Spring and Autumn Warring States
Literally, the ancient “toilet” is from the wide, wide like the house; from the then, then the side, which can be interpreted as “the side house next to the house”.
Earlier texts called “toilet” “qing”, or “溷” or “圊”. “Shuowen” Yun: “Toilet, Qingye.” Yun of the “Interpretation of the Name”: “溷, for turbidity; 圊, for the most filthy place, it is advisable to cultivate and cure it constantly to make it clean and clean.” The toilet is also known as “偃”, “Zhuangzi Gengsangchu”: “The viewer of the room zhou yu sleeping temple, and suitable for his yan.” Note the cloud: “Yan is called a screen toilet.” “It seems that when the ancients visited the living houses, they had to go to the toilet to check it, and the toilet had to be covered with a barrier.
The above explanation roughly outlines the initial shape and function of the toilet. It shows that during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the construction and use of toilets were already very standardized.
Han dynasty
“Mozi Banner” once described the public toilets of the Han Dynasty: there were screens on the outside of the road, with a circumference of 30 steps, generally more than 12 feet high. – Public toilets developed to the Han Dynasty and needed to be managed by special personnel.
The Article of Liu An, Volume VIII of the Taiping Guangji, records that Liu An chengxian, met Xian Bo, sat up disrespectfully, and spoke in a loud voice. Therefore, the master of Xian Bo played Liu An disrespectful and should be reprimanded and sent away, so that Liu An would “guard the capital toilet for three years.” Although this is a myth, it can be seen that the urban public toilets of the Han Dynasty already had a set of rules, and the level was not low.
Yudong found the tomb of the queen of the Western Han Dynasty Liang XiaoWang, one of the most amazing utensils in the tomb is the toilet – a stone handrail on the right side of the urinal, set in the back stone slab of the urinal, there are two boot-shaped portrait stones on the urinal, which are carved with buildings, evergreen trees and geometric patterns with yin line carvings, which are no less than modern luxuriously decorated urinals more than two thousand years ago.
Reflecting the Han Dynasty is the way Lin’an in the Mengliang Lu collects excrement. This kind of special management, by special people to collect feces, dedicated to one place, has the nature of the industry, which is also a kind of public toilet.
Ming and Qing dynasties
Not every dynasty’s public toilet business was built and managed well. There were very few public toilets on the streets of Beijing in the Ming and Qing dynasties, so that it was called “no toilet in Beijing”. Wang Siren of the Ming Dynasty once painted a picture in the “Literary and Rice Sketches”: “The streets and alleys of the Sorrowful Beijing Residence are muddy, and every time you are cool and wrapped up.” It is not difficult to feast anywhere, and there is no place to live. From a macroscopic point of view, public health in the south of the Ming and Qing dynasties was stronger than in the north.
The novel “Digging a New Pit and Becoming a Rich Man” written by a famous person in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties reflects such a side through the construction and management of public toilets in the countryside of Wucheng County, Huzhou: First, there are more urban toilets in the Qing Dynasty. (Mu Taigong went to the city because of this.) Seeing that there were “cesspool pits” next to the road, I used my brain to do the toilet business. In his view, “it is better to do a different kind of business”; second, the rural toilet is also very standardized. (Mu Taigong asked the bricklayer to “dig the three houses in front of the door into three large pits, each pit was divided by a small wall, and the walls were powdered, and he rushed to the relatives in the city, and asked countless poems and paintings to be pasted on the walls of this dung house”, and he invited a town teacher to name this toilet with a non-trivial “Tooth Lord’s Hall”. ）；
Third, the toilet business should also be advertised. (Mu Taigong was afraid that the people would not know the toilet he had built, and asked Mr. Teaching to write a hundred and ten “newspaper notes” to be pasted on all sides, which read: Mu family spray incense new pit, ask gentlemen near and far to take care of it, and this house is willing to paste straw paper.) Fourth, the toilet should also be beautiful and convenient. (Mu Taigong powdered the toilet “like a snow cave, a little different than a countryman’s bedroom.”) The villagers slapped their butts after going to the toilet, “using straw tiles”, Mu Taigong paired it with ready-made “straw paper”, plus the toilet he opened “the walls are full of flowers and greenery, the most eye-catching, climbing a new pit, like looking at a scenery”. Even the female stream came to the pit, and Mu Taigong built another women’s toilet. Fifth, toilet feces can be sold. (In the “Shen’s Nongshu” of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, there is a record of going to Hangzhou to buy human dung, and Mu Taigong’s sale of dung can be mutually verified: for a while, the farmers who planted the fields came to buy at his house, and each carton was a price of silver and a dollar, and there were more firewood, rice, and oil to exchange.) Sixth, toilet civilization has been formed. (“Those big men and little women, like dots, fish come in and go, and they don’t stop shuttling and moving around”, Mu Taigong “got up at five more every day, put straw paper, and didn’t even have time to eat.”) This makes people feel the blowing of the civilized habits of the countryside during the Ming and Qing dynasties. ）
