Established a thousand-year family from the end of Qin Dynasty

Chapter 484 Journey to the West ([-])
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The strange sound was very clear in the silent night sky. Xu Xiake followed the sound, but what he saw was a naked woman eating a dead baby.

Judging by her appearance, this baby may have just been born by her.

Xu Xiake felt so shocked that he didn't go to sleep anymore, and rode his horse for the night.

In the early morning of the next day, he finally arrived in Dongguan (Juxian), which is still the territory of Liu Song.

The locals basically stayed at home and refused to go out, and outsiders who entered the city could not walk around at will, but were restricted to a certain area.

Xu Xiake was not in a hurry to travel or travel, but first found an inn to stay.

In the Central Plains of this era, the urban economy is still underdeveloped. Only big cities have the service of inns. Ordinary county towns do not have inns, and some small frontier towns don’t even have fangshi. The locals can only go to the other party’s house to trade privately.

Fortunately, Dongguan can be regarded as a big city, so there are also inns where you can stay.

After choosing a first-class room to stay in, he ordered a few small dishes and asked the innkeepers to prepare bath water and clothes.

Later, he continued to write a book while the food was not served, and recorded what he had seen and heard during his previous travels: In the summer of Yan 240, he traveled to Qingzhou in the south of the Song Dynasty. , Pregnant women eat babies.

Yan State has more accurate and diverse punctuation marks, so Xu Xiake doesn't have to worry about misunderstandings when recording.

At this time, the inn clerk had already brought the food, but with a mysterious smile on his mouth, he said to Xu Xiake, "Does the guest need sister to stay overnight?"

"Huh?" Xu Xiake was stunned for a moment, and then he understood that this is a special service of the inn, and some inns in Yan State also have such a special service, which is to run prostitutes by the way.

"No need." Xu Xiake shook his head, refused the special service, and then urged: "Hurry up and get the bath water and clean clothes."

"Yes, yes." The man left respectfully.

The meals are very simple, just a big bowl of rice, a vegetable, a pot of stewed chicken with mushrooms, and ordinary rice wine with a small gourd.

When ordering wine, the inn clerk reminded in a low voice that the inn had smuggled Yan Guo Qiongjiang wine, but Xu Xiake didn't order it.

As a native of Yan and the son of a nobleman in Yan, he was naturally educated about the dangers of fine wine. This kind of wine can only be sold to others, and he cannot drink it himself, otherwise his family will be ruined.

Although Emperor Liu Yilong of the Liu Song Dynasty ordered the ban on Qiongjiang wine, the profits could not be too large. Many children of aristocratic families liked to drink Qiongjiang wine, so merchants tried every means to smuggle it.

Don't look at such a simple meal, but in this era, even if you are from a poor family, you can only eat it once during the festivals. If you are an ordinary person, you may not be able to eat it once in your life. You can eat like this every day, of course, some businessmen will also eat like this every now and then.

Xu Xiake has to walk a lot every day, which consumes a lot of physical strength, and eating too little is not enough. He has no intention of becoming an ascetic monk. After all, his purpose is to travel around the world and record the customs of various places, not to practice.

However, the sound insulation effect of the inn is not very good.

After a while, two inn clerks carried two loads of hot boiling water upstairs and knocked on the door.

"Guest, we are the guys from the inn, and we brought you hot water."

"come in."

"okay."

woohoo-

While pouring hot water into the tub, the clerk asked Xu Xiake, "Guest, do you need spices for the bath?"

"No need." Xu Xiake refused. After all, spices are luxury items and are too expensive.

"It's all fresh goods imported from Yan Country."

The man wanted to say more, but Xu Xiake shook his head again and refused: "Go back."

After taking a shower, I fell asleep happily, and it was already afternoon when I woke up.

Xu Xiake left the inn and walked the streets and alleys of the city to observe the life of the local people.

There is no prosperous business here, nor a large number of handicraftsmen, only countless farmers who are carrying manure to the outside of the city.

In order to solve urban sewage, city managers generally allow local people to pick up the feces in the city's sewers.

Naturally, there is no wages, and the manure picked is equivalent to the remuneration for the manure pickers, who can use the manure to compost the farmland.

This does not seem to be the same as that of Yan State. Yan State spends money to hire excrement pickers to clean up the excrement in the city sewers, and uniformly brews compost in the fertilizer workshop to produce manure with higher fertility and higher fertilization effect, and then sells it to the guild They, the guilds were transferred to the plantation.

The farmland of the Song Dynasty can be roughly divided into three parts, the first is the farmland managed by the state, the second is the manor farmland of the aristocratic families, and the last is the field of ordinary self-cultivating farmers.

When I came to Fangshi, there were relatively few commercial activities here. There was an old man selling straw sandals, a girl who sold herself to support her younger brother, dozens of women who sold weaving cloth, an old farmer who sold broken iron farm tools, and a few sellers. The old woman of wild vegetables.

This is all about Fangshi, and its scale is not even as small as the small rural bazaars of later generations, but it is already a relatively large-scale commercial trade activity in this era.

The Central Plains was still in an era dominated by the manor economy, and the urban economy was very small and fragile, and could easily be destroyed by war.

In the evening, the official in charge of Fangshi began to beat the gong.

clang clang-

"Curfew, the market is closed."

"I want to do business, come back tomorrow morning."

The night market in the Central Plains dates back to the late Tang Dynasty at the earliest. At this time, the square market was still strictly adhering to the national curfew, and the market began to be closed in the evening.

The reason for this is that the first reason is that the commercial trade is not prosperous enough, and the income from mosquito legs in Fangshi is not enough for the government to arrange personnel to be on duty at night. The second reason is that the various lighting equipment are not as good as those in the Tang and Song Dynasties. Popularity, lighting at night is a very luxurious thing.

Not everyone can be like the Wang family, who put street lamps on both sides of the road, and use moonstone and luminous pearls as street lamp materials extravagantly, but the Wang family can be so extravagant, it is also the result of squeezing the entire Central Plains dry in the pre-Han period, exhausting the entire world Even if they have the financial resources, they can only hang street lamps in a manor, which shows how extravagant lighting is in this era.

Even in Yan State, where the urban economy is prosperous, only a few large cities with prosperous commercial trade, such as Yandu, Incheon City, Chang'e City, Xingfan City, Lanfang City, Taiji City, Busan City, and Sugarcane City, allow night markets. The city also imposed a curfew like the Central Plains.

After leaving Fangshi, Xu Xiake returned to the inn and recorded what he saw and heard: Dongguan City in the Song Dynasty, there were no brothels, no night markets, the people were yellow and emaciated, the Fangshi was depressed, and farmers picked manure from the city to fertilize.

Because the scale of the city is not large enough, there are no brothels specializing in the business of prostitutes, only inns that operate prostitutes incidentally.

As for whether there are prostitutes in brothels who don't sell their bodies, anyone who is not naive will understand that the so-called not selling their bodies is just not selling to you, because your status is too low, even prostitutes don't look down on you, but if the client is court The rich and powerful, of course, is worth a thousand dollars at a spring night.

Some people, he believed that royal princesses and ladies from aristocratic families would sell themselves, but he didn't believe that a brothel girl would sell herself.

(End of this chapter)