In ancient times, people didn't have soap, so how did they take a bath? This is a question from a reader's private message, and Goshi doesn't know much about it, but he's also very curious.
After consulting the relevant historical materials, the imperial history provides a less certain answer.
The ancients bathed not only to cleanse the body, but also to embody a culture. But in the pre-Qin period, when there was no soap, what did they use to wash the dirt? There is one answer, and that is "Pan".
It is mentioned in the "Zhou Li" that "Pan" refers to rice washing water, and people have long discovered its cleaning effect. During the pre-Qin and Han dynasties, rice washing water was a popular and practical detergent.
Even in modern health baths, there are bran baths, starch baths, and bran baths, and their principles are the same as those of ancient rice washing. In the Yuan miscellaneous drama "Xie Tianxiang", we can see the scene of a woman bathing with "boiled bran syrup and fragrant bath beans", which shows that the ancients first bathed with rice water and the juice of other crops.
2. For a long time, humans have been using plant fruits in nature as detergents. Honey locust is one of the main detergents and was widely used by the ancients.
Even in modern times, honey locusts are still used in many rural areas to clean and decontaminate. Acacia acacia, also known as saponaria, is a deciduous tree in the legume family that produces pale yellow flowers.
Its aqueous solution produces a soapy lather with stain-removing properties. As early as the Han Dynasty's "Shennong's Classic of Materia Medica", honey locust was listed as a medicinal plant. In the Southern Dynasties, there were even shops specializing in selling acacia locusts.
In the Tang Dynasty, the use of honey locust was even more common, and it was even used in the imperial court. At that time, the palace maid saw that the honey locust tree was full of fruit on the way to Tailing for worship, so she picked the honey locust and took it home for washing, which is enough to show that the honey locust was a very important washing product at that time.
3. During the Han Dynasty, a bath cleaner called "bath beans" appeared. According to the record of "Qianjin Yaofang", bath beans are a detergent made by grinding the sun-dried pig pancreas into a paste, and then mixing it evenly with soybean flour, spices and other materials to make it bean-like and then drying naturally, mainly used to clean the body.
However, due to the scarcity of pig pancreas, bath beans were not widely popularized in society, but only among the aristocratic class. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, people improved the production process of bath beans, added sugar, soda ash and animal fat, mixed evenly and pressed into balls or blocks, which were widely used by the people and called "pancreas".
This pancreas was chemically very similar to today's soaps. The mung bean noodles smoked from chrysanthemum leaves and osmanthus stamens described in the thirty-eighth chapter of "Dream of Red Mansions" are actually an improved kind of bath beans, which are used to wash hands and decontaminate.
No wonder your face is whiter than someone's ass! "The jasmine soap here is made with jasmine juice to give it a unique scent.
The birth and popularity of soap has gone through a process from rarity to popularization. As early as the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Jiangsu Liuhe's soap was famous for its high quality, but it was expensive and not affordable for ordinary people.
After the middle of the Qing Dynasty, soap gradually became popular in the society, with a wide variety, such as pancreatic soap, introduction pancreas, Yurong pancreas, goose oil pancreas, double pancreas, etc., and the production method is "mashed with honey locust to remove slag, with spices, medicinal materials synthetic".
By the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were hundreds of shops selling this kind of soap in Beijing, and soap had become very popular. China's modern soap and soap industry also sprouted in the early Qing Dynasty, and a special workshop was set up during the Kangxi period to imitate "Western pancreas", but the production scale was very small, and it was mainly used in the inner court.
In the 70s of the 19th century, the British businessman Mecha founded the Mecha Soap Factory in Shanghai, opening a new chapter in China's soap industry.
Xu Hua, the son of Xu Shou, founded a soap factory in Shanghai, marking the beginning of China's modern soap industry. Subsequently, the pancreatic company was also established in Tianjin, which made the modern soap industry in China have further developed.