They Invinted a New Job for That So to Not Happen Again
When we learn virtually ancient history, we usually hear about the kings and queens who lived lives of luxury in gilded palaces. The remainder of it usually gets cut out.
For the poor, life was a bit different. In ancient China, everyday life for an average person meant living on a farm, eating cheap meals and struggling to survive. Life was dirty, difficult, and short—and oftentimes truly disgusting.
10They Ate Eggs Soaked In A Footling Boy'south Urine
Ancient Chinese medicine was advanced. Chinese scholars had ideas that wouldn't achieve the West for thousands of years. But in the crude, early forms the ancient Chinese used, these treatments were a bit dissimilar, and a bit less appetizing. Like, for example, the ancient Chinese dish tongzi dan—or, in English, eggs boiled in a young male child'due south urine.
The recipe calls for a few dozen eggs and a pot filled to the brim with the urine of prepubescent boys. For best results, the urine should come from boys no more than than x years quondam.
Tongzi dan has been a staple food for so long that, in Dongyang, it'due south registered as a part of their cultural heritage. It's believed that they started eating them during a time of poverty, when the poor badly need a style to go on eggs from going bad. In most parts of China, they dealt with that problem by humid the eggs in tea, only the people Dongyang decided to do things a bit differently.
Today, it'due south considered a part of Chinese medicine. Some people in Dongyang however eat these things, and vendors will even put buckets in primary schools to collect children's pee. Even today, Chinese doctors claim that eating eggs soaked in urine works wonders to keep your body good for you.
Which might be true, only we'll take our chances without it.
9Foreplay Started With A Woman's Mutilated Feet
Chinese women, whether they were rich or poor, were encouraged to bind their feet as tightly as humanly possible. The goal was to keep your foot less than 4 inches long, which left it a crushed, mutilated mound of flesh they called a "lotus human foot." This wasn't only something a few people did. At its height, almost every upper-form woman and 50 percentage of the lower course spring their feet.
The really weird office, though, is how the men felt nigh it. To aboriginal Chinese men, these plain-featured lotus feet were the sexiest things on earth. Foreplay, in ancient Prc, was meant to start with a man fondling his partner'south broken foot, and they put a lot of thought into it. During the Qing Dynasty, they even released a sex manual with 48 different means to fondle a mutilated pes.
It wasn't only that lotus anxiety were sexy. They were the sexiest part of a woman's body. At that place are early Chinese sex books where women brazenly brandish every part of their body, except for their feet. They would tantalizingly play with their bindings similar they were going to reveal information technology, but they would never expose their bare feet. Genitals were one affair, but a bare lotus foot was a considered then erotic it was unfit to print.
Horrifyingly, the practice of pes-binding appears to be re-emerging in modern China.
8The Everyday Boxing Against Your Own Stench
Olfactory property was of import in Ancient People's republic of china. Body odor, they believed, was a sign of barbarism, and so the wealthy would get to great lengths to keep it off. Women would walk around with effluvious bags attached to their waists. When a man was in the presence of the emperor, he was required to suck on cloves to fight bad breath. In those times, so much of a Chinese noble'southward paycheck went toward hygiene that they called it a "subsidy for clothing and hair washing."
For the poor, though, the tricks simply weren't bachelor. And and so they resorted to some more desperate options. One ancient Chinese medico, for example, recommended that, at to the lowest degree once each year, every person should wash their armpits with urine.
In the north office of China, however, people would go the whole winter without bathing, fearing that touching water in the cold would make them ill. The Taoists, meanwhile, barely bathed at all. They believed that bathing spread illness, and so, while Koreans were bathing twice a day, they were staying as far away from soap and water as humanly possible, considering they didn't want to be unclean.
sevenPeople Ate Their Own Lice
When a massive part of your country is afraid to bathe, it causes a few problems. And so it might not specially surprising that ancient Mainland china was infested with lice.
Lice were then widespread that early Chinese doctors used them to make diagnoses. If the lice were itch all over the patient'due south body, an early Chinese medical document says, he will survive. If the lice are scrambling off his body similar rats fleeing a sinking ship, he volition die.
The poor were so used to existence covered in lice that many would compulsively pluck them off their hair and eat them. This happened and then much that they had remedies to help people who ate too much of their ain lice. They would exist fed ashes and boiled water from old combs. The next time you visited the bathroom, the doctors promised, yous would pass a belly full of lice.
6Men Eagerly Castrated Themselves
Being poor in the aboriginal earth was rough. If it would become him a job in the palace, a Chinese peasant would willingly chop off his own penis.
Eunuchs, in ancient Mainland china, were allowed to piece of work as servants to the emperor. For a poor person, that was the best shot at a meliorate life you lot could have. A lot of parents would castrate their children at birth, but if your parents didn't think ahead, it was a decent and fairly popular career motility for a grown homo to castrate himself.
Self-castration peaked during the Ming Dynasty. At one point, there were 100,000 eunuchs working across the country. So many people were castrating themselves that the authorities had to hunt neutered, job-hungry men away from the palace.
Eventually, they ready an application process. For 200 copper coins, yous could get your name on a listing of eunuch applicants. 250 people on that list would get to work for the emperor, but that was out of thousands of applicants. Near of the men wouldn't become the task. They would end upwards begging in the streets and would spend the residue of their lives knowing that they castrated themselves for zippo.
5They Pooped Into A Pigpen
If zero else, yous certainly tin't accuse ancient Chinese farmers of being wasteful. They even fabricated employ of their poop.
Some farmers, in aboriginal China, relieved themselves in a special blazon of outhouse built over a pigpen. They would practise their business organization and let information technology all fall into the pig'south trough, which, for one unlucky hog, would become the day's hors d'oeuvres.
By 1000, the Chinese were using public toilets instead, and that led to a whole new marketplace. Peasants would travel into the urban center to collect the public toilet's treasures and bring it back every bit a cheap fertilizer.
This wasn't just a minor business organization. Collecting from a public toilet was considered the fast track to wealth. At the time, there was an fifty-fifty a saying nearly information technology: "Treasure nightsoil as if it were gold."
4They Were Pioneers In Medicinal Uses Of Homo Urine
Chinese medicine made some incredible breakthroughs. They invented, for example, endocrinology in the 200 BC, a science the West didn't develop until the 20th century. That'due south an accomplishment, but it's besides a icky one.
Endocrinology involves separating hormones from human secretions. When they were picking homo secretions, the Chinese chose pee. They would gather up 150 gallons of male person urine in a large pan and eddy information technology until it evaporated. A crystallized hormone that they called "fall mineral" would exist left behind. Information technology was but crystallized urine.
They couldn't exactly inject hormones, so they would have the crystallized urine by eating it, and they ate a lot of information technology. "For each dose," one medical newspaper instructed, "take five to seven pills with warm wine or soup before breakfast."
They used it as a hormone, and it worked. Amazingly enough, China developed a whole field of medicine 2,000 years before the residual of the world. Nonetheless, it's difficult not to wonder about the man who first had the idea to go 150 gallons of urine together, boil it, and pop whatever was left behind in his mouth.
8 . . . And In Medicinal Uses Of Human Feces
They didn't stop their breakthroughs with drinking pee. By the 4th century BC, they'd adult stool transplants, another medical idea the W didn't find until the 20th century. The ancient Chinese mode of doing it, though, was a petty less than appetizing.
Chinese doctors would put together something they chosen "yellow soup," which was water mixed with a healthy person's fermented stool. They'd give it to patients who had diarrhea and club them to drink upwards every concluding driblet of that liquid feces.
Over again, this worked well. The good for you bacteria in the stool would get rid of the bad bacteria in the patient's body. The same concept is used today to care for C. diff, a deadly disease, but in ancient Mainland china, this was just listed as a diarrhea remedy. The Chinese had a fashion to treat diarrhea that worked, simply more than a few patients must accept seriously considered just toughing information technology out.
2Children Ate Smallpox Scabs
Photo credit: CDC
China besides invented the commencement smallpox vaccine. By the yr 1548, they'd written guides on 1 of history'south showtime vaccinations. Even before it was written downward, though, the people had heard almost the vaccine and figured they could do it themselves.
Parents who had heard of this new smallpox vaccine fed their kids scabs that had fallen off the pare of smallpox patients. They'd heard that exposing yourself to smallpox could proceed you good for you and, never likewise pressed to hear the details, simply started feeding their kids scabs and hoping for the best.
Feeding your kids scabs, of class, just makes things worse, merely the real handling wasn't much better. Instead, doctors would shell those scabs into a pulverization and blow them upwardly people's noses.
It worked, sort of. There was about a 2-percent chance getting smallpox scabs diddled up your nose would infect and kill yous. That, though, gave you amend odds than tackling a smallpox epidemic head-on, then people around the state signed up.
aneThey Disgusted The Earth By Inventing Toilet Paper
Somewhere effectually the year 600, the Chinese invented toilet paper. It's a product nosotros even so use today, just we only retrieve it'south normal because we're used to it. When toilet paper came out, it was considered the about disgusting affair on this list.
The Chinese were the first people to use it, and they used a lot of information technology. A record from 1393 says that the imperial court ordered 720,000 sheets in a single twelvemonth. The used leftovers were gathered on a mound and so massive that the people called information technology "Elephant Mountain."
They'd had toilet paper for a while by then. It'due south hard to say when it was invented because the Chinese didn't like to talk well-nigh information technology. The oldest reference nosotros accept, though, is delightful. It'due south a note from a human being that mentions a "paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from 'Five Classics' or the name of sages, I cartel non use for toilet purposes." Which means that the first mention of toilet paper was from a human begrudgingly deciding non to wipe his ass with the I Ching.
An Standard arabic traveler who visited China saw them use information technology firsthand. He wrote about it in disgust, saying, "They are not careful about cleanliness, and they practise not launder themselves with h2o when they have done their necessities; but they merely wipe themselves with newspaper." To the other countries of the ancient world, using toilet newspaper was the about disgusting act of all.
Source: https://listverse.com/2017/01/31/10-truly-disgusting-facts-about-life-in-ancient-china/
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