In his poem “Watching the Wheat Harvest,” Bai Juyi wrote: “Farmers have few idle months; May is doubly busy. Last night, the south wind rose, and the wheat
fields turned golden. Women and mothers-in-law carried baskets of food, and children carried jugs of water. They went together to the fields to deliver food, where the strong men were on the southern hill. Their feet were steamed by the hot earth, and their backs were scorched by the blazing sun. Exhausted, they felt no heat, only regretting that the summer day was too long. There was also a poor woman, carrying her child on her back. In her right hand, she held gleaning ears of wheat, and on her left arm hung a worn-out basket…”
I lived in a rural area in northern China in the 1950s, and Bai Juyi’s description here is exactly the same as what I saw: rural life has not changed much in the past one or two thousand years. This includes able-bodied men harvesting wheat, women and children delivering meals to the fields, and poor women carrying their children to glean ears of wheat.
The Mencius, Book 7, Part 1, states that one man farming is enough to feed a family of eight. This high productivity is at least no lower than the level of production in rural northern China at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In other words, more than two thousand years of development have not surpassed the production level achieved during the Warring States period.
This is sufficient to show that rural life in China has not changed much in the past one or two thousand years. This is also the original intention of Confucianism and Taoism in advocating the original social life, so that the vast majority of Chinese farmers live in a quasi-original society and are as close to nature as possible.
In the 1950s, rural areas in northern China still maintained this unchanging natural way of life. Now, in my seventies, I was fortunate enough to experience this authentic rural life in my childhood, and I feel it is my responsibility to write it down for future scholars to study.
In my view, rural life is characterized by diligence, thrift, and the absence of any waste. The diligence and thrift of traditional Chinese farmers are well-known, but diligence and thrift are contradictory. Diligence increases productivity and leads to material abundance, which eliminates the need for thrift; conversely, a frugal life consumes little material and therefore requires less diligence. In fact, Confucian benevolence represents humanity’s dedication to society, while the diligence and thrift of Chinese farmers represent humanity’s dedication to nature. Diligence is a contribution to nature, while thrift is respect for nature. Today, cities are piled high with garbage, making its disposal a major headache, yet traditional Chinese rural areas never produce a single speck of waste. As mentioned above, traditional Chinese rural areas recycled cooking smoke into high-quality fertilizer. In this era where smog poses a threat to human health, no other country in the world has followed the example of traditional Chinese farmers in recycling cooking smoke for agricultural fertilizer.
At that time, each farming family raised one cow, one pig, one cat, and a dozen or so chickens. A few families also kept dogs, geese, donkeys, and horses. The chaff left over from grinding grain was used to feed livestock and poultry. Usually, the chaff was mixed with the water used to wash dishes after each of the three daily meals and then fed to the animals. Human and livestock excrement, after being dried, became excellent organic fertilizer. Each family had a pigsty to raise pigs. Above the pigsty were the pigsty and feeding area, and below was a muddy area dug out for the pigs to trod on, containing both pig manure and grass for them to eat. The garbage that the family swept from inside the house and yard each day was poured into this muddy area in the pigsty, where it turned into fertilizer under the trampling of the pigs. Once or twice a year, this was dug up and spread in the fields. Crop stalks and leaves were chopped up and fed to cattle and horses, and the remainder was used as fuel for cooking three meals a day. The ashes from cooking are also excellent fertilizer. In short, traditional Chinese rural areas do not produce a single bit of garbage or waste.
The following section will first introduce agricultural production at that time, and then describe the traditional peasant life in terms of clothing, food, housing and transportation.
In my hometown, a rural area in Hebei, the staple foods were corn, millet, and wheat, supplemented by small amounts of sweet potatoes, sorghum, various beans, and sesame seeds. Side dishes consisted of various vegetables and fruits. It’s clear that the farmers’ diet was rich and healthy.
Wheat is sown in the fall and harvested in June of the following year, after which a fast-maturing type of corn is planted, resulting in two harvests a year. However, other crops are sown in the spring and harvested in the fall, yielding only one harvest a year. Local farmers also grow fruit trees in their homes and around the village; almost every household has a few jujube trees in their yard, while a few families grow peaches, apricots, apples, pears, and the like.
The farm tools at that time were all traditional implements used for thousands of years, such as plows, harrows, hoes, and seed drills. All were made of wood with sharp steel parts; the steel parts could be melted down and reused, while the wooden parts were locally sourced. Farm work such as plowing and weeding was done individually by family members, but during harvest season, local farmers usually worked together in groups of three to five. Except for corn, which was threshed manually, other crops such as wheat and beans were threshed in a threshing ground. Usually, three to five families shared a threshing ground. A threshing ground was a flat area selected on the edge of the village. The surface soil was loosened with a harrow, water was sprinkled on it, a layer of wheat straw was laid on top, and then a roller pulled by oxen or horses was used to compact it, making the ground firm and flat. After the ground dried, it could be used to thresh crops, a process locally called “threshing.” The harvested wheat and various beans were placed in a layer on the threshing ground, and then a roller pulled by oxen or horses was used to thresh the seeds. Then, the grain grains mixed with crop stalks and leaves are scattered into the air. With the help of the wind and the difference in weight between the grain grains and the crop stalks and leaves, the grain grains fall into a specific zone.
The so-called “roller” is a stone pillar with a diameter of more than half a meter and a length of more than one meter. Locally, this type of roller is used to grind rice, separating the millet from the chaff. The millstone used to grind grain into flour consists of two layers of thick, disc-like stones grinding against each other. My hometown is about 200 li (approximately 100 kilometers) from the nearby Taihang Mountains, where the stone resources are inexhaustible.
During the wheat and autumn harvest seasons, after the last grain was packed into sacks in the threshing ground, farmers in my hometown had a custom of eagerly helping others carry their grain home. People would carry the first sack of grain of the year home for someone else, then pour it into the grain bin prepared for that person’s family, as a source of pride and enjoyment, even though a sack of grain weighed over a hundred pounds and was itself a heavy task.
Local farmers placed two large grain bins against one wall of an earthen house. The bins were woven from wicker and lined with mud mixed with rice husks to prevent grain from leaking out. Between the two bins, two bricks were placed on the ground, serving as a memorial tablet for the God of Wealth. The animistic farmers knelt before the two grain bins, burning incense and worshipping. In their minds, they were not worshipping the two bricks as the God of Wealth’s tablet, nor the God of Wealth they had no recollection of, but rather the two full bins of grain.
Local peasant women also have the custom of placing an old-fashioned spinning wheel next to two bricks used as a shrine to the God of Wealth, and then kneeling and worshipping the spinning wheel with reverence. This ritual of worshipping the spinning wheel is held before the Lunar New Year. Local custom requires farmers not to spin thread for a period of time before and after the Lunar New Year. They bring the spinning wheel there for worship after the Kitchen God Festival on the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month. When they check it on the fifth day of the first lunar month of the following year, they see many circular marks on the wooden boards of the spinning wheel, resembling copper coins. They believe that these copper coin marks represent the value the spinning wheel will bring them in the new year. (Figure 1: A granary with the God of Wealth and a spinning wheel)
It wasn’t until I was seventy years old that I realized: in the rural earthen houses and courtyards, there was a lot of dust in the windy and sandy weather of winter. The spinning wheel was covered with a layer of dust, and the roof of the rural earthen house was made of reeds covered with mud and sand. The mud and sand particles fell through the reeds and landed on the dust on the spinning wheel, smashing a circular gap in the dust layer, with the mud and sand in the middle acting as the eye of a coin.
From this perspective, the local farmers’ worship of grain and tools reflects two opposing psychological states: the former embodies frugality, and the latter diligence. This can actually be explained by animism. Influenced by animism, the farmers viewed the things around them as having thoughts and wills, just like themselves—deities worthy of worship. Thus, with thousands of deities to worship in their world, they naturally chose the most important one for them. In the quasi-primitive society, the simple farmers chose grain and tools.
In rural Hebei, farmers worshipped three deities within their homes: the Kitchen God, the God of Wealth, and Heaven and Earth. Like the God of Wealth, Heaven and Earth were simply enshrined on two bricks as a memorial tablet, located on the right-hand wall below the main entrance of the house. The wedding ceremony, the worship of Heaven and Earth, was held here. Of these three deities, only the Kitchen God had a physical image: a slightly larger than a modern A4 sheet of paper, depicting a husband and wife: the Kitchen God and his wife. Below this image was a rural calendar of the time, listing the dates of the twenty-four solar terms and the length of each month. Farmers used this simple calendar to check the dates. My village, a town of three thousand people, had a market held six times a month for farmers from a surrounding area of three to five li (approximately 1.5 kilometers). Farmers usually determined the market dates by referring to the calendar beneath the Kitchen God’s image.
The image of the Kitchen God can be produced by local farmers individually, carved from wood and then printed.
The image of the Kitchen God was pasted on the wall above the bellows next to the stove on the right side of the main room. Women would face the image of the Kitchen God every day while cooking. Given that Chinese emperors typically depicted only the emperor (朕) without showing the numerous concubines behind him, the image of the Kitchen God was more of a symbol of the peasant family. Only ordinary farmers, like the Kitchen God and his wife, adhered to monogamy. In short, judging from the ancient saying “Food is the first necessity of the people,” traditional Chinese farmers revered grain and food with a deep respect for Heaven.
Within my family’s community of about 300 people, surnamed Li, there is a local earth god temple and a shrine believed to be dedicated to a prominent ancestor of the Li family. Between the two shrines lies the site of the family’s primary school. Local farmers hold funerals in front of the earth god temple after death, believing that death signifies leaving the family and re-entering the family community.
To modern eyes, the deities worshipped within a family and the local earth god temple worshipped by the clan seem to overlap. This suggests that the family and the clan community worship two separate pantheons, possibly with different origins, and only the pantheon worshipped within the family aligns with the belief that “food is the first necessity of the people.”
author By Dr. You-Sheng Li
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