Chapter 38 Hookah

It is impossible to test when the hookah originated, but there is no doubt that this kind of smoking equipment is a product of the old grandmother's time.From the south to the north in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, no matter if they were officials or merchants, everyone liked to hold hookahs in their hands and enjoy themselves. All kinds of emotions, remembering the past, have become a historical lens, which is rare. At that time, hookah pipes were popular in all provinces in the north and south, but the styles of hookah pipes were different in size, length, straightness, carving and carving, and the techniques were different.Beijing-style hookahs are all made of cloud white copper, which is generous and heavy. The pipe is slightly longer and not too curved. The place where the pipe is connected is mostly made of silk rope or a sash woven with silk thread.The kind of silk is known to the daughter of the boudoir, skillful new tailoring, competing for odds and victories, embellishing the decorations, and even wearing pearls, emeralds, emeralds and agates into thongs. The color is mixed with silk powder, which will make it more beautiful and elevate the hookah. Worth it.

Behind the chimney, there is a copper box with a folded cover to hold the shredded tobacco. On both sides of the chimney, there is a copper groove sleeve on each side. On one side, there are tweezers to hold the ashes. It is a fire paper twister (also known as "fire paper matchmaker") for plugging in cigarettes, and it is an indispensable ignition medium for smoking hookahs.The raw material of paper media is heart-mounted paper. First, the paper is cut into long strips with a width of one inch, and then twisted into media.It is common for children to learn to blow fire paper matchsticks and accidentally burn their upper lips.

The hookah needs to be filled with clean water, and the pipe will only make a snoring sound when it is smoked.After smoking a bag of shisha, you must first pick up the pipe pot to remove the embers, and then blow out the smoke in the pipe before you can install a second bag for smoking. If you forget to blow out the smoke, the water in the pipe will flow upstream Well, it would be too embarrassing to be able to take a mouthful of smelly and spicy cigarette water before the public.There is a steel wire grate on the pot of the cigarette bag, and there is a special term called "kei", which is thick, thin, soft and hard, and is very particular.If the grate is too dense, it is easy to block, it is difficult to suck up, and it likes to rob the fire; if it is too sparse, the shredded tobacco is easy to leak.Experts buy a hookah, first look at the grate of the pot, and the price of the hookah depends on it.

In the past, it was common for a person in a big family to have several hookahs. There were five or six members of a family smoking hookahs.The hookah needs to be washed with alkaline water every day and replaced with clean water. When the copper rubbing medicine was not invented, the outside had to be polished with incense ash. Although this work is not laborious, it is trivial and time-consuming. It is similar to opening briquettes in winter. Stove cleaning and cleaning of kerosene lampshades are all part of the duty-bound work of changing rooms and nursing homes. The hookahs made in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces are called Su style. Compared with the Beijing style, the hookahs are shorter and curved, smaller and smaller, and easy to carry.At that time, one of the Four Great Vajras, one of the most famous flowers in Beili, Shanghai, was named Lin Daiyu.When she reached the age of her old age, someone sent a note to call for flowers, and she did it right.There are two antiques with her, one is a cardamom box inlaid with gold and jade, and the other is her carefully designed red gold hookah, which is carved and carved, dazzling the eyes.She sits behind the guests, holds a golden hookah, and puts smoke on the guests, with a graceful posture.It is said that after serving cigarettes, she invites guests to taste her betel nut and cardamom, which is a hint of welcoming guests to the business wave.

Another Vajra in Huaguo is Zhang Yushu. Although she was born as a goddess who blocked the streets in Jiangbei, after becoming one of the Four Vajras, she has to compete with Lin Daiyu in everything.In order to separate herself from Lin Daiyu, she also ordered a hookah with silver decorations and gold, and a pipe case outside, embroidered with embroidered flowers, and nine-color Qionghua.In addition to the exquisite embroidery, some people say that when you put on the four pockets with lids inside and outside, and open the stack, each has a frame of a secret play of Su embroidery.Later, she gave this cigarette pouch to the famous actress Lu Yushan, and the famous piano ticket Chen Twelve said that he had paid homage to it before, so it must be true.

Yuan Hanyun's brother-in-law, Liu Gonglu, is a well-known widowed child in Shanghai. He never leaves his hookah every day, and uses more than 20 sticks of fire paper to match him. The amount of smoke is huge, as you can imagine.One year, Kuang Huifeng, Zhu Jiangyou, and Yuan Bokui, the widowed elders, gathered in his home for poetry collections, and Liu Gonglu won the first prize again and again. He was so happy that he brought out a small, exquisite and luxurious hookah, and invited everyone to appreciate it.He said that he exchanged four heads of nobles from the actor Long Xiaoyun. Long Ling was once taken by Lin Daiyu as a confinement.

There was a very old luthier in Peking named Geng Yao. Although he always opened the scene in the theater, famous luthiers such as Chen Hongshou, Yang Baozhong, and Wang's brothers Shaoqing and Youqing kowtowed to him.Mr. Geng was very addicted to cigarettes. Apart from working in the closet, he never took his pipe away from his mouth all day long. Later, when he was old and weak, he would choke and cough non-stop when he smoked Kanto Leaf cigarettes, so he switched to hookah.The violinist’s huqin is always tied around his waist with a sheath. When he walks, he swings it and never hits his legs. Mr. Geng made a hookah into a sheath and tied it around his waist. Clear and unrestrained, showing no burden at all.Gou Huisheng's luthier Zhao Jigeng (nicknamed Lama) was delighted to see Lie Xin, and learned to walk and kick for two months. No one dared to learn Geng Yao's unique skill later.

Zhu Erdian, the British Minister to China in the Beiyang era, was the most appreciative of Chinese hookahs among Europeans. He said: "Cigarettes, cigars, and tobacco are too hot. Chewing tobacco, snuff, one goes directly into the throat, and the other goes straight to the sinuses. It is hygienic and hurts the respiratory organs. There is only hookah, which has a soft smell and is filtered by water. Even if it hurts the body, it is very limited, so smoking with a hookah can be said to be the most hygienic and scientific method." Before being transferred back to China, he ordered a dozen hookah pipes in Yuji’s hookah workshop outside Qianmen, and brought them back to Britain as gifts. Only the British knew that they were a kind of smoking equipment.Later, when some British people visited Beiping, they always looked for one or two hookahs to take back as souvenirs!

There is a kind of hookah in Guangzhou with a long mouthpiece, so it is called "crane legs".This kind of hookah is specially used by big families who use slaves.In the early years, the practice of keeping maidservants in Guangdong was very common. Although there are groups of maidservants in wealthy and wealthy families, it is common for ordinary people to raise a few maidservants. Therefore, ordinary people listen to songs, fight wine, gamble, chat, and hold water pipes. Work has become a compulsory course for maids and maidservants who are graceful in two buns.This kind of hookah can be handed over to smoke from a little distance away, which can not only hinder the conversation between the host and the guest, but also prevent the maidservants from spreading the word if there are secret words that people don't want to know.The shape of the crane foot hookah is different from the Beijing-style Soviet-style hookah except that the mouth is longer and the body is shorter. There is a short and fat cigarette case on each side, and the tobacco capacity can be doubled.A few days ago at the folk cultural relics exhibition, I saw a few hookahs on display at the venue, but the crane legs were missing. I think that the ancient scholarly families in Hong Kong may still collect such old antiques!

When the author was young, I read the Ministry of Literature and saw An Longmei in a teahouse in Huai’an, looking around, and suddenly felt a piece of cold and hard thing sticking directly into his mouth. Pay attention, Ganqing is a hookah seller who looks like a beggar, across a few tea tables, like a silver dragon looking for a hole, he stuffed a long cigarette holder to his mouth in a daze.The writing is very expressive, the mouth of the hookah with crane feet is long enough, and you can stretch out the mouth of the pipe after a few tea tables, it seems that the writing is a bit too mysterious.Unexpectedly, in the year of the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, northern Jiangsu was restored, and the author was sent to Lixiahe, Xinghua, Taixian, and Dongtai in northern Jiangsu on business. I happened to drink tea in a teahouse outside the north gate of Taixian County and listen to Kang Guohua's storytelling.

Brother Chen Zhongxin, who went with me, is a native of his hometown, and he is very familiar with the snack vendors in the local teahouses.Not long after sitting down, suddenly a hookah from outside the sky reached out to his mouth, and he took it calmly and smoked several bags in a row. I took a closer look at the old and tall hookah, the mouth of the hookah was like a tripod for a camera Stretching it will make it longer, and shrinking it will make it shorter. A piece of red copper is patched on the east side of the hookah, and a few drops of tin beads are soldered on the west side.Regardless of his appearance, the hookah seller wears a brown felt hat and a big old sheepskin waistcoat. It is black and shiny with grease stains. The paper medium he uses is short and thick. , immediately ignited.At that time, I thought that if I could learn this technique, Beijing opera has a place where fire is used. The fire folds can be burned in a flash, and the rosin can catch fire at any time. What kind of fire can be displayed immediately, how interesting it is. When the storytelling writer mentions a place with a "button", it counts as a paragraph, and immediately stops talking and circling (the bookstore asks for money, which is called circling), and the hookah seller immediately comes over to offer cigarettes, smoke about three or five times, humiliate three or two tubes, and end The cost is less than half a pack of cigarettes!During that trip to northern Jiangsu, I didn't expect to be able to open my eyes. I saw this ancient action of smoking hookah, which was quite a blessing.It is said that Mrs. Xu, the continuation of Jiangdong talented scholar Yang Yunshi, had a water pipe for the Empress Dowager Cixi, and her graceful and elegant smoking posture won the praise of the wives of the envoys at that time. Download the photos and listen to the descriptions of the seniors, only Tu Yinjie thinks about it. The styles of hookah pipes manufactured in different provinces are of course different, and the shredded tobacco used for smoking hookahs is also varied.There are two kinds of shredded tobacco smoked in the north: one is called "spindle", which is a product from the eastern part of Hebei, and the other is called "chaoyan". Although I can't say whether it is a product of Chaozhou, Guangdong, it can be asserted that it is indeed shipped from the south.Half a pack of this kind of tidal tobacco comes in a pack, the shredded tobacco is thin and thick, and it sticks into pieces for a long time. When you open the paper bag, you have to take a few pieces off first, put them in a small porcelain basin, and cover it with a damp cloth to let it moisten before you can smoke it.Some people tear off a few pieces of fresh tangerine peel, fresh orange peel, or lemon pomegranate peel and suffocate them with tide smoke for a long time. The smoke is fragrant and fruity, blending together, and the natural entrance is more fragrant. It is authentic to the natives of Beiping, and they are not used to tide smoke. , They mixed some orchid seeds into the spindle, but it was also refreshing and moist.For hookah smokers, Fujian leather cigarettes can be regarded as the best quality cigarettes. Even southerners who live here still don’t forget to ask someone to bring a few packs of Danfeng brand leather cigarettes to Fuzhou to smoke. As long as they smoke Fujian leather Nine out of ten people who smoke are from Jiangsu and Zhejiang.There are also people who think that smoking leather cigarettes is easy to produce phlegm. They smoke Lanzhou "Qingtiao" with a little Hangzhou Xiangqi, which not only increases the aroma and helps combustion, but also has a thin and bland taste, which is not a special taste. At present, the medical profession is shouting loudly that smoking cigarettes is easy to cause cancer, and newspapers and magazines have repeatedly reported that the number of cancer deaths caused by smoking is increasing year by year.Although ordinary addicts look at the text in the chart, they feel horrified and want to quit cigarettes immediately, but after a short period of time, they have another cigarette in their hands without any taboos.Among my friends who have quit smoking, there are many who have quit smoking. I want to find someone who, after quitting smoking, is strong and clear, and has never broken the ring.One of my friends, Xiong Gongdu, used to never leave his hookah all day long in the Mainland.Since Fuhai came to Taiwan, because the source of shredded tobacco for smoking hookah was cut off, he had to switch to pipe tobacco.One day, he had a whim. He thought that there were thousands of tobacco farmers and more than 10,000 tobacco farms under the jurisdiction of the Taiwan Tobacco and Alcohol Sales Bureau. Don't people who love to smoke waterpipes come to smoke again?Maybe some people think that in today's industrial society, if you turn back to smoking hookah, it's not like going backwards. Since you can't quit smoking, isn't it interesting to smoke a tube or two of hookah when you're resting at home? Although Xiong Lao's high-level theory has his reasons, whether Taiwan's climate and soil are suitable for planting hookah varieties needs to be carefully studied and discussed by tobacco production experts.If there is really hookah to smoke in the future, my old gun, who has quit smoking for more than ten years, may be shaken in confidence and resolutely quit.