Chapter 5 Mr. Wu Zhu's house

Mr. Wu Zhu's house Mr. Zhu lives in the southwest of Beijing. There is a large door plate above the entrance of the gate. The door plate has three important features: one foot high.Green bottom and gold doorplate. "Ancestor's shady property" means that a person lives in the inheritance handed down from his ancestors, just like a person takes shelter under a big tree to enjoy the shade.Mr. Zhu's grandfather once won Tanhua and won a high reputation. Tanhua ranked third in the national examination.It was he who bought the property for his five children and descendants. Mr. Zhu's house was built for a large family.Entering the gate, one must bypass a large wooden screen that separates the courtyard from the outside.Therefore, passers-by on the street will never guess the wealth of the owner of the house, nor the furnishings in the house, except for the length of the fence and a glimpse of the curved roof.

The essence of a Chinese house is private, closed, and hidden from outsiders.Like a monastery in a monastery, Chinese houses are built along the courtyard, which releases the public and private space, and the courtyard is also a part of the internal structure of the house.In Da Fu's house, the courtyard is a landscaped park, well used, with swings, stone benches, moss-covered terraces and vines.In those low-level houses, the courtyard is a centralized family-oriented activity place, where there is a large water tank for washing things.But whether rich or poor, a jujube tree or a pomegranate tree and a goldfish bowl are usually used to beautify the courtyard.According to the relationship with the courtyard, the rooms are called East Wing, West Wing, South Wing, and North Wing.In poor homes, several families share a courtyard.

In Mr. Zhu’s home, there are several courtyards. The moon arches beside the courtyards lead one courtyard to another, and the courtyards are connected by covered corridors.In such houses, these corridors are open on both sides or on one side, and when the corridors are laid out along the walls, the corridors are a connection system of inner spaces.Corridors are interconnected and have a common entrance. The way the house is divided by the courtyard is in line with the idea of ​​a modern apartment.In this way, members of a family can live together and have their own private space - their own kitchen and bedroom.For Chinese families with children and grandchildren living together, this kind of house is the most ideal.

Mr. Zhu's courtyard is paved with fine stone slabs, with decorative potted flowers, shady trees, shrubs and stone tables.Portico windows come in a variety of shapes—round, square, diamond, fan-shaped, or louvered—and are framed with brick or wood.Looking through these windows, Zhu Pin was able to see the furnishings inside. When Zhu Pin visited one courtyard after another, each courtyard was an eye-opener for him, and he felt like stepping into a maze.Such a surprise is well-founded, and it was designed by the craftsman long ago.In a courtyard, there is generally a stage, a terrace open on three sides, and stone pillars standing on a small lotus pond, supporting the stage.Such theaters are a special case in Chinese houses, perhaps only wealthy owners used to have their own theater companies.

The private audience includes family members and invited guests, looking across the pond to watch opera performances.In the back yard, the young guest followed a zigzag path to a large garden with many trees, small mounds, and pavilions, and a stream crossed a five-foot stone bridge.The craftsmen of ancient China tried their best to devise various ways to block the view, which surprised the visitors. Mr. Zhu's house was exceptionally large—the roof was thirty feet high and gradually descending, with carved and painted columns supporting them—and Zhu Pin couldn't remember what he saw afterwards.At least he remembered the many moon arches and the hexagonal doors and the many winding corridors, painted red and green, with low stools for the wanderers to rest on.The room is full of wood carvings, with huge pillars, carved golden figures, and handmade partition walls with blue and purple backgrounds. Zhu Pin knows that women's boudoirs are taboo for men to visit.

As one of many Western-educated warlords, Mr Zhu himself has benefited greatly.In fact a Western education never changed him much; he found the old way of life more comfortable and agreeable.He also studied modern finance and economics, but this did not change his lifestyle and concept of life.Zhu Pin first saw Mr. Zhu wearing a suit, but at home he was very surprised to see him wearing a blue coat.Mr. Zhu is sixty-three years old and plainly dressed, but his pair of piercing eyes above the heavily drooping mustache and white beard are impressive.He looked like a high-ranking nine-rank official in the feudal era. Despite his modern education, Mr. Zhu still maintained his traditional qualities.

Mr. Zhu wears a gown with white sleeves, and the inner jacket is turned out to expose an inch or so, which is more convenient to wear.He walked with square steps, which accentuated his long gown.He spoke with poise and a tone of voice that conveyed a quiet majesty that is now impossible to find among Western-educated officials.He also smacked his lips lightly while sipping tea, and cleared his throat instead of pronouncing loudly, which was also a habit of his.It is not the posture of the body, such as a swaggering gait, or clearing the throat, or hesitating and spitting into the spittoon, which show Mr. Zhu's bearing and majesty.It came from his eyes, the eyes of a man who knew how to think rightly and stand his ground.These are the eyes of a man with the wisdom of life. This man has learned to wait and has insight into the many evils and sorrows in life.Mr. Zhu is as calm as water in his heart. He calmly faces any unforeseen difficulties and disasters, and at the same time has infinite patience.

Judging from his reading, he has absorbed and digested the life experience of China's three thousand years of history, sometimes sad and sometimes persistently pursued.He is a Confucian, he believes that life will be better if one has courage and self-confidence and has a happy family at the same time.He has nothing but contempt for warlords and young "rising" political stars.He is an old-fashioned official, and even maintains the system of concubines. It is not difficult for Zhu Pin to understand these, because he knows that Mr. Zhu was born in intellectual family.The traditional cultural background of Mr. Zhu's family can be seen in his

This is evident in the large number of book sets.In thousands of sets of books, Zhu Pin seems to be in the ocean of wisdom of all ages, among all the knowledge, philosophy, law, statues and arts that shape Chinese life and Chinese civilization. Chinese books lay flat on the shelf, the spine is the last thing to be seen, it is difficult to print on the edge of the soft paper, so the cover is hand painted with a nice brush.A book usually has seven volumes, cloth bound, and placed in a book box, a Chinese book consisting of two pages folded in the middle, and since the paper is not large enough to print on both sides of the paper, the printed text is vertical From right to left.A person begins to read a Chinese book from what we call the back.

Ancient books were carved and printed on wood blocks on thin rice paper, and always had paper covers.Since the paper is thin and very elastic, a roll is usually rolled up in the hand if the book is not spread out on the table. In ancient times, as early as the Shang Dynasty, knives were used to carve characters on bones.The earliest such scripts to exist in China are oracle bone inscriptions, carved in the 14th century BC on the shoulder bones of animals or on long, narrow bone lines.This form of writing is much older than the writing on bronzes of the Zhou Dynasty (1122-247 BC).Later, ancient books used leather thread to tie the bamboo slips together. It is said that because Confucius read his favorite book too frequently, the leather thread broke three times.The text was printed in ink on bamboo slips detailing how the Chinese army was rationed, and the relics were discovered by a British scholar, Sir Aurel Stein, in the dry Turkic desert.These texts detail how the Chinese army was rationed and when it returned to the Han Dynasty (206 BC to 264 AD).Text was also written on silk at that time, but silk was very expensive.

Around AD 100, Cai Lun invented paper from tree bark, hemp scraps, and old fishing nets.Printing was invented in the Tang Dynasty from the 8th to the 10th century, hundreds of years before Gutenberg founded the publishing house in Europe.The origins of commercial book printing can be traced back to the second half of the 10th century.Movable type printing was invented in the process of using clay type printing.However, because the soil is easy to disperse, clay calligraphy printing has not been practically used, nor has it become popular.