We Chinese can wear warm, breathable, comfortable cotton clothes, covered with suitable quilts, there are two people who should be particularly grateful, one is that the Zodiac po promoted cotton textile technology, and the other is That Zhu Yuanzhang promoted cotton planting.
Before the Song Dynasty in China, there was no cotton, and most of the laborers lived in poverty without clothes.
China did not produce cotton, and the origin of cotton was India and the Arab countries, or Peru in South America.
According to the Book of Song, cotton was only introduced to China during the Southern and Northern Dynasties of China, but at that time it was still mostly planted in Xinjiang, Hainan Island and other frontiers, and was not successively introduced to the interior until the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty.
"I Went to Xinjiang to Pick Cotton", a really good novel
Fan Chengda, a famous poet of the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote in his "Four Hours of Pastoral Miscellaneous Xing, Its Thirty-one": "The day out of the field and the night are hemp, and the sons and daughters of the village are in charge." Tong Sun did not solve the cultivation and weaving, and also learned to plant melons in The Sang Yin. The "night hemp" here means that the meaning of starting to divide the hemp fiber and connect the hemp fiber at night is equivalent to the later cotton spinning thread.
From here, we can see that the "thread" used to weave linen cloth in the Song Dynasty could not be "spun" with tools, which was the basic situation of China's textile industry at that time.
"Four Hours of Pastoral Miscellaneous Excitement: Its Thirty-One"
Before the Song Dynasty, only the character "mian" was in the Chinese characters, and "cotton" appeared in the Song book.
Soon, however, China's textile technology revolution came with The Zodiac.
Second, The Zodiac brought advanced cotton textile technology from the Li people in Hainan, which led to the transformation of the clothing fabrics of the Han people from hemp and silk to cotton.
Huang Daobo was a child daughter-in-law in Songjiang Province at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, because she could no longer stand the endless abuse of the in-laws, she opened a hole in the roof of the house late at night, hid in a sea boat and fled to Hainan Island (Yazhou), where she learned exquisite cotton weaving techniques from Li women and mastered the related techniques of cotton textile tools.
After living in Hainan for 30 years, in her later years, Huang Daobo chose to return to her hometown of Songjiang, where she taught all the skills she learned to the local textile industry and improved the textile tools, which greatly promoted the progress of Cotton Textile Technology in China.
Third, after Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty, he vigorously promoted the cultivation of cotton, and cotton clothes began to enter thousands of households.
The cotton textile industry can not only have technology, but also a large amount of cotton can be developed, and this historical process has come very quickly.
In the early years of the Yuan Dynasty, cotton began to be introduced in the interior, and the reason why the Yuan Dynasty was able to begin to introduce cotton cultivation from the frontier areas was related to the strengthening of exchanges between various ethnic groups such as the large scope of the Yuan Dynasty's rule and the central plains and the southern frontier of the western region.
The large-scale promotion of cotton in China was in the early years of the Ming Dynasty.
Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, was extremely poor, and when he was a child, he could not eat or wear enough, and when his father died, he only used a mat to roll up and buried it.
Therefore, after the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, when the poor emperor Zhu Yuanzhang recognized the value of the new crop of cotton, he promoted this cash crop throughout the country and by compulsory means, the purpose was very simple, the original intention was very simple, that is, to let the poor people of the world have clothes and quilt covers.
Zhu Yuanzhang stipulated that as long as the family has ten acres of land, it is necessary to plant half an acre of cotton, hemp, and mulberry, which basically solves the problem that the people can eat enough and wear warm clothes, and soon Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei, Hubei and other places have become the main producers of cotton.
Zhu Yuanzhang's original intention
So we have to thank Zhu Yuanzhang, because of his promotion of cotton cultivation, the poor began to improve their basic living conditions.
Fourth, there is a question, in ancient times without cotton, what Chinese wear and cover?
Originally, animal skins were worn.
There is a record in the Yellow Emperor's military tips that before the Yellow Emperor conquered Xuan You, he dreamed that the Queen Mother of the West sent a Daoist dressed in the fur of the Xuan Fox to "grant the emperor with a spell".
The fur of the fox is a dress made of yellow fox skin.
In ancient times, rich people wore mink, fox or lamb skin, especially mink skin, which was stipulated from the beginning of the Ming Dynasty that merchants or lower-class people could not wear it; commoners wore white leather clothes made of deerskin and sheepskin.
Some people have to ask again, you can wear leather clothes in winter, what to do in summer? Of course, there is a way in the summer, and that is to wear "linen" or silk clothes.
Wearing linen clothes and wearing hemp rope around the waist was the standard at that time
The poor generally wore cheap linen clothes, and the men were mostly naked; the nobles and the rich wore silk clothes, and the amount of silk was small, and the average person, including the family of the weaver, could not afford to wear it.
Let's talk about the quilt again.
Before the Northern Song Dynasty, the so-called quilt was actually a thick pajama that could be draped on the body, and the explanation of the Shuowen Jiezi was: "Quilt, nightgown, long and half." ”
Why were the clothes of the rich people in ancient times very wide? Because it is worn as a dress during the day, and it is used as a quilt at night.
Many poor families in the winter, at night is covered with animal skins, the bottom bunk is generally wheat straw and other things, where there are any serious quilts, watching TV and movies, you have been deceived hundreds of times do not know it.
The ancients all covered such quilts? You've made a fool of me and wanted me to applaud!
This is the "cushion quilt"
Conclusion: So since the Ming Dynasty, Chinese can be regarded as eating enough and dressing decently, this is the truth of history, do you want us to thank The Zodiac and Zhu Yuanzhang?