If you lived in the Tang Dynasty during the Zhenyuan or Yuanhe period and wanted to eat cucumbers in February, you had to be born in the imperial family. The Tang Dynasty poet Wang Jian wrote about the royal customs in the "Palace Words": "A hundred high-rise buildings in the wine mantle, and flowers in front of the Yangliu Temple in front of the palace." The inner garden was given warm soup water, and in mid-February, melons had been entered. ”
Cucumber
This inner garden is the royal garden, and the "melon" in the poem is a cucumber grown in a greenhouse heated with hot spring water to supply the tribute of the court.
Even in the Qing Dynasty, anti-seasonal cucumbers were rare. The more rare it is, the more it arouses the appetite of rich people. In the middle of winter or in early spring and February, if you want to eat cucumbers, you have to spend a lot of money. In this regard, Li Jingshan, a Qing dynasty, sighed: "Cucumbers are more valuable than ginseng at first sight, as small as a hairpin worth a few gold." Micro things can't increase life expectancy, what is the heart of a million dollars and a meal!"
Li Shizhen examined that cucumbers were introduced by Zhang Qian along the Silk Road from Central Asia, and later generations included cucumbers in the category of Zhang Qian's plants.
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