This article is from the official account: On the Road Gezhi forum (ID: SELFtalks) , Author: Shi Xiao Lei, Chinese Academy of History of Natural Science Associate researcher of the Institute, Science Communication Research Center, title picture from: Visual China
Northern Song Dynasty Zhang Zeduan’s “Surfing the River on Qingming Festival” is now in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing, which is one of the treasures of the museum. It depicts the social life scenes of people from all walks of life in Kaifeng area 900 years ago, which was also the capital at that time.
Since then, each dynasty has had different copies and imitations, and there are dozens of them in total.
In addition, there are two more famous works with the same name as “A Picture of Shanghe on the Qingming Festival”. One is “A Picture of the River on the Qingming Festival” by Qiu Ying of the Ming Dynasty and is now in the collection of the Liaoning Museum; the other is “A Picture of the River on the Ching Ming Dynasty” in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
They all continue the realistic style of the Song Dynasty and provide us with an excellent window to understand ancient society.
1. A window to understand ancient society
This scene is on a wharf in Bianhe. There are several porters on the wharf. They hold things like wooden sticks in their hands.
Actually, what they were holding was not a wooden stick, but a bamboo stick.
This is a form of ancient piece rate wages-unloading grain from the dockAfter it is transported to the granary, you can get a bamboo stick here for a salary.
This is a question that economic historians care about. As a researcher of the history of science, what do I care about?
In this scene, the wheelbarrow is covered with a layer of cloth. However, this cloth is not an ordinary cloth. If you look closely, you will find that there are words on this cloth.
Mr. Yu Hui, a researcher at the Palace Museum, thinks it is cursive.
At that time, after the Northern Song Dynasty Huizong ascended the throne, Cai Jing, the power minister, was reused. Cai Jing engaged in a political struggle, which is equivalent to using a wheelbarrow to transport the ransacked things to the outskirts and burn them. This idea has not been confirmed yet, it is just his personal opinion.
The above example is some research on political history. I myself do research on the history of ancient technology, and I will focus on different points.
This unicycle is very strange. Under normal circumstances, a wheelbarrow is pulled by a person at the front and a person is pushing at the back.
However, there is another person pulling at the front shaft in the painting, and there are two shafts. In this case, the wheelbarrow has a certain balancing function. He also had a whip in his hand and a donkey in front of him.
This driving style can only be seen in this kind of paintings like “A River on the Qingming Festival”, which is now invisible.
This painting shows a car repair shop on the street at that time, and the direction of the arrow is a frame saw. The frame saw is a kind of I-shaped saw, which was very important in ancient times.
For example, if you want to process a large board, if you don’t have this kind of frame saw, you have to drive it in with a wooden wedges and then split it, so that the split board is very uneven. You have to use adze, or some other tools for processing, veryStrenuous. However, it is much more convenient to have a frame saw.
The image of China’s earliest frame saw appears in the “Shang He Tu on Qingming Festival”, which provides great convenience for the textual research of ancient material and cultural history.
On the right side of the picture above, there are ships on the Bianhe River, which are inland river ships. The arrow on the ship refers to a highly advanced high-tech at the time-a liftable balance rudder. There is a hanging rudder chain on it so that it can be raised and lowered.
When the Bian River is shallow, the rudder should be raised, otherwise, the rudder will change its course, and if it is inserted below, it will hinder navigation.
What does balance rudder mean? The rudder is to change the course. If the rudder shaft needs to be moved to the center, the torque will be very convenient. This was a very wise design of the ancients.
Second. Wheel wheel and “Shanghe Picture on Qingming Festival”
This is called a potter’s wheel. When I was young, I saw adults often use it, but now it’s hard to see it. The theme song of the TV series “Roller’s Wheel · Woman and Well” more than 30 years ago was sung by the then big singer Wei Wei.
One of the lyrics is: “Women are not water, men are not tanks, destiny is not the potter’s wheel, you must wrap the well rope around yourself.” This is very vivid, because the potter’s wheel is a crank, and shaking the crank can hold the water. Put it up.
Because this kind of potter’s wheel has a crank, we can call it a crank potter’s wheel first. This is a very commonly used in ancient China, and it is a very labor-saving water lifting machine in ancient times, but when did it come into being?
These are three drawings of wheels in the Han Dynasty. But it is not the same as what I just said. It is basically a fixed pulley type, that is, it only changes the direction of the force without saving effort. During the period from the Han Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty, there were many words for the wheel wheel, but we are not sure whether it is this wheel wheel or the crank wheel wheel I just mentioned.
For example, Liu Yiqing of the Southern Dynasty wrote a book called “Shi Shuo Xin Yu”. He told a story about the great painter Gu Kaizhi playing games and joking with three friends. He said: “Everyone says a word, see who says the most dangerous, whoever wins.”
The first person said “Spear the rice with the sword for cooking”, what does this mean? It means using the tip of a spear to wash rice and cooking with a sword; the second person said, “A hundred-year-old man climbs dead twigs”. It was rare in the seventy years of ancient times, and it still climbed dead twigs at a hundred years old. Isn’t that a death? The third one is what Gu Kaizhi said. He said “Inoue roller wheel lying baby”. This term is very dangerous, but here we don’t know which one of the two previous roller wheels is.
So from the Han Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty, we could not find the dynasty where the crank wheel appeared.
One time when I was appreciating “A River on the Qingming Festival”, I saw a team walking on the right. The place where the box is drawn is a vegetable garden, and there is a well in the vegetable garden.
The whole picture of “Shanghe River on Qingming Festival” consists of two wells. This is a round well. If you zoom in, it is the picture above.
On the top of the round well, there is a very small thing, if it is not a potter’s wheel, it cannot be explained. There was a person next to him who seemed to be carrying water, and on the side to his left, there was a person carrying a load, and he should have already drawn water.
This is one of the earliest images of this single-crank, labor-saving reel in my country. In order to find more evidence, later in the Northern Song DynastySome of the brick carvings and paintings in the tomb were found, and this is one of them.
This should be a child who is relatively short. You can see that he is shaking the potter’s wheel vigorously, and he is shaking the crank hard to lift water. Through these pieces of evidence, combined with the “Surfing the River on the Qingming Festival”, it is proved that the wheel wheel was already widely used in the Central Plains 900 years ago.
3. The bellows and the “Shanghe Picture on Qingming Festival”
When I was young, my grandma asked me to cook with fire, using a bellows. In fact, our hometown does not call it a bellows, but a wind box. The box is just a small wooden box.
The bellows is very easy to use, what are its characteristics? At that time, I often heard the sound of croaking, it was the sound of the air door, that is, the wind would be generated when pushing and pulling. In ancient times, it was not only a function of burning fire and cooking, but the advanced metallurgy in ancient China also relied on it to reach the temperature of ironmaking.
There is a Chinese allegorical saying “The mouse in the bellows-two ends get angry”, which is related to its principle.
When did the bellows first come into being?
The British scholar Joseph Needham discovered two pictures in the Northern Song Dynasty book “Performing Bird Fighting Techniques in the Three Worlds”. The left side is an iron drawing and the right is a silver drawing.
There is a very small wooden handle at the back. Because the temperature required for ironing is relatively high, he concluded that there was such a tool as a bellows in the Song Dynasty.
But when I read this book at the Wenjin Ancient Books Department of the National Library of China a few years ago, I found something suspicious. This book was not from the Song Dynasty, but from later.
I found three pieces of evidence: the first piece of evidence, on the left is a picture cut from this book, and on the right is a reference chronology. The man in the first picture is wearing a black hat. This black gauze hat has long wings, but this long wing is not very long and has rounded corners.
This is a feature of the official uniforms of the Ming Dynasty. The long wings of the Song Dynasty were very long.
Basically in line with the facts, Song Taizu, Zhao Kuangyin, in order to prevent ministers from whispering upwards, he made the wings on the black hat so long, so that it would be inconvenient to speak.
In addition, there is something like a patch on the front of his official uniform. The technical term is tonic. In fact, there is a tonic on the front and back. This is the official uniform of the Ming and Qing Dynasties and a symbol of official status. Civil officials play birds, military officials play beasts, so the clothing-crowned beasts referred to them in the early days, but they have now become derogatory terms. The picture on the right is a Ming Dynasty painting, showing obvious characteristics of the Ming Dynasty.
The second piece of evidence is an undertaking, which is a kind of small official who sent documents in the past.
The top of the hat he wears is flat with square corners. It is called the “square flat towel”.
This kind of hat worn by small officials was popular after Zhu Yuanzhang in the Ming Dynasty. After Zhu Yuanzhang came to power, he believed that “the world is peaceful, the four directions are peaceful”, so he created such a costume.
The picture on the right is an engraving from the Ming Dynasty called “Qin Xin Ji”, which tells the story of Zhuo Wenjun and Sima Xiangru eloped for love in the Han Dynasty. The old man standing in the middle wears the same hat as the one on the left, so this is a Ming Dynasty style dress.
The third evidence is the hat worn on the head of the man sitting in the picture on the left. The technical term is “Liuheyi unified hat”. It is the six-petal cloth that looks like half a watermelon, so it is actually called a melon hat. We usually see landlords and old wealth wearing this kind of melon hat, which has spread to modern times.
“Liuhe” means east, west, south, north, up and down, that is, six directions. This is still popular after Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang.
The picture on the right is also a book from the reference period, the Ming-printed version of “Red Pear Blossoms”, you can see that the second person on the left is also wearing this melon hat.
Combining these three pieces of evidence, I think Needham’s conclusion on “The Three Worlds” is very questionable, and the evidence I provided is relatively sufficient.
Once I read a book about Qiu Ying’s “A Picture of the River on the Qingming Festival”, originally in the Liaoning Museum. In the book, I saw a blacksmith’s shop in which three naked men were swinging hammers to strike iron. They were hitting some household utensils, such as scissors, knives, and axes.
Behind them is a stove, and a man behind the stove is pulling the bellows, and we can clearly see the fire door.
Qiu Ying’s paintings in the Ming Dynasty should be dated 1543, around the middle of the 16th century, and Qiu Ying was a southerner who lived in the Yangtze River Delta and was one of the four great talents in the Ming Dynasty.
This proves that in the middle of the 16th century, the Yangtze River Delta region should generally use this type of bellows. Because it is not widely used, there should be a process of entering the painting, which combines the bellows of this era with the “Shanghe on Qingming Festival”.
Four, rollover and kicking
Of course, there are many scenes like this in “A Riverside Scene at Qingming Festival”. Let me give two more interesting examples.
The first is a very traditional water-lifting and irrigation tool in China, especially a commonly used tool in the south, called a keel water wheel, or a dump truck. It should be hard to see now.
Look at another one. It is still in Qiu Ying’s “Surfing the River on Qingming Festival”. On the side of the Bianhe River, that is, on the side of the field, there is a straw shed like a wheel below. What is it for? of?
This is difficult to guess. It is estimated that few people have seen it, or it is difficult to understand.
Later, in 1637, Song Yingxing’s “Tiangong Kaiwu” introduced the Niu Zhuan rollover, but the only difference from it was that there was no shed.
A cow is needed below. People sit on a wooden plate to drive the cow. The cow pulls the disc and drives the waterwheel through two gear structures. This was a common high-tech technique used to lift water for irrigation.
It’s still in Qiu Ying’s “Shanghe on the Qingming Festival”. There is a dyeing workshop in it. In the middle, you can see a person holding something like a wooden frame. His feet seem to be stepping on something. This is a kick cloth maker.
Because ancient life was not so monotonous, there were colorful clothes, dyed with various vegetable and mineral dyes. After dyeing, the cotton cloth is too wrinkled and needs to be rolled onto a cloth shaft and placed on the slate.
The kick cloth maker stepped on a stone that looked like an ingot, weighing several hundred kilograms, called an ingot gem, and pressed it onto the cloth shaft. He stepped up and stepped on it. It is impossible to do acrobatics when stepping on it. He must support a frame and step on it again so that the cloth is smooth and smooth.
In the “Shang He Tu on Qingming Festival”, whether it is in the Song version or the Ming version, many things that reflect the social reality of the time can be found.
Photography came into being very late, probably in the first half of the 19th century. To understand ancient social life, science and technology, we must rely on these paintings or murals to a large extent.
Fortunately, We have such a valuable resource as “A Picture of the River on the Qingming Festival”, which allows us to travel to the past and talk to the ancients, and to experience the strange and magical world with curiosity. thank you all!
This article is from the official account:Gezhilun Dao Forum (ID: SELFtalks) , author: Shi Xiao Lei, Chinese Academy of sciences Institute of history of Natural Science, Science Communication Research Center Associate Professor