For thousands of years, people in China have always regarded the Spring Festival as a major event. Before the Chinese New Year, we have to make a lot of preparations and buy a lot of things, including food, useful things, clothes, clothes, fun, supplies, dry things, fresh things, raw things and ripe things. The day with a unified name is called "New Year's Goods".
"Kyoto Customs" said: "After the Tenth Five-Year Plan, there are many people selling new year's goods in the city." There are too many kinds of new year's goods in Beijing, which can't compare with other parts of the country.
Mr. Zhao Gang said in Notes on Kaohong that Cao Xueqin's Dream of Red Mansions had Manchu customs when describing the New Year in China, which was very strange. In fact, this is very natural.
During the two or three hundred years of the Qing Dynasty, Beijing was a mixture of Han people, Manchu people, northerners and southerners. Especially in the upper class, that is, the bureaucratic class, various customs exchanges are more common. Manchu and northerners deliberately learn the diet and daily life of Suzhou and Hangzhou people, while Han people deliberately learn the etiquette and official style of Manchu (that is, Manchu) and mix them into a special "Beijing flavor" from all aspects.
Complex new year's goods are also a reflection of this social life.
New year's goods in Beijing can be divided into six categories: diet, clothing, sun and moon, superstition, play and ornament. Staple food is the most common in diet, such as pigs, mutton, chickens and ducks; Venison, pheasant, frozen fish, etc. They are all Kanto goods outside Shanhaiguan; Shuimo rice cake, sugar rice cake, cold bamboo shoots and magnolia slices are other things in the south of the Yangtze River. Clothing varies from time to time, but in the old days, in addition to "flag dress", it also emphasized the southern style.
There are many daily necessities in the new year, such as paper, bamboo, porcelain and so on from the south; Superstitious articles are the bulk of the old new year's goods, such as thread incense, tin foil, woodcut door gods, kitchen gods, Buddha flowers, honey sacrifices and so on. Among them, the tin foil folded into "ingots" and "ingots" all came from the south. There are many things to play with, and children's and adults' toys are not divided into north and south.
"Gathering Wind in Spring" says: "Coloured glaze, wire, oil paint, turning over sand, touching silk, running horses, kites, cymbals, harmonicas, cards, playing chess, promotion plans, Jiangmi people, Taiping drums, gourds and glazed corners are all children's playthings, and that is called a busy year." Most people want to buy some firecrackers: white elephants, horses, Ertui, Qihua and Taiping flowers. This is something between play and superstition; As for dice and cards, they are adult toys; At the age of 20, the offerings of the Qing Dynasty, such as narcissus heads and bergamot, all came from the south.
As soon as we entered the twelfth lunar month, all the downtown areas were crowded with people who bought new year's goods, but all kinds of things also rose a lot. Businessmen took the opportunity to do a good business, so there is a proverb that "soil and water are three points more expensive in the twelfth month"
I recommend it carefully.