Only the capital can hold a lantern festival for five days in a row.
The Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month is also called Shangyuan Festival, or Shangyuan Festival for short. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Cao Yunzheng said in a poem: "Three nights in the Shang Yuan Dynasty passed, and the New Year's Festival was over with the lights." After the Lantern Festival, the traditional Spring Festival is over. The theme of the Lantern Festival is lights. Without colorful lantern shows, the Lantern Festival will definitely become extremely boring. Fortunately, there was a Lantern Festival in the Song Dynasty, which was not only grand, but also very lively and fun. The staple food of Lantern Festival is dumplings, which are sweet, soft, fragrant and glutinous, making this festival sweet and round. People in the Song Dynasty always eat glutinous rice balls during the Lantern Festival. Besides glutinous rice balls, they also eat other foods, such as burnt rice, glutinous rice, tadpole soup and salted black bean soup, which are all seasonal delicacies of the Lantern Festival. People in Song Dynasty loved to play, to be lively, to be entertained and to live. In the capital of Song Dynasty, around the 15th day of the first month of each year, there are various grand performances arranged by the government on both sides of Yujie Street south of the Palace, including acrobatics, magic, animal training, storytelling, rap and music ... The artists of Jiaofang and folk artists are on the same stage, and the civil and military officials and ordinary people are rewarded, and they are all free to watch. Now let's go back to Dasong and have a Lantern Festival with the people of the Song Dynasty.
in the early years of the northern song dynasty, the lantern festival lasted only three days, namely the 14th, 15th and 16th of the first month. During these three nights, the gates of major cities all over the country were wide open, kept open all night, and there was no curfew in the streets. Farmers were free to enter the city, and citizens could stay out all night. Everyone was happy to watch the light show. However, in the early morning of the 17th day of the first month, the government will force the lights to be turned off, the gates will be opened and closed regularly, and the patrol appointed by the government will interrogate or even take away the pedestrians who are still staying outside after 9: pm. To put it simply: After the 16th day of the first month, the light show will be over. In the third year of Song Taizong's peaceful and rejuvenating the country (978), Qian Hong, the king of Wu Yueguo, who was separated from the south of the Yangtze River, surrendered to the Great Song Dynasty, and devoted his hands to the territory of Jiangsu and Zhejiang and the wealth of his country to Song Taizong. Emperor Taizong was overjoyed, so he extended the Lantern Festival in the second year by two days, that is, from the 14th day of the first month to the 18th day of the first month. Since then, "going to Yuan for three nights" has become "going to Yuan for five nights".
However, the policy of five-day light show has not been popularized all over the country. Only the capital can do that, and other state capitals can only hold three-day light shows. About twenty years later, Minister Zhang Yong took power in Sichuan, put down the rebellion, developed the economy, and made Sichuan very rich. The gentry in Sichuan said: We have money here, and the people's lives are no worse than those in Beijing. The Lantern Festival in Beijing is open for five days, and we only have three days here, which is too little. In line with public opinion, Zhang Yong advanced the start time of the Lantern Festival by one day, starting from the thirteenth day of the first month and still ending on the sixteenth day of the first month, allowing Sichuan people to play for four nights in a row. In the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty, when Song and Jin were at war, Song Gaozong was too busy running for his life to attend to the Lantern Festival. It was not until the third year after Song and Jin made peace (1143) that he announced the resumption of the Lantern Festival, but the time for the Lantern Festival was only three days. Why not do it for five days like the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty? The main reason is that a large number of northern refugees have flooded into cities in the south of the Yangtze River, and the houses are dense and crude, which are very prone to fire. In order to reduce the incidence of fire, the duration of the lantern show must be shortened.
by the middle of the southern song dynasty, the war was quiet, the political situation was stable, and the market layout and fire control measures in cities south of the Yangtze river such as Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Suzhou and Nanjing were basically mature, so the three-day lantern show was extended to five days from Hangzhou, the capital city. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Chen Yuanliang's "Guang Ji at the Age of Years" said: "Hangyi first watched the lights for five nights, and then the counties could do it with public money and people's resources, up to five nights." Hangzhou took the lead in extending the lantern show to five days, and other cities followed suit. As long as they have money and can afford it, they will continue to do so. How to do security work during the light show?
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the first month, the emperor took the prince, concubines and eunuchs to the Xuande Building and personally watched the thorn basin lamp in Panlou Street and the Bodhisattva lamp in Yujie Street. Under the Xuande Building, on the north side of Panlou Street, opposite the Spine Pot Lamp, there are dozens of stands facing the street, in which the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Tang Dynasty envoys, six ministers and their families sit. The emperor watched the lights upstairs in Xuande, and these ministers watched the lights downstairs in the stands. Low-ranking officials and the common people of the Li people have no stands, and they are crowded in the street to watch, and Panlou Street and Yujie Street are packed. For the convenience of watching the lights, those wise men and rich people with foresight made a reservation in the restaurant facing the street ten days in advance, and while watching the lights, they drank too much with their relatives and friends. It's too late for others to book seats, so "A Talk on Newly Made Drunken Man" says: "Everyone wants to have a dinner party, but there is no place to go, so there are many people."
I couldn't find a place to eat in a hotel during the light show, because others had already booked it out. Because there are emperors who enjoy themselves with the people, the lantern shows in Panlou Street and Yujie Street are the biggest in the city. However, the emperor was easily sleepy (he had to get up early in the morning, so he had to go to bed early), and went back to his bedroom to rest in the middle of the night (midnight), so the light shows on Panlou Street and Yujie Street would also end early. For example, "Tokyo Dream of China Record" says: At the third drum, everyone knows that the car is still in the air with a small red gauze lamp ball. When you hear the sound of whipping outside the building, hundreds of thousands of lights and candles go up and down the mountain.
at midnight, a little red gauze lantern was suddenly raised from the upstairs of Xuande. When the citizens watching the lantern saw it, they knew that the emperor was going back to his bedroom. After a while, I heard another whip, pa, which was a code word, indicating that the emperor had left, so hundreds of thousands of lanterns went out at the same time, and the light show came to an end. Don't be disappointed, the light show here is over, and other places have just begun. Sleepless officials and the people moved to the battlefield and went to Sokokuji, the Great Buddha Temple, the Baozhen Palace, Liquan Temple, Xingjie Ma and Niuxing Street ... because there are also light shows in these places, and they will last until dawn.
The Lantern Festival in Beijing is so lively that petty theft is hard to avoid. We can often see stories of losing jewelry, losing wallets, losing children and losing family members during the light show when we read the story of the Song Dynasty. As for the Tokyo Lantern Festival in The Water Margin, it is not impossible for Liangshan heroes to visit Beijing, which led to likui jy's making a scene in Tokyo and killing people.
In order to ensure the property and life safety of the people enjoying the lanterns, officials in Kaifeng really tried their best. The first is fire prevention. In the Song Dynasty, there were no fire engines and high-pressure water guns, so we had to rely on ladders, forks, hooks and buckets to put out the fire. Therefore, next to each light shed, there was a ladder, a giant bucket and a number of soldiers (fire police), and the bucket was filled with clear water for fire fighting.
Secondly, in order to prevent children from getting lost, all the major alleys in Kaifeng have set up "small shadow play sheds" in the community for children to watch. At that time, there were no cartoons. Shadow artists used lights, gestures, paper figures and shadow puppets to project simple and interesting animations on the set, which really attracted children to watch and prevented them from running around and being abducted by bad people.
Thirdly, Kaifeng attaches great importance to setting an example for others. According to "Tokyo Dream Record", when the thorn basin lamp was exhibited in Panlou Street, "Kaifeng Yin played the curtain, listed the sinners before they were full, and then decided to send them back to warn the ignorant people." Thieves who steal people's money and hooligans who flirt with women are found in the crowd, and they are immediately pulled to the front of the lamp shed for public display, or beaten on the board, or sentenced to prison, so that those bad guys who are eager to move know the severity of the punishment and the consequences of evil, so as to stop from the brink and dare not do evil again. What are the fillings of dumplings in Song Dynasty?
It is said in "Guang Ji at the Age of Years" that people in Beijing use mung bean powder as tadpole soup. Boiled glutinous rice is a pill, and sugar is a pill, which is called a "round son". Salted black beans, twisted heads, and mixed meat to make soup are called "salted black beans soup", which is all eaten on the Yuan Festival ... There was a "silk rice" on the Yuan Dynasty, and it was smashed with rice. Zhu Luzhi, Xuan Huang Zhi, and southerners thought it was a dish ... On the Yuan Dynasty, the solar eclipse was scorched, and it was the most prosperous and long.
It can be seen that tadpole soup, dumplings, salted black bean soup, silk rice and coke are all food for the Lantern Festival. "Tadpole Soup" is made of mung bean powder, so it is called "Tadpole" because it looks like a tadpole.
People in Song Dynasty invented countless pictographic foods, and tadpole soup should be regarded as the simplest one. How simple is it? Listen to me.
Soak mung beans in water, grind them into thin paste in a stone mill, bring them to the side of the pot, scoop them into the retort (an ancient cooker for steaming rice, which looks like a earthen pot with many holes at the bottom), press them with your hand, and the mung bean paste will fall from the holes in the retort bottom, pattering into the water pot, first sink to the bottom, then float, and cook by two rolls. The hole in the bottom of the retort is round, so the little ball of batter that leaks down is also round. When they leak down, they are bound to encounter some resistance, and they will be broken and dragged, so every little batter is dragging a small tail. Round head, small tail, like a tadpole? Of course it does. So people in Song Dynasty called this kind of food tadpole soup.
The practice of "Yuanzi" has been briefly introduced in "Guang Ji at the Age of Years": "Boil glutinous rice for pills, and sugar for pills." Glutinous rice flour is made into small balls, filled with sugar and cooked in boiling water. Obviously, the dumplings in the Song Dynasty are today's dumplings.
Tangyuan in Song Dynasty was not always filled with sugar. According to the "Yuanxi" section of the second volume of Old Wulin, there are both "lactose dumplings" and "Chengsha dumplings" on the dining table of Hangzhou Yuanxiao in the Southern Song Dynasty. The former is dumplings filled with sugar, and the latter is dumplings filled with bean paste. Of course, the bean paste stuffing also needs sugar.
The practice of "salt-fermented bean soup" is also mentioned in "Guang Ji at the Age of Years": "Salt-fermented bean, twisted head and mixed meat are used to make soup, which is called salt-fermented bean soup." "Salted fermented soybean" means salted fermented soybean, "twisted head" means fried short noodles, commonly known as "fried fingers" and "twisted head", and
"miscellaneous meat" means mixed meat. Stew salted lobster sauce, fried fingers and meat together to make salted lobster sauce soup. In fact, the salted lobster sauce soup has a long history and is very popular in ancient China. There are many ways to make it. In other words, lobster sauce can be mixed with many kinds of ingredients to make soup. At present, the cooking method of cooking soup with douchi as the main ingredient has disappeared in Chinese mainland, but it has been carried forward in Japan and South Korea in the east.
Salted black bean soup was once introduced to Japan and South Korea, and later developed into miso soup and miso soup respectively.
"Silk rice" is actually rice noodles, very fine rice noodles, which look like rice noodles today. However, this kind of rice flour was dyed with natural pigments when it was processed. It was red, green, black and yellow. It was cooked in a pot and served on a plate. It was colorful and festive.
"burnt" is also called "oil" and "sugar", in which the pronunciation of the word "burnt" is equivalent to "pile", and sugar is a pile of sugar. Speaking of sugar piles, Tianjin people will get excited, because Tianjin people always call the candied haws made of hawthorn sugar piles. There were hawthorns in the Song Dynasty, but people in the Song Dynasty had not learned to process hawthorns into candied haws. They only used sliced hawthorns to make cakes or pickled them with sugar to make candied fruit.
in the song dynasty, sugar was a small ball made of half flour and half rice flour mixed with sugar and rubbed by hand. It is different from glutinous rice balls, because glutinous rice balls are hollow and filled with stuffing, while sugar is solid, and sugar and powder are mixed together. After rubbing into small balls, fry them in the oil pan. When it comes out of the oil pan, it is crisp, and "crisp" is equivalent to "coke" in the vernacular of Song Dynasty, so people also call sugar coke.
selling coke in song dynasty is very interesting. According to Lu Yuanming's Miscellaneous Notes on the Age of Years in the Northern Song Dynasty: Anyone who sells a drum must ring it, which is called a "drum". Every time a green umbrella is put out of a bamboo frame, it is decorated with small plum-red gold lanterns. Lanterns are also set in front of and behind the bamboo frame. When you beat the drums, you should beat them and walk around in circles, which is called "playing the spin". List the streets and lanes everywhere. Vendors walking around the streets selling coke must be armed to the teeth: carrying bamboo stands behind their backs, leather drums hanging from their waists, touch of green umbrellas in front of the bamboo stands, and lanterns hanging under the green umbrellas. While walking, the peddler drummed the drums, and at the same time, with the rhythm of drumming, he turned the handle of the umbrella with his other hand, so that the green umbrella and the colored lanterns under the umbrella flew round and round, like a lantern.