Eating dumplings with your head down means spending the summer in peace.

It is a traditional custom to eat dumplings with your head bent down. Dumplings were a rare food in ancient times. However, because dumplings are shaped like ingots, ingots belong to gold, and gold treasures always lie down, so "Fu" and "Fu" are homophonic, which means blessing. Full. Therefore, people choose to eat dumplings on this day, which also means that they hope to survive the bitter summer safely.

Dongfang Shuo in the Han Dynasty said in his annotation to "Jiao Si Ji": "Fu means that the yin energy is about to rise and is forced by the setting sun but cannot be released, so it is called Zangfu, so it is also called Furi." That is to say, after the summer solstice, the weather is getting shorter and shorter day by day, and the Yin Qi is radiating. Because the residual power of the sun has not passed, suppressing the Yin Qi, the weather is still very hot. And "in summer, three Geng and several tumulus fall", so people will choose to eat dumplings in the first volt, hoping to spend the summer safely.

Analysis of taufu

Toufu is the first volt of the "three volts". Its date starts from the third Geng day after the summer solstice to the period before the fourth Geng day after the summer solstice. Because there are 10 days between each Geng day, the first fall period is 10 days. The "volt" in the three volts has two meanings. First, it means that Yin Qi is forced by Yang Qi to hide underground; second, it means that the weather is too hot and it is better to lie down and not move. Its climate is characterized by "high temperature and high humidity". ?

"Three Volts" and "Three Heats" (slight heat, severe heat, and extreme heat in the twenty-four solar terms) both represent high-temperature extreme weather. The curves on the time axis and the temperature axis are basically the same: when summer comes, The dog days are coming; the dog days are gone, and the summer heat is coming to an end. The reason why the ancients called the extremely hot days of the year "summer" and also found the word "volt" to accompany it is that in addition to the cultural meaning, another important purpose is for health reasons.