The fourth episode of the documentary "A Brief Reading of China" [Lonely Road, Brave Heart].
The birth of a feminist pioneer.
The sender is Li Loan.
People shut a woman in the kitchen or boudoir, but marveled at her limited vision, broke her wings, but lamented that she could not fly. Beauvoir, the pioneer of the French feminist movement, described the plight of women in her book The Second Sex. 400 years before Beauvoir, a man from the Ming Dynasty in 16th-century China actually agreed with her.
There is a difference between men and women. But how is it possible to say that knowledge is also divided into men and women?It is not ridiculous to say that all men have lofty knowledge and women have short-sighted knowledge. "
In 1593, in the twenty-first year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, a major event occurred in Macheng, Hubei, a teacher named Li Zhen gave a lecture in a Buddhist temple, and a widow named Mei Ran came to listen to the lecture. More than 400 years ago, this incident caused no less sensation in society than it was.
Li Zhen was a notoriously madman, and when he was 12 years old, he openly wrote articles mocking Confucius. In the following decades, Confucian masters such as Mencius, Zhu Xi, and Zhou Dunyi were satirized by him. He criticized Confucianism, advocated equality for all, and called on everyone to maintain a childlike heart.
Li Zhen resigned at the age of 54 and later moved to Macheng. He set up an altar in a Buddhist temple to give a lecture, and even publicly cut off his long hair, and the students recruited were male or female. Among the people who came to study, there was a lady named Mei Ran, a woman who entered the school, such a big rebellion, aroused the guardians. They concentrated their fire on Li Zhen. There are even some so-called well-wishers who advise women that they are short-sighted and not worth teaching them. Faced with this situation, Li Zhen wrote this letter to those well-meaning friends.
If a woman is willing to hear the truth, is willing to learn the Buddhist path that transcends the world, and understands that the world is not worth nostalgia, I am afraid that men in the world today will dare to sweat with shame when they see her. Isn't such a person exactly the talent that Sage Confucius also hopes to meet?But now such a person is regarded as a short-sighted person, and it is too wronged. But whether she is wronged or not has nothing to do with herself, it is only these biased bystanders who are ashamed to make a fool of herself. "
Life was not easy for women in ancient China, especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Women of the gentry families of the Ming Dynasty were not allowed to eat at the same table with men after the age of seven. "The Boudoir Ring", "Min Fan" and "The Legend of the Daughters" are compulsory courses. At the time when Mei Ran lived, a Spaniard who traveled to China described in his notes that there was not a single woman to be seen in the whole city of Guangzhou, except for a few prostitutes and the lowest working women.
During the Jiading period, there was a blind woman whose husband often beat her when he was alive, but after her husband's death, she had to hang herself with another widow because society required him to abide by women's morals. Xuan is just one of the many martyrs in the History of the Ming Dynasty. According to the "Collection of Ancient and Modern Books", there were no less than 36,000 martyrs like Xuan's in the Ming Dynasty.
The widow Mei Ran obviously disdained to be a martyr. Her father, Mei Guozhen, not only served as a squire in the military department, but also a great writer. The prominent position of the Mei family pushed Li Zhen and Mei Yuran to the forefront.
Yi Jiang, the wife of King Wu of Zhou, was one of the ten virtuous ministers of King Wu of Zhou, along with Duke Zhou, Duke Zhao, and Taigong. The mother of King Wu, Taiji, and the famous ministers Sanyisheng and Taidian are called the four friends. But if these women let the children in the market hear about it, they must ask them to follow the three obedience and four virtues, and be a woman who does not leave the boudoir and teaches her husband and children. Isn't it ridiculous to treat a woman like Tai Yijiang like this? "
Li Zhen does not respect women's goodness and women's virtues, but appreciates their wisdom and ability from the bottom of his heart, and has always fought for women to be on the same level as men. He admired Mei Ran and called her a natural teacher, thinking that although Mei Ran was a woman, she could be called a born husband, and few men could compare to her.
Fate was very mean to Mei Ran, and her husband died before she got engaged. In order to get rid of the arranged marriage, Mei Ran chose to lead the hair to practice. This is the celibacy of that era. She took Li Zhen as a mentor under the pressure of **, discussed knowledge with him, and corresponded with him.
Those who have short knowledge can only see things within a hundred years, or closer, and only see through life and death, and reach the realm of indifference after calamity.
Parenting for a single mother.
Sender: Gu Ruopu.
Are female men a new species in our time? The answer is no. Gu Ruopu, a single mother in Hangzhou who lived in the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty, is not inferior to any female man today.
This is a letter written by Gu Ruopu, a poetess of the late Ming Dynasty, to her younger brother Gu Ruoqun. In 1619, the forty-seventh year of Wanli, Gu Ruopu's husband died, leaving her and her young children behind. This year, Gu Ruopu was 28 years old. Gu Ruopu was born in a scholarly family, and at the age of 15, he married Huang Dongsheng, a fellow villager. Huang Dongsheng's father, Huang Ruheng, was a jinshi in the twenty-sixth year of Wanli (1598 AD), and the official went to the Jiangxi Buzheng Department to senate. Huang Dongsheng followed his father's example and took the mission of glorifying his ancestors and participated in the imperial examination twice, but both ended in failure. Repeated defeats made Huang Dongsheng, who was already in poor health, more and more depressed. At the age of 31, Huang Dongsheng took the imperial examination for the fourth time, but he was still unknown on the gold list. This defeat completely crushed Huang Dongsheng. In the spring of the following year, Huang Dongsheng passed away due to illness, how should Gu Ruopu face his elderly father, young children and a big family with an uncertain future?
It is easy to die for chastity, but it is not easy to keep chastity. The children are still young, and I want to be like Liu Zhongying's mother in the Tang Dynasty, using bear bile to decoct pills to help the children strengthen their bodies, and learn from Ouyang Xiu's mother to write on the ground with branches and teach the children to read. Little by little, wait for them to grow up. "
Women who lived in the Ming and Qing dynasties had no autonomy over their lives. Most women like Gu Ruopu will choose to remarry under pressure, relying on their next husband to live more easily and steadily.
However, Gu Ruopu is different, she chose to be celibate. She planned the family's assets, carefully calculated the expenses, and at the same time relied on weaving to subsidize the family. Gu Ruopu's two sons, one is 8 years old and the other is 6 years old, while working as a housekeeper, she is also the children's enlightenment teacher.
I've always been worried, worried that I will live up to Dongsheng's original ambition, and I won't have the face to see him under Jiuquan in the future. In addition to cooking and weaving, I opened the books collected at home, from the Four Books and Five Classics to the Ancient Historical Records, "Huangming Tongji" and "Dazheng Ji" read day and night, but I felt that there was not enough time, and when the children came in, I asked them to light the lantern and sit in a corner of the room to explain my understanding of reading. Sometimes I take them with me until midnight. I take pleasure in it and don't get tired. "
Today, it is not an exaggeration to say that Gu Ruopu is an educator. In order for children to succeed, in addition to learning together, she also explores new ways of education. Gu Ruopu built a small boat, and the boat was moored next to the broken bridge in West Lake. Reading in such an environment allows children to abandon distractions and concentrate on their work. Gu Ruopu's two sons, Huang Can and Huang Wei, grew up and became well-known local literati in Hangzhou.
What's even more eclectic is that Gu Ruopu also attaches great importance to the education of women, and Gu Ruopu is the enlightenment teacher of the Huang family and all the women of the Gu family. Girls are encouraged to read and study, care about current affairs, and express their spiritual world through poetry. She cultivated the Jiaoyuan Poetry Society, the first women's literary group in Chinese history.
Some scholars have inferred from this that Cao Xueqin was inspired by the Jiaoyuan Poetry Society when she created female characters. And Gu Ruopu may be the prototype of the eldest patriarch Jia Mu in "Dream of Red Mansions". At that time, many elders, especially female elders, blamed Gu Ruopu for what he did. Gu Ruopu argues that women's cultural education should be as important as men's cultural education. Only a woman with knowledge can be a good wife and a good mother.
As time goes by, and so does the knowledge accumulated day by day, these books of sages can cleanse the mind. I also want to read poems like "The Book of Songs" and "Lisao", those elegant and chic words and phrases, as if they can express the sorrow in my heart, soothe the resentment full of anger, and not get sick because of sorrow. Birds chirp in the spring, and insects chirp in the summer. They sensed the sound of the season, and I wrote the article casually and hid it in the box. Although it is also uneven, how dare it be compared with Ban Zhao Zuocai in ancient times, it is just a toddler in Handan. "
At the same time as Gu Ruopu, more and more women began to awaken. Influenced by Gu Ruopu, choosing the life he likes like a man became a scenery in Hangzhou at that time.
Huang Yuanjie was one such woman, who came from a literati family and had a high talent for painting, and lived with her husband on the edge of the West Lake, who was in charge of housekeeping. Huang Yuanjie went to the street to sell paintings and earn money to support his family.
With their own struggles, these women have broken the harsh social norms that have been harsh for thousands of years and won more respect and recognition for women.
It is said that Gu Ruopu lived a long life, and she was still studying at the age of ninety, and she used her tenacity and wisdom to support a family at the same time, but also achieved her legendary life.
The first farmer of the Qing Dynasty.
Sender: Zheng Banqiao.
These bamboos are a person's label, wanton and chic, vigorous and sharp. The painter paints not only bamboo, but also himself, and every stroke is his pride and stubbornness.
The first class of people in heaven and earth is only farmers, and scholars are the last class of scholars, farmers and businessmen. The best farmer can cultivate a hundred acres of land, and the problem of seventy or eighty acres is fifty or sixty acres again. They wear out their bodies and work hard to feed the world. If there were no peasants, the whole world would starve to death. "
The person who wrote this letter was the ghost talent of the first strange person in the calligraphy and painting world of the Qing Dynasty"Yangzhou Eight Monsters"The head of Zheng Banqiao, the recipient is Zheng Mo of Zheng Ban.
This letter was written in 1744, the ninth year of Qianlong, and the 51-year-old Zheng Banqiao was doing the county in Fan County, Henan. He went through the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong dynasties, and was only 43 years old when he became a jinshi. Because he didn't know the world and didn't welcome him, he was idle for 6 years, until he was almost fifty years old, and he was recommended to be a seven-grade sesame official.
Zheng Banqiao is an official outside, his wife and children are in his hometown of Taizhou, and the family can only be entrusted to his younger brother Zheng to take care of. Zheng Banqiao has no siblings, and he has the deepest relationship with his cousin Zheng Mo. Zheng Mo wrote to tell his brother that the family had received 30,000 catties of autumn grain, and Zheng Banqiao was very happy. My cousin is not good at writing and is not good at writing, but he is a good hand at governing the family. Zheng Mo runs the Zheng family's 300 acres of land and is an out-and-out farmer.
In ancient societies, the concept of a farmer was broader, referring to both those who worked the land themselves and those who ran the farm.
I once laughed at the Qixi poems written by the Tang people, they talked about the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, and they always couldn't avoid the theme of grievances, which was really out of the original meaning of this legend. The Weaver Girl represents the source of clothing, and the Cowherd represents the foundation of food. As celestial stars, they have the most noble status, and God favors them, but ordinary people don't understand the importance of food and clothing. Although the women in our hometown can't weave silk and cloth, they can preside over housework and do needlework, which can be regarded as industrious. "Zheng Banqiao is an out-and-out peasant child He grew up in the countryside, and when he was born, he was already in a middle-class family, and his life has been very poor. Zheng Banqiao's mother died young, and he was raised by a nursing mother, a simple working woman who had a deep influence on Zheng Banqiao's life.
Zheng Banqiao had a natural affinity for farmers, and when he was a parent official in Fan County, he often went to the fields to inspect the people's conditions and understand the lives of the farmers. Sometimes, he would even put on civilian clothes and work in the fields with the peasants. When he returned from the field, he ate with the farmers, and there was no county governor at all.
He hated those people who came from peasant families and forgot their roots once they became officials, and he wrote articles satirizing them"How many Jintai celebrities and fortunes, a little taste of fishy pupils, forget the Tian family's will"。Such words and deeds will naturally attract criticism and calculation from peers. In their eyes, Zheng Banqiao is an out-and-out outlier.
Today's scholars are different, and they want to be promoted to a person, a junior scholar, and a big official as soon as they hold a handful of books. After becoming an official, he was thinking about how to make a lot of money, build houses, and sell fields. They went the wrong way from the beginning, and then they went further and further apathy, and it didn't end well. "
There are also some people who have not made a career, they are doing evil in the township, their words and deeds are ugly, and they are really unbearable, so is there no one in this world who values their own morality? Isn't there anyone who has the ideal of helping the people through the world? Isn't there anyone who wants to have a noble heart like the ancients? In fact, there are a lot of them, but good people are always involved by bad people, and it's really hard to tell the difference. "
When Zheng Banqiao was the magistrate of Weixian County, Shandong, he encountered a famine year, and despite the obstruction of others, he asked the people to write IOUs, opened warehouses and released grain, and saved more than 10,000 people. The autumn grain harvest failed, and he burned all the IOUs again. The people are grateful to Zheng Banqiao for setting up a shrine for him. When Zheng Banqiao was 60 years old, there was a great famine in Hexian County, and he wrote a letter requesting to open a warehouse for disaster relief, but his boss detained him and did not report it. In a hurry, he opened the granary in advance. This time, he was exposed and had no choice but to resign. Zheng Banqiao's short career came to an end.
The most respectful thing in my life is the farmer, the new tenant, we must treat each other with courtesy, they call us the master, we call them customers, the host and the guest should be equal. What do we have to honor, and what do they have to be low? Let us have compassion on them, have mercy on them, and if they need to borrow, do it, and forgive those who cannot repay. "
In 1753, Zheng Banqiao used three donkeys to carry all his belongings and resigned and returned to his hometown. In the spring of the thirtieth year of Qianlong, he painted the famous "Bamboo and Stone Map".
On the edge of the cliff in the wilderness, thin bamboos grow in the wind, seemingly weak, but full of energy. The inscription on the painting is all too familiar to us"Insist that the green mountains are not relaxed, and the roots are in the broken rocks. Thousands of blows are still strong, any east, west, north and south winds. "
College Entrance Examination Life. Sender: Yuan Mei.
If today's college entrance examination is a single-plank bridge, then the imperial examination in ancient times was a high-altitude tightrope, and the people who could go to the end, for the title of the gold list, the students plunged headlong into the suffocating imperial examination battlefield. During the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, there was a scholar named Atong, who fell into a scientific research dispute.
Atong is seventeen years old, eats and dresses well at home, but is lazy to study. sent him to Jiangning County to apply for the exam, mainly to sharpen him, not to really expect him to be admitted. If you can pass the exam, it would be great to join Jiangning County. After all, Jiangning is the place of the ancestral tomb, once it is abandoned, how can I go in my heart. Who knew that this incident made the locals in Jiangning dissatisfied, and they notified Ah to the government on the charge of impersonating his hometown. But I don't resent them, but I think it's a bad thing turned into a good thing, why? Because I do have selfish intentions. "The real name of Atong mentioned in the letter is Yuan Tong, and the great literary scholar Yuan Mei of the Qing Dynasty has reached the age of 60 and has no children under his knees. Cousin Yuan Shu gave his child Ah Cheng to him.
Yuan Mei lived in Hangzhou, but his ancestral tomb was in Jiangning, which is today's Nanjing. The Yuan family has always regarded Jiangning as their homeland. If Atong can enter Jiangning Mansion to study, it will be a wish. Moreover, Yuan Mei also knew that the learning atmosphere in Jiangning was more relaxed at that time, and the competition in the imperial examination was not so fierce.
In 1791, the fifty-sixth year of Qianlong, when Yuan Tong applied for the Jiangning Academy examination, he was accused of impersonation and lost his qualification for the examination.
Impersonation refers to the fact that candidates pretend to be from their place of origin to take the exam, similar to today's college entrance examination immigrants, Yuan Shu was indignant about this, wrote a thousand-word complaint, and went to the government to express his grievances. However, Yuan Mei's attitude was completely opposite, and he wrote this letter to his younger brother.
Taking the exam is actually secondary, and whether you have real talent or not is fundamental. If Atong is talented, he can be admitted to Jiangning or Hangzhou, or even without taking the exam. But if you don't have real talent, you can't get the **. As elders, is it necessary for us not to teach our juniors the truth of reading and learning, but to compete with others? It's better to teach Atong according to his nature and aptitude. "
Jiangsu and Zhejiang have been major provinces with flourishing humanities since ancient times, with a large number of candidates and fierce competition. If a precedent is set for Yuan Tong, more people will join the ranks of impostors. The Jiangning candidates' objections are reasonable. Yuan Shu, who wants his son Jackie Chan, is not calm, but Yuan Mei is sober. Yuan Tong is a smart child, but also a child who does not like to learn.
One year of the Double Ninth Festival, Yuan Mei came out of the couplet to inspect Yuan Tong, he came out of the upper couplet, the family has a high place, Yuan Tong did not think about the couplet, and there was no time after school. Yuan Tong's personal experience speaks for hundreds of generations of candidates, and the mood of looking forward to the end of school has never changed. Knowing his son Mo Ruo's father, Atong is coarse and frivolous, and he is still far from the word Xiucai.
I thought of Li Hefeng's daughter Li Hanzhang, her son failed the exam, and she once comforted, I never asked you to study for fame when I gave birth to you. The current scholars and doctors do not have the courage and opinions of her, and they should be ashamed of themselves. If you don't understand this truth, even if you have fame, you will definitely get sick, mislead the country and the people, and harm others and yourself. A wall without a foundation will fall even if it is high. We are not doing this now, we are not loving the child, but harming him. "
At the time of writing this letter, Yuan Mei was 75 years old. Looking back on his life, he has a deep appreciation for the cruelty of scientific research and the hardships of his career. Yuan Mei has been extremely talented since he was a child, and when he was 12 years old, he was admitted to Xiucai with his teacher. At the age of 23, he participated in the Shuntianfu Township Test and won the victory. In the second year, he participated in the examination and obtained the tribute. Immediately after taking the palace examination, he ranked fifth and was selected as a Shujishi, and studied at the Hanlin Academy.
It's a pity that the good times didn't last long, and three years later, Yuan Mei was quickly sent to Jiangnan to be a magistrate because he got the lowest grade in the Manchu exam. He is determined to be a grassroots petty official who is supported by the people, fighting drought and eradicating locusts, and governing one side. He did it well and effectively. But after many years of officialdom, he gradually discovered that many people do not become officials for the sake of the world, but to satisfy their own selfishness. Yuan Mei was unwilling to grovel, and wronged himself for promotion, and after more than ten years of running around in his official career, he resigned and retired at the age of 33.
The situation of people is different, and some people have to ask for a name. For example, your family and I don't have land, we don't go to school to get a name, and we have no place to live in this life. For some people, it doesn't have to be a family name. That's like Atong, if you can keep to yourself at home, don't cause trouble, and don't do ugly deeds. As Ma Yuan's younger brother Shaoyou said in the Han Dynasty, being a good person in the mouth of the villagers and neighbors is a good child of our family. I can be blind when I die, what more can I ask for? "
Yuan Mei, who came from scratch at the age of 33, has more detachment to see through the world. He bought an abandoned manor in Jiangning, carefully designed and decorated it, and built a private garden full of interest, named Suiyuan. The special feature of Suiyuan is that there are no external walls, similar to today's public gardens. Yuan Mei turned Suiyuan into a cultural mecca for reading, meeting friends, and teaching. He loves food, and even launched "Suiyuan Food List", an ancient Chinese classic food cooking and tasting book, and the 326 dishes he depicts make the viewer's appetite move. Suiyuan soon became a famous tourist destination in Suzhou and Hangzhou.