EVERYDAY LIFE · SHANG TO QING
Stories
Small questions open a window onto a different world.
The Donkey in the Well: Temple Illusions in Northern Wei Luoyang
At a Luoyang nunnery an entertainer skinned a donkey into a well and made dates and melons edible in a moment; the audience was spellbound — and after the wars, the record says, the show simply vanished.
When the Gates Opened: A Day in Qing Beijing
Beijing's gates opened by the court calendar, not the clock: at dawn on audience days, after the morning bell, before the fifth watch; at night a tally from the palace had to match the gate's half before it opened.
A List of Things: What Was Inside a Song House
A Southern Song market list records tables, stools, bamboo beds, summer mats, a bamboo bolster called the 'bamboo wife', washbasins, a chamber pot, a bronze hand-warmer and charcoal cakes.
Questions on Bone: How the Shang Fed Their Ancestors
The Shang believed the dead became ancestors who could help the living, so they offered food and wine, divined the harvest on oracle bones, and buried retainers and sacrificial victims with the bronze.
Mallows, Beans and a Lamb: What People Ate in the Spring and Autumn
The ode "Seventh Month" lists a year of food — mallows, beans, dates, rice for wine, gourds, bitter herbs — with millets as staples and lamb for the year-end feast. Two meals a day; no menu survives.
Preserving Meat Without a Fridge: Rice, Wine Lees and Mud
One pig killed in the twelfth month and three ways to keep it: pork packed in cooked rice until it sours, meat buried in salted wine lees, and cuts sealed in mud on the north wall.
Slave to the Milk: Wang Su, Tea and a Northern Court's Taste
A southern defector reached Luoyang in 494 refusing mutton and milk and drinking tea by the measure. Years later he ate milk gruel at the emperor's table and called tea the slave of milk.
Three Shi, Three Dou, Three Sheng: A Ration Register from the Han Frontier
One 4.66-gram wooden slip from a Han frontier post records fifteen men, their grain ration of three shi three dou three sheng, and the month each collected it himself.
A Northern Wei Meal: Noodles, Roast Suckling Pig and Milk Curd
A sixth-century northern meal built without a wok: dough cut one foot or two inches at a time, a suckling pig turned over a low fire and brushed with wine, milk set with a spoon of starter and beaten into butter.