Bao Si, the beloved concubine and queen of Ji Gongni, King You of Zhou. Her surname is Si, and Bao is her birthplace. Bao Si was an abandoned baby who was later adopted by a family named Si in Baocheng. Baocheng at that time was a piece of land in Hanzhong, Shaanxi Province today. The distance between Hanzhong and Xi'an today makes it difficult to measure the distance between Baocheng and Haojing, the capital of the country. In short, not far from the country, three years after King Zhou You ascended the throne, the Bao Kingdom was defeated. The teenage adopted daughter Bao Si was presented to the palace as a gift of atonement by the clan leader. This was in 779 BC.
From then on, Himomiya fell under a spell, and he instantly fell in love with this beauty who didn't like to smile. Maybe love is shallow, because at that time he only saw her beautiful face and enchanting figure, but he didn't know what kind of sorrow was hidden behind her unsmiling face. He was just obsessed with this cold-faced woman until he died.
The arrogant King You changed his cruel and domineering style and took great pains to obey Bao Si. The book says that King You built a beautiful platform for her, made beautiful clothes, summoned musicians to ring bells and drums, taste bamboo and string silk, and made the palace people sing and dance into the wine glass, just to please her.
Where is the Beauty? Volume 1: Past Love, Handing Over the Country to Please You (2)
Never believe too much in words, and don’t believe in the images of the present world, which are deliberately elaborated by future generations. They can't tell you the whole truth, because you will probably be bored after seeing it and lose the desire to imagine. I was shocked when I saw the Xia Dynasty palace model in the Henan Museum. It was far from what was described in the book. The palace was not gorgeous, and the structure was even simpler. It looked like a larger farmyard. No wonder Xi and Daji thought the palace was old and asked the emperor to build a new palace. Obviously, women who are a bit pursuing material things and have some ideas about life style will find it very shabby.
It is inferred from this that the living conditions of Ji Gongni and Baosi are also average, and the so-called delicious food is only a more refined meal, not a Manchu and Han banquet. The pavilions and pavilions are not very luxurious, and they feel completely different from the Forbidden City. The glory of the Forbidden City is the culmination of the accumulated wealth and power of the feudal dynasty for more than two thousand years. If you think that every emperor is having fun in such a palace with his beautiful concubines, then they are really unjust.
"The Chronicles of the States of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty" also wrote that Bao Si liked to hear the sound of tearing silk, so King You ordered people to take silk from the treasury, and asked the powerful palace maid to tear it apart all day long for Bao Si to listen to. Such a description, in Jia Mu's words, "can be said to be a mouthful." After all, the two men Feng and Cai who wrote this book lived in the Ming Dynasty. How could they not make jokes by using the Ming Dynasty's customs to speculate on Zhou people? If the silk splitting incident was still possible in the Ming Dynasty, how high was the productivity level of the entire society in the Zhou Dynasty at that time? How can there be so much silk to be torn up and listened to every day? Moreover, this incident was originally said to be due to happiness, but now it is attributed to Baosi. It can be seen that it is once again the literati's assumption and frame-up.
The strange thing is that Bao Si is not interested in any of these.
Even if King You abolished the empress Shen and the prince with a prominent family background for her, and appointed her son Bofu as the heir apparent, he could not make her smile. This sensitive girl seems to be very aware of her situation and knows that her humble background cannot compete with the famous Empress Shen, so she does not have the usual "only newcomers laugh" in the palace, and she is not seen killing Empress Shen and the prince. Come to think of it, a woman who doesn't like to laugh is destined to not be too enthusiastic about many things. Maybe everything is just the wishful enthusiasm of the man named Himemiya Nirvana.
Bao Si never smiles, which makes her unique and different among these imperial concubines. Even for Xi and Daji, whose beauty and admiration are on the same level, they more or less have to greet the emperor's husband with a smile in order to seduce them. Even if Xi Gui didn't talk to the King of Chu much, it was still necessary to deal with the King of Chu with a smile.
I have counted the concubines and women over the past thousands of years, and the coldness of praise is like piercing the glacier of the Titanic, no one can conquer it.
Second? Farewell with a smile
If you don’t take into account the difference in identity between the two, you can simply think that Himegong Nirvana is the slave assigned by God to Bao Si. Faced with the melancholy and indifferent Bao Si, King You took the trouble to inquire again and again. Bao Si coldly replied: "I have nothing good." When asked again why she didn't smile, Bao Si responded proudly: "I have never smiled in my life."
So the man who loved this woman to the point of madness refused to accept it. He didn’t believe it. As a majestic king of Zhou, there were still things he couldn’t do. The desire to conquer that melted the iceberg made King You think deeply about a question: Why doesn't Bao Si like to laugh? Is it because she has a miserable life experience and is depressed? Did she suddenly enter the palace and leave her hometown and lack a sense of security? Or maybe she is just such a person by nature that she doesn't like to laugh at all and becomes very indifferent to everything?
He just promised a thousand pieces of gold, and as long as he had a plan to make the queen smile, he would be rewarded with a thousand pieces of gold.
The sycophantic minister Guo Shihu proposed a plan, and King You agreed, so an unprecedented farce took place. The reason why it was unprecedented was because it was so absurd that even the more absurd emperors in later generations did not have the courage to imitate it. If someone told you that the leader of a superpower tested an atomic bomb just to make a woman laugh, would you believe it? But the history of ancient China tells you to the letter: A king of Zhou who ruled the world, in order to make his beloved concubine smile, he played with the princes on Mount Li by beacon fire.
People shake their heads but can’t help but admire and admire the "thousands of gold to buy smiles" by later generations of merchants, because it is maintained within a reasonable range and is so wasteful that it makes people feel deeply romantic. But in ancient times, the idea of ??raising beacon fire and playing tricks on the princes was so romantic that it made people gnash their teeth.
The carriages were rolling, the horses were rustling, the smoke and dust of Mount Li covered the sky and the sun, and all the princes from all walks of life had arrived.
"Your Majesty, where is the enemy?"
King You said happily: "Everyone, thank you for your hard work, please come back."
The princes looked at each other with colorful flags. Swing - in an instant, smoke and dust billowed eastward.
This foolish king thought it was funny to see those princes rushing in and returning without success. He seemed not to know that he was wasting the integrity of the country and the majesty of the king.
If God does evil, you can still do it; if you do evil yourself, you can’t live. There is a clear lesson from ancient times.
The remaining question is why Bao Si smiled brightly because of the beacon fire teasing the princes.
Now that I think about it, it may be fate to play the princes with beacon fire. Only the hard work of millions of people can make such an iceberg beauty like Bao Si thaw out and put on a smile. Bao Si has passed away, and no one knows what she saw in the sky full of fire. Why is she laughing? This is an eternal mystery.
But I really can’t hide my fondness for this woman. Everything she does is straightforward. When she doesn’t smile, she won’t smile no matter how hard King You tries. When she wants to laugh, even if it costs her everything. Even if the country is beautiful, she still smiles. As a teenager, she didn't look like a scheming woman who was greedy for wealth, but she was surprisingly mysterious and melancholy. When the fate of the clan's defeat deprived her of her right to choose, and when King You couldn't help but fall in love with her, she remained the same as before, with a cold expression but a hot body, a distant expression and a gentle and cheerful expression.
The war broke out as scheduled. The deposed queen's brother Shenhou led the dog soldiers into Haojing, and King You and Bofu were killed. On the beacon tower, there is no longer the princes of King Qin, and there is no more peerless smile, only the true surrender of the country and the destruction of the city.
That was 771 BC. After all, King You and Bao Si only lived together for eight years.
The history books no longer have a favorable ending for Bao Si. Her whereabouts are unknown and her life and death are unpredictable. Maybe she finally believed that all seasons would fade away, maybe there was no paradise on this path she took, but it was just that she would never meet a man like King You who was willing to tease the world for her beautiful smile.
It is rare to be so lighthearted for love. No matter how absurd the story is and how unbearable these two people are, what I can see is a bit of sincerity in the smoke and dust of the beacon fire.