To talk about Zhang Dai, we must first start from the story of a cup of milk tea.
In 1614, at the age of 17, Zhang Dai invented "Lan Xue Tea".
He improved the tea making method on the basis of the famous tea "Nichi cast snow buds" in Jiangnan, and also added jasmine flowers on a whim, but he did not expect the result but gave people a big surprise.
This tea, Zhang Dai named it "Lan Xue Tea". "The color is like a bamboo basket (tuò, bamboo shoots) square solution, green powder is initially uniform; and it is like the first dawn of the mountain window, and the light of the paper is transparent." Years later, the impoverished Zhang Dai recalled the tea, he wrote.
The color is the new green of the bamboo shoots that have just broken the ground, and it is like the sky light leaking out of the window at dawn. It's beautiful to think about.
As soon as this tea was launched, it soon became the most mainstream product in the tea market. Before the story was over, Zhang Dai continued to improve Lan Xue Tea, he added cheese to the tea, and successfully developed "Lan Xue Tea", which was popular at that time.
The cheese added is also unusual, it is zhang Dai's homemade, absolutely private pure hand: "Yu Zi Feng (huàn, feeding) a cow, night to take the milk in the pot Ang, Bi Xiao, milk flowers clustered up a ruler, boiled with a copper bell, 瀹 (yuè boiled) Lan Xue juice, milk jin and juice si Ou, hundred boiling." Jade liquid bead glue, snow cream cream, blowing qi Shenglan, into the lungs, self-providence. ”
Their own domestic cows, made of milk flowers and orchid tea brewed tea constantly boiled with copper bells, the last milk tea is "jade liquid bead glue, snow cream greasy, blowing shenglan, into the lungs, self-providence." "The color and smell are excellent.
Making milk tea is just a part of the exquisite life of Zhang Dai.
His exquisite life also includes: he not only understands tea, but also has a good study of the water that drinks tea, and he has several delicious specialties from all over the world; he is very good at poetry, quick thinking, and is regarded as a prodigy very early; he understands drama, once had a well-known girlfriend Zhu Chusheng, he also dragged a group of theater friends to a temple to improvise, which frightened the monks in the temple; he knew calligraphy and painting, and chen Hongshou, the most famous painter in the late Ming Dynasty, was his best friend; he was also a cockfighting master. It was because he once overheard that Tang Xuanzong, who was the same as his birthday, once loved cockfighting but eventually became the king of the defeated country, that he felt ominous and gave up this hobby.
……
In short, a lot, and so on.
Why is he zhang dai able to master so many skills and live his life like a god?
In a word, rich and talented willful.
This brings us to his origins.
Zhang Dai came from a family of scholars and eunuchs, his ancestors had held important positions in four generations, and his great-grandfather had also lived in high school, so his life when he was a child was almost willful.
Tell a little thing about how generous his family is.
When he was three years old, he had a phlegm disease, and his grandfather took him to live with him, and then he didn't know where to get three baskets of beef yolk pills (think about the price of natural bovine yolk) and gave them to eat until he was sixteen years old. It's really rich and willful.
Zhang Dai is smart and studious, and his family is full of poetry and books, so his cultural cultivation is very high. Rich and talented, Zhang Dai is the noble prince who the heavens will be jealous of.
If he had not been born at the end of the Ming Dynasty, his life would have been perfect. But the fall of the Ming Dynasty brought about a drastic change in his life.
In 1644, when Zhang Dai was 47 years old, Li Zicheng attacked the city of Beijing, the Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youjian committed suicide, and the Ming Dynasty collapsed. The Qing Dynasty was established.
Zhang Dai's illustrious family collapsed in an instant, and the collapse was also the dynasty to which the scholars were loyal, which was the basis for their existence.
Zhang Dai had a good friend who died in order to be loyal, and Zhang Dai, who was nearly 50 years old, also wanted to do this, but he thought about the history book "Shi Kui Ji" that he was determined to complete, so he endured the humiliation and survived. Avoid the disaster in the mountains, do not ask about the world, concentrate on writing books.
The second half of his life was described by him as "After JiaShen, he was careless, neither able to seek death nor talk about life, white-haired, and like a living person." ”
These words are from the Self-Made Epitaph, which he wrote at the age of 69.
At that time, he felt that he was running out of time, so he wrote an article summarizing and identifying his life. But he did not expect that in the end he would live to be 93 years old.
In the first paragraph of the article, he recalls the past:
"Shu people Zhang Dai, Tao Anqi number also." Less for the stupid children, very fond of prosperity, good house, good beauty, good child prostitution, good fresh clothes, good food, good horses, good lanterns, good fireworks, good pear orchards, good trumpets, good antiques, good flowers and birds, tea and orange abuse, bookworm (dù, worm) poetry demons, toiling for half a life, all become dreams. In the fifties, the country was destroyed and the family died, and the mountain dwellings were avoided, and the survivors broke the bed and broke a few, folded the sick piano, and the number of broken books was missing. Cloth vegetable buttercup (gèn, wild vegetables), often until the cooking is broken. Looking back twenty years ago, it was like a lifetime away. ”
Remembering his life when he was young, he was dressed in fresh clothes and angry horses and proud of the spring breeze, Zhang Dai felt like a dream.
Therefore, his essay collections are all named after dreams: "Tao An Dream Memories" and "West Lake Dream Search".
Tao An is his number, his maternal grandfather has Tao Yuanming's bloodline, and he considers himself to be Tao Yuanming's descendant. On the other hand, he also considered himself a hermit like Tao Yuanming.
West Lake was a place he often visited when he was young, and it was the place where he recorded his most beautiful dreams!
And recording these dreams is probably the sweetness of his days when everything is gray.