Really? I always feel that things may not be that simple. The idiom "the ring is fat and the swallow is thin" comes from Su Shi's "Sun Xin Lao Qiu Mo's Wonderful Poems" of the Song Dynasty: "Du Ling's evaluation of calligraphy is expensive, thin and hard. I don't believe this theory is fair. Short, long, fat and thin have their own characteristics. Yuhuan is thin and thin. Who dares to hate." Here, Su Shi is talking about calligraphy, using Yang Yuhuan and Zhao Feiyan as a metaphor, which means that the styles of their works are different and each has its own strengths. You think about it, Chinese calligraphy, no matter short, long, fat, thin, soft or hard, must not only have its own style, but also its own beauty. If it is thin, it cannot show its beauty, and if it is fat, it cannot show its beauty, it cannot be said to be a calligraphy. A good piece of calligraphy. To bring out the beauty of calligraphy, it is natural not to be so fat that it has no appearance, that there is no standard, or that it is too fat. Instead, there must be "certain rules", which can constitute the beauty of calligraphy. Otherwise, too much is not enough. In this poem, the ring fat and the swallow thin are regarded as different styles of calligraphy. In fact, they are also regarded as different beauties. Naturally, there are "certain rules" for this kind of fatness and thinness. In other words, "the swallow is thin and the ring is fat" must also conform to a certain aesthetic. standard. What's more, the Song Dynasty when Su Shi lived was said to regard thinness as beauty, and it was impossible to praise fatness infinitely. It can be seen that it seems difficult to convince people to simply rely on the thinness of the bird and the fatness of the ring to infer that people in the Tang Dynasty "valued fatness as beauty". I would like to believe that people in the Tang Dynasty regarded plumpness as beauty, just like people nowadays regard thinness as beauty, and there is a standard. If you are too thin and out of shape, too skinny, and appear sickly, it is difficult to call it beautiful. In fact, when we look at the murals, paintings of ladies, and sculptures of the Tang Dynasty, we rarely see thin women, but those female images can only be described as plump, round and beautiful, but they cannot be called fat. Studies have shown that the reason why the Tang people (mainly the Li and Tang royal families) "regarded fat as beauty" was because the Tang Dynasty royal family had Xianbei descent and belonged to the Mongolian grassland nomads. The nomadic people make a living by raising livestock, and the fatter the livestock, the better. Naturally, "sheep's size" is considered beautiful, and fatness is considered beautiful in national aesthetics. However, I think there is another meaning here, that is, the nomadic people are capable of riding and shooting in Hufu. They have a fat personality and many women are "fat and strong". This is to adapt to the needs of nomadic survival on the grassland, so naturally they will not like it. Lin Daiyu's morbid beauty, raised in a boudoir and frail. Therefore, the Tang Dynasty royal family "takes fat as beauty", and I prefer to understand the "fat" here as meaning "fat", "fat", "plump" and "fit". It's just that after the Xianbei people unified the Central Plains, they were influenced by Han culture, and their masculine fat gradually turned into soft and beautiful fat, but it is definitely not beautiful as a pile of fat. We can see this kind of soft fat in Tang Dynasty murals, pictures of ladies, and sculptures. If we want to use one word to describe this kind of soft fat, I think "fat but not greasy" is the most appropriate word. Bai Juyi's "Song of Everlasting Regret" has many descriptions of Concubine Yang, but there is no positive description of whether Concubine Yang is fat or not. There is a line in it, "The hot spring water washes away the fat." Judging from the "fat", she should be a bit fat. But we don’t know how fat she is, so it’s better not to deliberately gain weight for Concubine Yang.