Ji Xiaolan's Yuewei Caotang Notes recorded such a story:
"Jingcheng west, there are several wasteland, must be the ground. After a few hours, an old servant pointed and said, "Yes, it's a descendant of Zhou, and one bite the hand that feeds him. ".In the last years of Chongzhen before the Ming Dynasty, drought and locust plague occurred in Shandong, Henan Province, and the grass roots and bark were exhausted, which made the people eat it. Officials can ban it.
Women and children who lag behind in the market are called vegetarians. The butcher bought it, like a tapir. When Dongchang merchants returned, Zhou's ancestors went to have lunch. The butcher said, "The meat is finished, please stay." Seeing two women being dragged into the kitchen, I let out a cry: "If you stay for a long time, you can take a hoof first." As soon as I heard the trombone, a woman broke her right arm and fell to the ground. A woman, trembling and pale, shouted for help. Zhou was deeply moved and paid the price for it. Physically nothing, it hurts his heart to death; As soon as I returned home, I was taken as a concubine because I had no children. I gave birth to a man, HongLing, with his right arm and my shoulder blades under his arm. Now my arm is broken. The last three generations are unique. Thirteen sisters in the Tang Dynasty said that Zhou Ben had no children, and this third generation was a good thing. "
What is it about?
Outside a county in Shandong Province, there is a wasteland. The local old man pointed out: "This is the grave of the Zhou family, and there is no one in their family."
In the last years of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, there was a drought, a plague of locusts and no harvest. Even the roots of the turf have been eaten up. People eat people in many places, and the authorities can't stop them.
Women, like cows, sheep, pigs and dogs, are publicly sold in the market. Zhou's ancestors passed Dongchang on their way home from a business trip and had lunch in a restaurant. The shopkeeper said, "The meat is gone, please wait a moment." Then he saw the shopkeeper dragging two women to the kitchen and shouted, "If the guest is in a hurry, cut off a hoof first!" " When Zhou Rui's family heard this, they all ran to the kitchen to save them. "。 I just heard a scream. One woman broke her right arm, and the other woman turned pale with fear. Both of them turned to Zhou's ancestors for help. One is to die quickly to avoid pain, and the other is to ask for help.
Zhou Zu had compassion, so he paid for the two men. Without a chance to be saved, one stabbed her in the heart and told her to die quickly. One was taken away by Zhou's ancestors and took her as a concubine. It turns out that Zhou's ancestors had no sons. After marrying her, they gave birth to a son, and HongLing was in her right arm, just like a woman with a broken arm.
Later, the Zhou family passed down for three generations without an heir. Everyone said that the Zhou family had no children in their lives. It is because they did such a good thing that karma got a son.
This story sounds terrible to modern people, but it was very common in ancient times.
Almost at the same time, in the Chongzhen period in Shandong, there is such a poem:
A couple starved to death, it is better for a concubine to go to the vegetable market.
If you have 3000 yuan, you can walk a mile.
First, break both limbs, hang them in the butcher shop, and cut the soup.
If you don't kill yourself, you must eat fresh meat, and you will be hungry.
It means that both husband and wife will starve to death if they catch up with famine. My wife might as well go to the vegetable market to sell herself. Take 3 thousand yuan to let my husband run for his life, and I'll sell you a piece of meat to let you walk out of a mile.
Two arms were cut off and hung in front of the butcher shop, and then the meat on the thigh was slowly cut off to make soup.
Diners don't want people to die, they want fresh meat and watch their own meat enter their mouths.
It's a horror novel, but the ancients didn't mean to scare people. Eating people is a common phenomenon in history.
In ancient times, there was hardly a year in the country that did not eat people. As long as there is famine, there must be a record of "man eating man". Even in the heyday of the so-called "Kanggan heyday" in the Qing Dynasty, in the forty-second year of Kangxi, the year when the summer resort was completed, there were records of large-scale cannibalism in Shandong due to famine.
As for the Chongzhen Dynasty in the late Ming Dynasty, war, plague, drought and locust plague made famine the most common phenomenon in all parts of the country. In Shaanxi and Chongzhen Chang 'an, there are stalls selling human flesh everywhere. In Han county, Shaanxi province, passers-by dare not travel alone, and children dare not give up their homes, otherwise they will be taken away and eaten carelessly.
As for previous dynasties, cannibalism was more common. At the end of the Huang Chao Rebellion in the Tang Dynasty, Huang Chao's 500,000 troops besieged Suizhou for 300 days, relying on human flesh as food rations.
Teacher Lu Xun said that history books are full of "cannibalism", but it is no exaggeration at all.
Reading is a pleasure, except for some books. Zhou Zuoren said that history is a cruel learning. Don't read ancient unofficial history if you don't want to rest your fragile mind.
This is a reasonable statement by the elders. Sometimes I will read Wu's Road and Bridge, Wang Xiuchu's Ten Days in Yangzhou, Qu Dajun's An Shi, Bian's Breathing in the Tiger's Mouth, and so on. When I read the text through the gap, I really felt that the word "cannibalism" was written all over the book!
Therefore, this passage in Lu Xun's Miscellaneous Talks after Illness is impressive: "No wonder some compassionate people don't want to see unofficial history and listen to stories. Some things, really unlike this world, are creepy and hurt in the heart, and can never be completely healed. " List a few at hand.
Persuading people to be kind is a beautiful thing, but I also think it is terrible to do it by intimidation and moral kidnapping.
Wang Yan's Xiang Ming Ji is a note novel that appeared in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. This book tells about the efficacy of Buddhism. Lu Xun and other predecessors said that it was constructed under the principle of truth. Many things are more real and can be used as a supplement to the official history.
The author Rebecca is regarded as one of the earliest "animal protectionists" in China, and his book lists a large number of examples of animals being slaughtered. As Ruan Zhizong of Song Dynasty said, "Taking the skin of young children, peeling it and cutting it is like treating all animals, then putting it in deep water, taking it out of the mouth, dissecting it and cutting it. If it's hard, put it in an iron pot and cook it. It will disappear at first, then it will heal, and it will hurt and suffer until three. "
This story is about a man named Ruan Zhizong, who is "good at fishing and hunting". Some Buddhists advised him not to kill. He "didn't understand, so he took punishment as a warning": as a result, a living person was simulated as a fish, dragged into the river and drowned repeatedly, and then slowly peeled, cut and amputated. Cook the cut meat in hot water until it becomes corrosive and bloody.
In unofficial history's classic notes, many people were punished for killing people. This record is the most cruel and terrible I have ever seen. Fishing alone requires poisoning. I wonder what more frightening ways Mr. Rebecca will think of to deal with people who eat dog meat in Guangdong and Guangxi?
As far as my own feelings are concerned, ghost stories are never terrible, what is even more terrible is bloody records.
Among unofficial history's notes, Peng Zunsi from Sichuan wrote the Qing Dynasty calligraphy and pen, which is the most tasteful and inhuman I know. This book tells the story of Zhang's coming to Shu. Another title of this book is "Seven Killings", because of Zhang Qi's famous saying: "Everything comes from life, and nothing can die. Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! " Lu Xun's book Miscellaneous Talks after Illness says: "In fact, this is a book that not only Sichuanese but all China people should read." .
For example, Zhang likes to skin people, which is technically "artistic": "Besides, it takes a day for a skinner to split a lock from head to toe, like a bird spreading its wings. In other words, he instructed his men to strip a large number of people from head to toe, and stripped them completely without any damage. The human trunk forms the wings of a bird, and it will take several days to die. Suppose someone dies quickly, the person appointed to do it will also be killed.
For example, after Zhang occupied Chengdu, the soldiers were divided into four roads and went door-to-door to "kill grass": "It is rare to go out in the first month and return in May. It is estimated that tens of thousands of men and women have been killed all the way; Wen Xiu killed tens of thousands of men and women all the way; Dingguo killed tens of thousands of men and women all the way, leaving only Chengdu, a metropolis with less than 100 households, bleeding profusely. But it was this Sun Kewang who was eventually banished to the Qing Dynasty and was named "King of Righteousness", and became famous in Thailand. As for Li Dingguo, ironically, later generations wrote history and praised him as the "first generation hero" because Li Yong supported the endgame.
In terms of scale, the 5,000-year ground killing in China is cruel. I think the most prominent ones are the Nanjing Massacre and the Zhang Massacre in Sichuan. If you look closely, it will really make people feel difficult to breathe. There are still many people who "avenge" Zhang, thinking that this is a slander against the Qing Dynasty, including many Sichuanese. I don't know what those people think. I want to ask them: According to statistics, there are more than 450 kinds of documents about the Sichuan Massacre. How much washing powder does it need to clean it?
The horror of human society is not only evil, killing, strangeness and bloodiness, but also the fact that human basic ethics have been completely lost and animals eat people. Gu said that this is the real "world of death"
The History of Nine Kingdoms written by Lu Zhen in the Northern Song Dynasty also tells the story of Liu, the sixth emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty, which is simply outrageous: his mother was too ill to visit, thinking that there were many ghosts in the patient's residence, and her old mother was so angry that she would commit suicide by breaking her belly; Have a hobby of incest, kill my uncle and rob my aunt to be a concubine; Born to hate the same clan, he often ties up his uncles one by one for no reason. Among them, his fat uncle was treated as a pig and let the servants let them eat in the trough. Suspecting that his uncle was unfaithful, he personally led a team to copy his family, dismembered, dissected and gouged out his family, soaked it in honey juice, and called it "Ghost Eye jiaozi"; Sexual perversion, once called all the princesses in the palace to one place and instructed the left and right cronies to take turns raping them. When an aunt resisted, he ordered the killing of his three sons, that is, his cousins.
This Liu was later killed by eunuchs. Some people say that these records are too demonized, but no matter how they are discounted, they are still terrible. In addition, these "glorious deeds" are also dribs and drabs in the official li yanshou's History of North and South. This is an era when people's hearts have long been chaotic, and shame can't be covered. After all, it flows eastward.
Terrible, and of course, the distortion of normal human nature. For the sake of profit, people lost their humanity. No matter how many thousands of years such human beings have died, the scattered mud bones are still full of stinging pathogens.
A story in the Tang Dynasty's New Tales of Tang People: "Wei is an ancient scholar. He was ill and the imperial historian saved him. After the empire became independent, he met Yuan Zhong, and he was very worried. Please take Yuan Zhong's stool as a test of the severity of the disease. Yuan Zhong refused, and Bagu asked, tasted it and was shocked. August rejoiced:' Doctor, this thing tastes sweet and cures diseases; It tastes bitter now, but it should be better now. "Yuan Qingzheng is clean and honest, and he hates it. He shows it in the court."
This story is true, which is recorded in both old and new Tang books. As a vernacular, it tells the story of the Wu Zetian dynasty. At that time, Yu Shiwei, the later prime minister, was ill, and his subordinate Guo Ba and a group of colleagues went to visit him. After they left, Guo Ba was very diligent and stayed in the last one. He crossed the line with boss Wei and said that the doctor's "seeing, listening and asking" remote diagnosis was not good. Just now I have asked the waiter to take out your toilet and taste it carefully. It tastes bitter. It is said that the bitter the stool, the healthier people are, and they should be fine in a few days. Don't worry. Since then, Guo Ba has been called the so-called "shit-eating empire" in history.
Reading notes, I always feel that such talents can eat shit happily for a little profit.