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When did washboards appear? I want to know all about the history of washboards!!!

Zeng Yuan said in an article titled "Several Faces on the Washboard" that "the household chore of washing clothes has been somewhat over-publicized in Tang poetry. Li Bai's 'A Moon in Chang'an' , the sound of thousands of households banging clothes', Du Fu's 'The cold clothes are everywhere, the anvils are rushing at dusk in Baidi City', Bai Juyi's 'Jiang people give clothes late, and the anvils can be heard only in October. …Apart from poetry and music, aren’t there any other art forms that express the process of washing clothes?” Zeng Yuan here regarded “breaking clothes” as washing clothes, which is obviously literal.

The so-called "clothing pounding" means placing the fabrics for making clothes on an anvil, pounding them with a pestle until soft, and then cutting and sewing them into clothes. Because pounding clothes is the prelude to sewing cold clothes, and the crisp sound of the anvil in the autumn night can most touch the feelings of a missing woman, so "beating clothes" has become a motif for poets to chant. Later, when women living by the water washed their clothes, they often put the clothes on the rocks by the water and pounded them with a mallet. And women who lived far away from the water invented the washboard.

There is no history of when the washboard was invented. The word "rub" first appeared in Tang poetry, which shows that the history of washboards does not date back to the Tang Dynasty. If it is said that this kind of thing existed before and it was not called a washboard, there is no record in the historical records, so the speculation cannot be established.

But we are vividly aware of the functional changes of the washboard. Before the invention of the washing machine, this thing was mainly used for washing clothes and also served as a torture instrument for husbands. Up to now, its function has almost completely evolved into a torture instrument for husband punishment. The lyrics of a song titled "Kneeling on the Washboard" are circulating on the Internet, which reads: "I borrowed your money/Write it on the IOU slip/Bury it deep under my panda pillow/Unfortunately my wife found it at night/I am punished by kneeling down The washboard is still scarred..." If this tone sounds a bit nonsense, then another true story has a profound meaning. In Mr. Lu Ge’s home in Yuzhou, Xietaizi, Chongqing, there is an old-fashioned wooden washboard. The jagged concave and convex parts in the middle of the wooden board are very smooth. This is all the result of Lao Ge often kneeling. Lao Ge, 41, has been married for 16 years. When they first got married, his wife would always tell him to kneel on the washboard when she was angry. The first time he knelt down, because Lao Ge really loved his wife and didn't want to make her unhappy, he thought that he would only kneel for a short time and no one else would see him, so he obeyed his wife's wishes. When the wife saw her husband being so obedient, she thought she would use this trick to "educate" him in the future. Therefore, in the future marriage life, whenever Mr. Ge made his wife unhappy, he would be punished by kneeling on the washboard. In the first few years, he only punished his wife when she was unhappy. Gradually, for some unknown reason, he made her angry more and more often, and naturally the number of times he knelt down also increased. In about the fifth year of marriage, I basically knelt two or three times a week, but by that time I no longer felt like I was being punished. Starting from the seventh year, I have to kneel down almost every other day. Counting the number of times I kneel on the washboard, there are at least two thousand times! In this way, Mr. Ge became addicted to kneeling and was reluctant to throw away the washboard even when he moved to a new house. "I often have sore calves. Kneeling on that foot will make it much more comfortable. Now I completely use it as a massager. If I don't kneel down the next day, I feel uncomfortable all over." Lao Ge said.

Seeing her husband like this, Lao Ge's wife regretted her original behavior very much, "I was angry at that time for fun, but I didn't expect that he would have such a strange problem now."