There are various anniversaries every year, and today you may not hear of them. On 19 November, it was designated by the United Nations as World Toilet Day since 2013. The festival was established to highlight the sanitation crisis facing the poor, to promote safe drinking water and basic sanitation, and to promote a clean, comfortable and hygienic environment for all. It is hoped that through the efforts of people around the world, we will jointly improve the world's environmental health problems.
Toileting is not a small matter. Some people have calculated that an adult has to go to the toilet an average of 6-8 times a day, and there are 2500 times a year. On average, each time is two minutes, about 3 years of a person's life is spent in the toilet (longer for women). So what was the toilet that accompanied us all the way like in ancient China? Today, let's learn about the culture and interesting things related to toilets in ancient China through excavated cultural relics.
Most are built together with pigsty
In the Han Dynasty, there were already prototypes of water flushing toilets
The earliest record of the construction of toilets is found in the Warring States period, and the Mozi mentions that toilets with high walls were enclosed to protect privacy. During the Two Han Dynasties, the construction of toilets was very common, and the toilets at that time were mostly built on pig pens, which may have the dual purpose of using excrement as pig food and mixing with pig manure as fertilizer.
For example, in the Xi'an Museum, there is a model of a green glazed toilet unearthed in the Han Dynasty, which is a good reproduction of the basic scene of people going to the toilet at that time for posterity.
Below the artifact is a pigsty and above is a toilet. There were even two toileters, lying on the window and looking downstairs into the pigsty.
In the pigsty downstairs, the sow is lying on the ground, and has already produced three piglets, and the head of a small pig has popped out of the birth canal, and a person next to it is delivering it, while two people on the toilet are watching, vividly living in the Han Dynasty.
There is a staircase at the back that leads to the toilet on the second floor
In addition, the China Agricultural Museum also has a Han Dynasty pottery pig pen toilet excavated from Henan. This form of construction in which the pigsty and the toilet are combined has many advantages: the pollution source is concentrated and easy to clean; the double-storey building structure saves space; human excrement is used as part of the pig food to save feed; and pig manure can be used to fertilize the seedling field.
Su Tao Ming Ware - Tao Pig Pen (Han) is in the collection of the China Agricultural Museum
The following picture is a model of the toilet unearthed in the Eastern Han Dynasty, which is still the structure of the pigsty and the toilet.
Later, with the development of society, in order to be clean, the toilet was gradually separated from the pigsty, and even the prototype of a modern water toilet appeared. In 1992, when Chinese archaeologists excavated the tomb of Liang Xiaowanghan in Mangzhongshan, Shangqiu City, Henan Province, they accidentally found a toilet built 2,000 years ago in the tomb, and on the wall behind the squat pit, the builder of the toilet chiseled out a flushing pipe, and its structure and principle are very similar to today's water flushing toilets.
A tomb toilet has also been excavated from the Xuzhou Lion Mountain Han Tomb, and its shape is even no different from that of some modern rural areas. More vividly, the tomb builders even installed handrails on the wall next to the toilet to facilitate the help of the toilet when they got up.
The model of the toilet found in some of the artifacts unearthed later is almost exactly the same as the dry toilet in modern rural areas.
Toilets during the Northern Dynasty
Tang Sancai toilet excavated in Xi'an
Ancient celebrity toilet troubles
Jin Jinggong toilet drowned, the powerful minister Wang Dun "bath beans for rice"
Looking at so many excavated toilet relics, we found that toilets and human life are closely related from ancient times to the present. Therefore, there are also some ancient celebrities whose toilet troubles have been recorded and passed down to this day. The most bizarre thing is that a king fell into the toilet and drowned, he was the Duke of Jinjing.
Jin Jinggong
One year, a shaman said to Jin Jinggong, "Great King, I'm afraid you won't live to eat the new wheat." Jin Jinggong was furious, dragged the wizard out and beheaded him, and said, "I will definitely live until the wheat is ripe, but you will not see the sun tomorrow!" Later, when the wheat was ripe, Jin Jinggong remembered the wizard's words, and hurriedly made a bowl to present, thinking: Still saying that I can't eat this year's new wheat? I'll eat it now! Just when he was about to pick up the chopsticks, he suddenly felt a pain in his stomach, so Jin Jinggong rushed to the pit. But I didn't expect that I would fall into the pit and drown! This incident is even recorded in the Zuo Zhuan, saying that "the food will be eaten, raised, toileted, and trapped." "In this way, it seems that a generation of kings drowned in the toilet is really quite tragic.
In addition, Wang Dun, a powerful minister of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, also had trouble with the toilet, and even from him there was an idiom "bath beans for rice". It is said that Wang Dun married Princess Xiangcheng, the daughter of Emperor Sima Yan of Jinwu, lived in the Princess Mansion, the princess lived a luxurious life as a royal family, and when she went to the toilet, she would use dried dates to block her nostrils to block the odor, so there were often a lot of dried dates stored in the toilet, and once Wang Dun saw dry dates in the lacquer box when he went to the toilet, Wang Dun thought that the princess was exquisite, and the toilet also had fruit food, so he ate it, and also ate a fine light. Another time was also to go to the toilet, when the benevolent brother came out of the toilet, he found that there was water prepared in the golden bath plate, and there was bean flour in the glass bowl next to it. He drank the bean powder and drank it all, and the maids next to him couldn't help but be funny. It turned out that the plate of water was used by the princess for bathing, and the bean flour was actually equivalent to the current soap.
Since then, there has been an idiom called "bath beans for rice", which describes the embarrassment of a person who has never seen the world. Wang Dun originally thought that he was the son of a rich and noble village, but unexpectedly met the princess and he still had to bow to the wind, and was amazed by the delicacy of the royal family.
In addition, the Han Huan Emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty also had a major incident related to the toilet. According to records, Liu Zhi served as a puppet for thirteen years, allowing Liang Ji to control the government, and he was surrounded by eyes and ears that could reach Liang Ji's ears as long as the wind blew. Until one day, he finally couldn't bear it anymore, and under the pretext of going to the toilet, he called his confidant eunuch Tang Heng into the toilet and discussed with him the plan to destroy the powerful minister. After a conspiracy, they eliminated Liang Ji in one fell swoop, and this operation is also known as the "toilet coup".
Bamboo Wood Jane turned out to be the earliest toilet paper
Many of the excavated wooden janes have air-dried feces
When it comes to toileting, many people will ask how the ancients wiped filth before the advent of hand paper?
In fact, the ancients had many kinds of tools, such as dirt blocks, stones, grass and leaves. But you don't know that bamboo and wood Jane, which is regarded as a treasure by cultural relics experts, was also used to clean after toilets in ancient times, commonly known as toilet chips. According to Yu Gengzhe, a teacher at Shaanxi Normal University, the bamboo wood jane excavated from the Han Dynasty Beacon Site in Dunhuang Maquan Bay may have been a toilet chip used by the ancients, because some dried feces were found on these bamboo logs when they were excavated.
Dunhuang Maquan Bay Ruins Han Jian
Toilet chips
An ancient case of bamboo chips being used as toilet chips is also recorded in the Southern Tang Dynasty Book of Futu Biography, which tells that Li Yu, the lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty, and his empress Dowager Zhou personally made bamboo toilet chips for monks in order to express their piety to the Buddha. The book says: "After the Lord and Zhou Hou personally cut the monk's toilet, tried it with cheeks, and if there were few thorns, they added another repair." This means that the Southern Tang Dynasty Lord and Zhou Hou personally shaved the toilet chips for the monk's ass, and after cutting, they also tested whether they were smooth on the cheeks, and if there were thorns, they continued to polish the smooth. This kind of behavior is also crazy in the eyes of future generations.
Li Yu, the lord of the Southern Tang Dynasty
Another benefit of using polished bamboo as a toilet chip is that it can be recycled. In that underdeveloped ancient time, after use, it was cleaned and put back for the next person who went to the toilet. The TV series "In Search of Qin" has such a scene: Xiang Shaolong, who travels back to the Warring States Era, stays overnight at Zhao Guomin's residence, and asks the old man for toilet paper in an internal emergency. The old man listened for half a day, only to know that it was something that wiped his ass, and the old man picked up a piece of bamboo by the side of the pit and handed it over, which was a toilet chip.
"In Search of Qin"
So when did the ancients use toilet paper? The earliest record is in the Tang Dynasty, found in the "Records of Chinese India" written by the Arabs, article 23 says that "Chinese (Tang) do not pay attention to hygiene, and after going to the toilet, they are not washed with water, but wiped with paper made in China." "But because paper was more expensive at that time, it was not popular until after the Yuan Dynasty, toilet paper began to become popular, such as Arima dung paper, this kind of paper is not good at writing, but it is very suitable for toilet paper."
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, wiping the buttocks with straw paper became a habit of the rich and noble. However, at that time, there was a stipulation that it was not allowed to wipe the buttocks with the paper on which the words were written, and the "Law of Regret Words", "The New Compilation of The Words of The Words", "The Records of the Examination of the Signs of the Words of the Emperor of Wenchang", "The Law of the Emperor of Wenchang", and the "Law of the Meritorious Deeds of the Wenchang Emperor" were all related to a series of laws. Violators are punished by the government.
There is no small matter of going to the toilet, fortunately, with these cultural relics and records, we can learn how the ancestors have gradually moved from ancient barbarism to today's civilization.
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