Meng Xi Bi Tan records that people in Guanzhong don't know crabs. After someone received a dried crab, they hung it on the door as a "mascot" to prevent malaria.
The ancients were superstitious, and it was generally believed that the reason why people suffered from malaria was because a malaria ghost was at work. Crab, an animal like Weichi Gong, a keeper, can effectively scare off malaria ghosts, so as long as a crab is hung at the door, the disease will not dare to visit people's homes. Meng Xi Bi Tan also mentioned that the crabs of Guanzhong generation "are not only ignorant of people, but also ignorant of ghosts".
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This is enough to show that hanging crabs on the door to prevent malaria was common at that time, but the effect was not very good. It can be said that until the Song Dynasty, the traffic in China was not very developed, so the people living in Guanzhong had never seen what crabs were. However, cities close to the sea and villages and towns near rivers and lakes have long had the custom of eating crabs.
Zheng Xuan, a Confucian scholar in the Eastern Han Dynasty, made a textual research on the history of China people eating crabs, and thought that China people had already started eating crabs as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, there is a big gap between the way the ancients ate crabs and the way they eat them now. At that time, there were no "eight crabs", so eating crabs was quite troublesome.
Zhou people eat crabs and only eat crabs. The so-called "crab sauce" is a kind of crab sauce. Qingzhou people in the Western Zhou Dynasty invented this delicious and convenient sauce (later, the shrimp sauce of Shandong people also had the same effect). It can be seen that as early as two weeks ago, the ancients became "crab eaters" and regarded them as delicious and enjoyable.
During the Eastern Jin Dynasty, there was an official named Bi Zhuo, who was a drunkard without drinking or drinking. He always likes to eat a few crabs when he drinks. Bi Zhuo often interferes with his work because of drinking. Every time he smells the brewing in the neighborhood, he jumps into someone else's yard at night to steal wine, and is often caught red-handed by his neighbor's servants.
The servant didn't know Bi Zhuo, but regarded him as a common thief. After catching him, he beat him and threw him into the woodshed. It was not until the next morning that the neighbor discovered that the thief was actually Lang Bizhuo, the official department, so he quickly released it and presented some newly brewed wine as a gift. Bi Zhuo once said: "When you have hundreds of boats full of wine, you can put them at both ends at four o'clock, holding a glass in your right hand and a crab claw in your left hand, and you can pat them in a floating wine boat for a lifetime." Holding a glass in one hand and a crab in the other is the lifelong pursuit of Bi Zhuo, a native of the Eastern Jin Dynasty.
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In the Book of Jin, a guy with a low official position and no outstanding achievements like Bi Zhuo can be biographied by historians, mostly because of his unique dietary preferences. With the popularity of eating crabs in the south,