The most luxurious woman in China, with an average daily spend10,000 RMB, a new dress every day,I can't wear it all year long.
The Empress Dowager Cixi, the ruler of the Qing Dynasty, was extremely luxurious, spending up to 40,000 taels a day**, equivalent to 5 million yuan today. She was obsessed with power and greedy for wealth, making Emperor Guangxu a pawn, but in fact she was the real supreme ruler of the Qing Dynasty.
With the help of power, she enjoys the glory and wealth of the world to the fullest, and the degree of luxury is unimaginable. As a woman, the Empress Dowager Cixi must also have a love for beauty, how many sets of clothes do she have in her wardrobe?
Yu Deling mentioned in the book "Me and the Empress Dowager Cixi" that in 1881, the Empress Dowager Cixi took a train to Fengtian to worship her ancestors (now Shenyang), and because of the short itinerary, she only brought clothes suitable for the current season.
However, these clothes alone occupy the entire carriage, and the number is about 2,000 pieces.
The possession of 2,000 pieces of clothing may allow us to change our clothes every day, but even so, it is only the tip of the iceberg of the Empress Dowager Cixi's imperial clothes storehouse. It is estimated that the number of her real clothes may be 6-80,000 pieces, which means that if she changes three pieces a day, she will have to wear them for 192 years, and there is still a surplus.
It is said that every once in a while she would take out all her clothes and admire them, and let the eunuch hold a tray with three pieces of clothing on each tray, walk in front of her, and stop the eunuch when she saw the clothes she liked.
Some people may wonder, after all, there are as many as 70,000 pieces of clothes, and each tray can only hold 3 pieces, won't it exhaust the eunuchs to death? There is no need to worry about this problem, after all, when the Empress Dowager Cixi traveled to Mukden, there were as many as 1,000 people accompanying her.
Despite her large number of clothes, each one of them is jaw-dropping. Cixi has a ** that is often circulated on major platforms.
A pearl cape full of historical charm is known to the world for its unique design and exquisite craftsmanship. The cloak is made of 3,500 smooth and bright pearls of the same color, each as big as a canary egg.
The edge of the cloak is also embellished with jadeite, which is particularly luxurious. It is estimated that the value of this cloak is about 10,000 taels**, which is only one of the hundreds of expensive clothes owned by the Empress Dowager Cixi.
In his book "The Great Empress Dowager Cixi", the American painter Carr described in detail the gorgeous costumes that the Empress Dowager Cixi wore when she met him.
When she received Miss Karl, she wore an extravagant yellow silk cheongsam inlaid with 18 jade clasps, each of which was adorned with huge pearls, the first of which was particularly unique, set with a ruby and adorned with yellow tassels and pearls.
This seemingly ordinary cheongsam is worth about 500 taels**, while all of Cixi's clothes are worth 41.65 million taels**, which is equivalent to 8.3 billion yuan now.
All this happened 137 years ago, when 8.3 billion was not comparable to what it is now.
Empress Dowager Cixi was very particular about her meals, with 120 dishes and forty or fifty desserts at each meal, and the more than 300 chefs in charge of her were all "Michelin chefs".
They form a team of 3 people, and each person has a special task, from washing vegetables, cutting vegetables to stir-frying, they are strictly supervised by regulators, and once something goes wrong, it is difficult to shirk the responsibility.
In the palace, the Empress Dowager Cixi would not tell others about her tastes, and she did not allow anyone to talk about this topic, and once it was discovered, the consequences would be unimaginable. As a result, chefs rack their brains every day to figure out how to cook delicious dishes for the Empress Dowager Cixi.
The Empress Dowager Cixi has a unique vision and taste for food, and she believes that among the many dishes, there will always be something she loves. In order to ensure the safety of their own food, the plates used in the palace are made of silver, and it is said that if the dishes are poisonous, the silver plates will be immediately revealed.
During her meal, there will be four eunuchs around her who will be in charge of her diet. They would quickly deliver the dishes Cixi wanted to her. If Cixi was particularly fond of a dish, she would signal it with her eyes, and the eunuch would immediately deliver it to her.
And if she eats three bites of a dish, one of the eunuchs will immediately announce in a loud voice: "Withdraw!" "Then the dish is immediately removed and discarded. This is a rule left by the ancestors of the Qing Dynasty, which aims to remind everyone to eat less and taste more, and avoid ingesting poisons that cannot be detected by silver.
According to reports, the Empress Dowager Cixi needed up to 860 kilograms of ingredients for a meal, enough to feed more than 1,000 people. However, this staggering number can now only be used to describe her ordinary meal.
This data is ** in Pu Yi's "The First Half of My Life".
The 1,720-pound food is not composed of a single dish, but is made up of two delicate meals. Cixi strictly controls every dish, and only after Li Lianying's careful tasting will she be willing to taste it.
Even if there were luxurious tableware such as silver plates and silver needles, they could not appease Cixi's picky heart. Therefore, the weight of Cixi's meal reached 860 catties, plus Li Lianying's share, a total of 1,720 catties.
And what is the value of these ingredients? Due to the serious corruption in the imperial dining room, they will spend 2 taels to buy an egg, which is dozens of times that of the market, so the value of 860 kilograms of ingredients is high, which can be imagined.
Cixi is even more harsh on the ingredients bought by these **, for a pig weighing dozens of catties, only a few taels of meat may be selected, and only the best parts of the vegetables are selected, and the other parts are thrown away, and finally made into those exquisite dishes on the table.
On the first day of the Lunar New Year, a grand dinner will be held in the palace, with three tables of heaven, earth and people, among which the middle table where the Empress Dowager Cixi is located is the most noble.
There will be 500 delicacies on the day, each of which is extremely precious, such as bear's paw, deer breast, monkey brain, etc., each of which is invaluable.
The delivery of these delicacies was carried out by 500 trained eunuchs, who, in order of rank, lined up from the palace to the imperial dining room. It is said that in order to keep their movements smooth, they have to train hundreds of times a day, and even throw away more than 100 strips of white silk that are lost every day.
While the Empress enjoyed the feast, the fireworks outside exploded in the night sky like a picturesque one, and the whips were waved in front of the palace gates, and the lavish atmosphere would last until the end of the dinner.
However, Cixi's luxury does not stop there, she does not forget to show luxury even when she goes to the toilet. In the Imperial Palace, the toilet was called the "Chuan Guanfang", and the "Guanfang" was equivalent to the toilet bowl we have today.
And Cixi's official room is by no means an ordinary thing, it is a real national treasure. This official room is made of sandalwood and is shaped like a large gecko, and the gecko's four claws firmly grasp the ground, forming the "four legs" of the official room.
The gecko's body is smooth and translucent, as if it really has scales, and its belly is round and bulging, just in the shape of an official room. The gecko's head is proudly raised, slightly turned to the person riding on its back, its two eyes are shining, and its mouth is slightly open, this is where the toilet paper is placed.
Cixi's lavish lifestyle is truly breathtaking.
In Cixi's eyes, an ordinary piece of toilet paper is full of exquisiteness. The toilets in the palace are filled with fragrant wood chips, which are soft enough to wrap the excrement perfectly.
Today's high-end toilets are automatically cleaned, heated, and massaged, but they are overshadowed by these fragrant wood chips. In fact, Cixi let the palace maid contain warm water, which is to cut and process the white cotton paper, cut the paper to the right size, and after the moistening of saliva and the ironing of the copper iron, the paper is smooth**, which shows her ultimate pursuit of details.
When we were choosing cosmetics, the Empress Dowager Cixi had already surpassed our understanding. We are looking for "plant-based", and she has long surpassed that standard. The rouge powder used by Cixi is made from carefully selected flower petals, such as roses, and the color of the petals on each flower is different, and to make high-grade rouge powder, you need petals of the same color.
Among the hundreds of catties of petals, she carefully selected 20-30 catties as raw materials. It takes about 40 days for a rose to bloom from sowing to flowering, and 60 days in winter.
The rouge used by Cixi was not an ordinary rouge, but was made by her "extravagant rose years" and manpower. When we lit the scented candles, Cixi was no longer satisfied with the ordinary jade incense burner, but ordered the palace maid to prepare dozens of catties of fruit in the room as "aromatherapy", and the whole room was filled with sweet fruit fragrance.
While we were comfortably wearing cotton socks, Cixi invited 3,000 embroiderers to sew the socks for her. Each pair of socks is made of fine white silk, and it takes about a week to make a pair of socks because of the embroidery.
She has a very high pursuit of the beauty of socks, even if she only wears them once, she will change several pairs, and the annual cost of socks is as high as 10,000 taels of silver. Cixi's luxurious life is not only reflected in clothing, food, housing, and transportation, but she is also fully prepared for her posthumous affairs, whether she is alive or dead, her appearance is first-class.
Empress Dowager Cixi died in 1908, and her funeral lasted 12 months. It didn't take long for a wild history called "Notes on Ai Yue Xuan" to begin to circulate among the people.
According to the book, Cixi believed in Buddhism all her life and admired the holy and beautiful meaning of lotus and lotus flowers, so at her funeral, she wore jade lotus leaves on her head and tourmaline lotus flowers on her feet.
At the bottom of Cixi's coffin was a gold silk quilt inlaid with 12,604 pearls and 85 ruby sapphires, as well as a silk quilt embroidered with lotus flowers, on which there were as many as 2,400 five-cent pearls.
These funerary objects all show the luxurious life of Cixi during her lifetime.
Sun Dianying blew open Cixi's mausoleum in 1928, and it was filled with priceless treasures, including two jade watermelons and a crown of beads inlaid with Dadong pearls, and even the cracks of the coffin were stuffed with pearls and precious stones.
These treasures were handed down at the time, but none of them stood out more than the night pearl, which was called the "Secret". It is said that this pearl of the night is formed by combining two ordinary beads and is able to illuminate a range of up to 10 steps, and even the hair is clearly visible.
Sun Dianying didn't understand that this was a treasure, and there was a "Dharani Sutra" that he had forgotten in the corner. This quilt is made of pure silk and real gold twisted into threads, and has 250,000 words of **, every stitch and thread are hand-sewn by top embroiderers, and the production process takes 10 years.
The Empress Dowager Cixi's life was extremely luxurious, which was not at all imaginable by ordinary people. As the ruler of the Qing Empire, she disregarded the common people and did not care about the fate of the country, and only luxury could make her happy.
Cuba once said: "Luxury is the beginning of national decay." "The Empress Dowager Cixi spent 10 million taels of silver on her birthday, 30 million taels of silver for the construction of the Summer Palace, and only 10 million taels of silver for the construction of the entire Beiyang Military Division.
Do you remember the harrowing Sino-Japanese War? The Yoshino, which was originally sold by the British to the Qing Dynasty, but was resold to Japan because the imperial court could not come up with 3.5 million taels of silver, which eventually led to the defeat of the war.
As an old proverb goes, "The whole nation of the Qing Dynasty raised a woman together." Therefore, her funeral goods were not gold, silver and jewelry, but the entire Qing Empire.
The consequences of luxury inevitably led to the corruption of taste, as well as the corruption of the Qing Dynasty. Only frugality is the eternal cuisine and the starting point of the rise of a country.