Folklore is a story created by working people and related to certain historical figures, historical events and social customs. Although legends are also stories, they are different from stories: stories can be fabricated at will, but legends are often the product of history and related to actual things, so they contain some historical facts and have certain historical characteristics. Therefore, the legend about the origin of chopsticks can find some reference for the traceability of chopsticks.
"God Birds Save Jiang Ziya", a legend of chopsticks spread in Sichuan and other places.
Jiang Ziya knows nothing but straight hook fishing, so he is very poor. And his wife can't live any longer, so she wants to kill him and marry someone else.
On this day, Jiang Ziya went fishing and returned empty-handed. His wife said, "You are hungry. I cooked meat for you. Eat it! " ! Jiang Ziya was really hungry, so he reached for the meat. Suddenly a bird flew out of the window and pecked him. He was in pain. He didn't eat meat, so he went to catch birds. When he went to get the meat for the second time, the bird pecked the back of his hand again. Jiang Ziya became suspicious. Why did this bird peck me twice? Can't I eat this meat? In order to try the bird, he caught the meat for the third time, and then the bird pecked him again. Knowing that it was a divine bird, he pretended to drive the bird away and chased it outside to an uninhabited hillside. He saw the bird perched on a silk bamboo and whispered, "Jiang Ziya, Jiang Ziya, don't grab the meat with your hands, it's under my feet ..." "Jiang Ziya listened to the bird's advice and took two thin bamboos home. At this time, his wife urged him to eat meat again, so Jiang Ziya put two thin silk bamboos into a bowl, and just threatened the meat, only the silk bamboos creaked into thick smoke. Pretending to know nothing about poisoning, Jiang Ziya said to his wife, "How can meat smoke? Is it poisonous? " There is no poison, you know that silk and bamboo can't touch meat. "It's not poisonous, so you can have one." Jiang Ziya picked up the meat and sent it to his wife's mouth. She turned pale with fear and hurried out of the door.
Jiang Ziya knew that this bamboo was a gift from God Bird, and any poison could be detected. Since then, he has eaten with two bamboo sticks every meal. After the news came out, not only did his wife dare not poison again, but the neighbors also learned to eat with bamboo sticks. Later, more and more people followed suit and the custom of eating with chopsticks was passed down from generation to generation.
This legend is obviously the product of worshipping Jiang Ziya, and it is also inconsistent with historical records. Because ivory chopsticks appeared in the Yin Dynasty, Jiang Ziya and Yin were contemporaries. Since Zhou Wang has been using ivory chopsticks, thin bamboo chopsticks in Jiang Ziya are far from being invented.
Da ji, a caged princess in Shang Zhouwang, fed Zhou Wang with a jade hairpin, which is a legend of chopsticks circulating in Jiangsu.
Shang Zhouwang is moody. When eating, he either said that the fish was not fresh, that the chicken soup was too hot, and sometimes he said that the food was cold and could not be eaten. Many chefs have become ghosts under his sword in order to eat. Favorite da ji also knows that she is difficult to serve, so every time she gives a banquet, she tastes it in advance, lest Zhou Wang get angry again. Once, I tasted a bowl of delicious food that was too hot, but it was too late to change it, because Zhou Wang had come to the table. In order to please Zhou Wang, da ji used his quick wits. He took off the long Hosta on his head, picked up the food, blew it and sent it to Zhou Wang's mouth. Zhou Wang is a dissolute and shameless person. He thought it was a pleasure to feed da ji with food, so he wanted da ji to do it every day. Later, da ji asked craftsmen to make two jade chopsticks for her to hold food, which was the initial prototype of jade chopsticks. Later, this way of carrying food spread to the people, so chopsticks came into being in China.
Different from the first legend, the legend of chopsticks is not full of myth, but close to life, which has certain practical significance, but even the legend is still inconsistent with the facts. Because the bronze chopsticks excavated by archaeologists in the Yin Tomb at Houjiazhuang 1005 in Anyang predate the era of Zhou Wang at the end of Yin Dynasty, it is obvious that chopsticks were not invented by Zhou Wang or my sister, but should be an earlier product.
"Dayu fished out hot food in the pot with branches and thin bamboo poles" is a legend of chopsticks circulating in Northeast China.
In the Yao-Shun era, floods caused disasters, and Shun ordered Yu to control water. After Dayu was ordered, he vowed to clear the flood for the people, so he searched his house three times and didn't go in. He struggled with fierce water waves day and night, not to mention resting, and even eating and sleeping, he could not bear to delay a minute.
Once, Dayu came to an island by boat. He was hungry, so he set up a clay pot cook the meat. After the meat is cooked, he can't grasp the food with his hands because it is too hot. Dayu didn't want to wait for the meat pot to get cold and waste time, so he cut off two branches and took the meat out of the soup to eat. From then on, in order to save time, Dayu always fished food from the boiling pot with branches and thin bamboo poles to make time for emergency affairs. Over time, Dayu skillfully learned the skill of holding food with a thin stick. People under his command saw him eat vegetables like this, neither spicy nor greasy, and followed suit, thus gradually forming the prototype of chopsticks.
Although legends mainly express people's understanding, views and feelings about historical events through some historical materials, they do not strictly reproduce the historical events themselves. But people today believe that it is true after hearing the initial process of Dayu's misuse of chopsticks in water control. Compared with the legend of making chopsticks in Jiang Ziya and da ji, it is more simple and true, and it also conforms to the law of the development of things.
The most important opportunity to promote the birth of chopsticks is that cooked food is hot. In ancient times, because there were no metal utensils, and because animal bones were too short and brittle to be processed easily, our ancestors picked bamboo and branches to catch cooked food. In the wilderness, human beings live in dense forests and grass holes, and the most convenient materials are trees and bamboo poles. Because of this, the ancestors fiddled with sticks and thin bamboo when baking, scooped them up when eating hot food, and stirred them when cooking corn and millet, only then did the embryonic form of chopsticks gradually appear. This is an inevitable development law under the special environment of human beings. From the present modeling research of chopsticks, it still has the characteristics of primitive bamboo sticks, and even after three years of development, its primitiveness cannot be changed.
Of course, any legend has always been processed through the selection, tailoring, fiction, exaggeration, rendering and even fantasy art of past generations.
The legend that Dayu created chopsticks is no exception. This paper focuses on Dayu, a typical figure who has been groping for chopsticks for thousands of years. In fact, the birth of chopsticks should be the collective wisdom of ancestors, not the credit of one person. However, chopsticks may have originated in the Dayu era. After hundreds of years or even years of exploration and popularization, chopsticks became tableware used with spoons in the Shang Dynasty.
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