mound. It is from this that her noble and extraordinary value is verified, just as the grain is harvested with the help of manure and fertilizer, and her fate is also to produce sludge without staining, to decay and magic, and to achieve through suffering.
There is another detail that many readers may have overlooked, Ye Limit's father is clearly "Wu Dong Lord", but the story calls the heroine "Ye Limit" throughout the story, is her full name "Wu Ye Limit"? Non also! Her last name is "Ye"! Ye, that is, the heroine's husband's surname, that is, the island king's surname Ye!
Yes, in ancient times, women married with their husband's surname, sometimes with their husband's surname and their own surname, and sometimes only with their husband's surname. (Here only talk about customs and habits, not to talk about others, "wife crown husband surname" not only existed in ancient China, but also a widespread existence in many ethnic groups in the world, some countries and regions have been inherited to this day.) ）
Don't look at the story of Ye Limit's stepmother fierce and brutal, like a dove occupying the magpie's nest, in fact, she has changed her surname to Wu, that family she is really the master of the name, no exaggeration; on the contrary, it is not Ye Limit's real home, Ye Limit's real home should be in her husband's place.
Ye Limit, the name already hints at the special theme of this story: "Marriage is the ultimate destiny of a woman".