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The Capital Hangzhou • Jacob D’ancona: • “is a city all painted in gold, with the highest wall in the world, together with many lakes and gardens, a thousand temples, fifty monasteries, more canals than may be found in Venice, four thousand bridges of stone and more than nine hundred thousand hearths” • “It is the greatest city upon the earth, requiring four days’ journey to go round the walls”
Hangzhou was on the Qian River, bordered by the West Lake and run through with canals • The dynamic city was praised for its commercial hustle and bustle • It was regarded as the hub of the universe.
Imperial Palace • “The emperor lived in a grand marble palace with more than five thousand rooms, all adorned with gold and jewels.” • “he is surrounded by eunuchs, scribes, servants, astrologers, women and others given to idleness, together with keepers of the animals of the emperor, as masters of the hawks and gyr-falcons
Hangzhou: Housing • Housing • Basic materials: wood, bamboo, bricks, tiles • Some peasants gave up cultivation of rice for forestry work and sold wood to merchants in the city • Stone, considered noble material fit for ornamentation and carving, was reserved for the ramparts, dykes, and for Buddhist towers
Curved roofs (roofs with upturned edges) were reserved for the houses for people of high rank and for government buildings • Ornaments in the forms of aigrettes and small terracotta animals, dragons and phoenixes, were placed on the ridge and eaves of roofs on the houses of nobles and officials, as well as on gov’t buildings. They were forbidden to the common people
Structure of Houses • Exterior: Gardens with man-made natural scenery • Little artificial hills, winding streams with waterfalls, ponds in which swam gold and silver fish, referred to as “long-life fish” • Rare flowers, pine trees, rocks, miniature mountain, dwarf trees
Interior: • Rectangular tables, little pedestal tables, armchairs, circular stools, light chairs known as “barbarian seats” • Beds made of wood or black lacquer (red lacquer reserved for the emperor’s use) • Scrolls, usually landscapes, and fine specimens of calligraphy covered an entire wall. • Antique vases and terracotta animals. • Flowers: jasmine, peonies, chrysanthemums, daphne, magnolia and orchids; blossoms of fruit trees such plum, pear, peach, pomegranate and cheery
Personal Toilet • A special taste of bathing was highly developed • Bathing and washing the hair were regarded as an important operation • Official salaries were known as “emoluments of the bath and hair washing”
Baths were taken for pleasure; many public bathing establishments were available (ca. 3,000) • Bathing was accompanied by services such as massage, tea, alcoholic drinks • Extreme cases found in some bath maniacs such as Mi Fu (1051-1107), an eccentric painter and calligrapher, who had a religious phobia for dirt of any kind and who washed his hand every few minutes.
Women and Cosmetics • Wore make-up that consisted of a white foundation, with powder of a deep rose shade placed on the cheeks • Covered their faces in winter time with a kind of ointment with a vegetable base • Took great care of their nails: • Tinted their nails with a product made up from pink balsam leaves crushed in alum
Put oil on their hair to make it smooth and shining • Plucked the eyebrows and penciled them in with a black line, which is thought to make it more attractive • Wore perfume sachets hung from their girdles
Cooking • Hundreds of names of dishes served in Hangzhou’s innumerable restaurants and taverns • Hanzhou had several varieties of regional cooking, because a large number of refugees and temporary visitors assembled in the city • Predominant cuisine was a combination of that of Henan and that of Zhejiang • Other regional cuisines were also popular: Sichuan, Shandong and Hobei, Quzhou Famous Song dish: Xihu cuyu (West Lake Vinegar fish)
Drinking and Eating • Wine made from grapes, raisins and dates became popular with wealthy families. • Common people remained loyal to rice-wine (ca. 54 kinds) • Milk and cheese were absent. • Tea enjoyed extraordinary vogue. Large teahouses had paintings and calligraphies displayed. • Teahouses also sold salted soybean soup and plum-flower wine. • “Water teahouses” were pleasure houses in disguise. “Longjing Xiaren” (Longjing shelled shrimps) Songsao yugeng (Madame Song’s Fish Broth
Food • Food for low classes: • Rice, pork, fish formed the main diet • Offal: liver, lights (lungs), kidneys and tripes • Cooked food sold by street peddlers at any time of the day • Food for the well-to-do: • Foul, geese, mutton, shell-fish and fresh fish of al kinds • Exotic dishes: shell-fish cooked in rice-wine, goose with apricots, lotus-seed soup, pimento-soup with mussels, fish cooked with plums “Dongpo rou” (Dongpo’s Pork)
Families in Hanzhou • Children were asked to protect the status and the power of the family • The birth of a boy generally more favorably viewed, but birth of a girl not viewed with disfavor • Girls could be placed in rich families as concubines companions, embroiderers, actresses, zither-players, chess-players, cooks… • Wealthy merchants welcomed girls, and married them off to scholars’ families “YIngxi tu” (Children Playing)
Children • Poverty obliged poor peasants to have their children separated from them, and sometimes drove them to infanticide • Newly-born infants, if not drown, were abandoned in the streets Song children’s clay toys, preserved at Northwest University, Xi’an
Marco Polo’s Account of Foundlings • “In those provinces [of South China], they are wont to expose their new-born babes; I speak of the poor, who have not the means of bringing them up. But the King [Emperor] used to have all those foundlings taken charge of, and had note made of the signs and planets under which each was born, and then put them out to nurse about the country. And when any rich man was childless he would go to the King [Emperor] and obtain from him as many of these children as he desired….”
Chinese Account of Foundlings • “In the Song period, there were offices for the protection of children in all prefectures. If a poor family had a child which it could not afford to bring up, the parents were allowed to hand it over to this administrative body. Note was taken of the exact date of birth, and the child given into the charge of a nurse. Families who, on the other hand, wanted to adopt children could come and get them from the foundling hospitals. In bad years, crowds of babies were brought there. Thus there were no new-born infants abandoned in the streets.” “Jiaoyin jiqiu tu” (Playing Ball under the Shade of Banana Tree), Anonymous, Song
Children were brought up to be affable, gentle and obedient; taught to follow the rules for the art of living “Kids playing in a small yard,” anonymous, Song “Kids playing In Autumn Yard,” Su Hanchen, Song detail
Upbringing and Education • Education was highly valued • Public and private education flourished because of the urbanization, the growth of urban middle classes, and the spread of printing • Number of candidates for the civil service examinations increased rapidly • The increase of high quality private academies and public schools • Educated women also increased; number of literate, literary and writing women increased dramatically “Baizi xichun tu” (One Hundred Lads Paying in the Spring,” anonymous
Entertainments in Hangzhou • The streets of Hangzhou: • Acrobats, Jugglers, mountebanks (persons selling quack medicines), musicians, storytellers exhibited their talents • Commercialization of art: paintings, calligraphy, antiques reached a wider circle
Large number of organized societies formed by people sharing the same interest: Poetry society, archery and cross-bow society, football and polo society, puppeteers society, Daoist association Special “pleasure grounds” were made available for all kinds of amusements singing, dancing, shadow plays, marionette theaters, storytelling, acrobatics, juggling, wrestling, magic, snake-charming, martial art demonstration and tournament Song brick sculptures about acrobat
