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Song · Daily Life
What Kaifeng Ate Before Daylight
In the Northern Song capital, breakfast started at the fifth watch with a monastery runner's wooden fish, a hundred bakery ovens, and a bowl of gourd soup for ten cash.
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The Tower That Rang: Yongning Monastery's Pagoda
A nine-storey timber tower ninety zhang high, a ten-zhang golden spire, 130 bells and 5,400 more on its doors: built in 516, burned in 534, alight for three months.
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.
The Ingot in the Dumpling: New Year in Qing Beijing
In Qing Beijing the year began with boiled white-flour dumplings, some hiding a tiny gold ingot; spring arrived with a radish, five nights of lanterns followed, and shops reopened on the sixth day.
Two Questions on One Shell: An Ordinary Day in Shang China
On one turtle shell the diviner Wei asked, on the same day, whether the harvest would come and whether it would not. Oracle bones are royal records; ordinary people appear only as "the many".
Eight Hundred Kilos of Bronze: How Shang Status Was Cast
The 832.84 kg ding took eight body moulds, three per leg, over a tonne of metal and seventy crucibles; Lady Hao's tomb held 1,928 objects, 755 of them jade, more than 200 older than she was.
A Deer Hide Worth 400,000 Coins: Han China's Money Experiments
A foot-square of white deer hide priced at 400,000 coins and required at court; silver pieces valued at 3,000, 500 and 300 by their designs; a red-edged coin passing for five. All of it failed.
Double Ninth in Song China: Named Chrysanthemums, Lion Cakes and Palace Lanterns
In Song China the ninth day of the ninth month brought five named chrysanthemums, flour lions on steamed cakes, hilltop feasts and, in the palace, chrysanthemum lanterns lit as at New Year.
One Crossbow, Fifty Paces of Wall: The Working Life of a Warring States Siege
A Qin crossbow trigger like those from the terracotta pits; a Mozi manual that assigns men, stones, water and torches to every fifty paces of wall — instructions for holding a city, not battle reports.
The Goose and the Gourd: Marriage Rules and Real Marriages in the Spring and Autumn
The ritual books set out six stages, a go-between, a gift and a ban on same-surname marriage; the Zuo Zhuan records political unions, accompanying women and one duke who took his son's bride.