EVERYDAY LIFE · SHANG TO QING
Stories
Small questions open a window onto a different world.
The Guild Elder and the Matchmaker: How Song Cities Hired People
In Song cities you hired through an intermediary: guild elders supplied cooks, clerks and chair-bearers, brokers brought women servants, and a surety stood behind every name.
The Night the Wine Ran Out
Song wine shops rebuilt their fronts with coloured silk for mid-autumn and sold new wine. In Kaifeng it was gone by early afternoon and the sign came down; that night the city burned lamps on the river.
Mud, Silk and Gold: The Qixi Dolls of Song China
Before Qixi, Song market streets sold mohele — small clay dolls in carved stands under red gauze. One pair could cost thousands; by the Southern Song, the palace ordered three hundred a year.
A Day in the Storytellers' Sheds
In Kaifeng's entertainment wards the storytellers split into four houses. Meng Yuanlao lists the men who told the Three Kingdoms and the Five Dynasties, and notes the sheds were full every day, rain or shine.
A Hundred Ways of Calling: How Street Cries Became Music in Song China
Before dawn in Kaifeng, food sellers were already 吟叫百端, a hundred ways of calling. Their cries were fitted to palace modes as a genre called 叫声, and Hangzhou kept a roster of men who lived by it.
The Wrestler's Purse: Professional Wrestling in Song China
In Song cities wrestling was a paid trade: market fighters drew crowds with women's opening bouts, and the champion at a Lin'an terrace took a banner, a silver basin, silk, a brocade jacket, paper money and a horse.
No Slot in the Roster: How the Idle Men of Hangzhou Made a Living
Two Hangzhou guidebooks keep a chapter on 闲人, men with no trade who lived off the rich: lettered hangers-on, bird handlers, barbers who brokered deals, and men who sold a greeting.
One Hundred and Twenty Coins: Fame and Price in a Song City
A bowl of gourd soup cost 120 full coins beside the emperor's viewing stand and ten in an ordinary shop. What the gap measures, and how a fish-soup seller grew rich.
The Wedding Was Rented: Hiring a Banquet in Song China
A Song city household could stage a wedding without owning the chairs, the wine cups or the cooks. The rental lists show a service economy built on things returned the next day.