Before the Han Dynasty, "double carps" were ancient envelopes.
This kind of envelope is different from the current pocket-shaped envelopes made of paper. It is made of two fish-shaped wooden boards with a letter sandwiched between them.
During the Qin and Han Dynasties, there was a collection of Yuefu poems called "Drinking Horses in the Great Wall Grottoes", which mainly recorded the story of Qin Shihuang's construction of the Great Wall and the forced recruitment of a large number of men to serve
Wife and children were separated. , and most of them are about wives missing their husbands. There is a five-character poem in which he writes: "A guest came from afar and left me a pair of carps. I cooked the carps with my son, and there was a ruler of plain calligraphy in it. I knelt down to read the plain calligraphy, but what happened in the book? ? The upper part is about longing for love, the lower part is about adding rice. "
The "double carp" in this poem does not really refer to two carp, but to one made of two boards. Woodcut carp. "Hu'er cooks carp" means untying the rope to open the letter, and "there is a ruler in the middle" means opening the letter and seeing a letter written in plain silk. This kind of carp-shaped envelope has been around for a long time, and there were still imitations until the Tang Dynasty.
The documents of the Han Dynasty were mainly bamboo slips, which were made of bamboo and wood and were about one Han ruler in length. In order to prevent confusion and leakage of secrets, the two pieces of slips were folded together, with the text facing inwards, and sealing mud was added to the knotted areas on the outside.
By the end of the Han Dynasty, some letters already used paper. Later, envelopes gradually became widely used. Envelopes in the Ming and Qing dynasties are roughly the same as modern envelopes, but the writing methods are different. There is writing on both the front and back of the envelope, and there are different writing methods depending on the status of the person writing the letter.
Compared with some Western countries, China used envelopes earlier. On May 16, 1696, the Englishman James Ogilvie put a letter in an envelope and sent it to the Minister of the Interior for the first time. It was the earliest envelope in the West and is now preserved in the British Public Document Office.
Our country had envelopes before the Han Dynasty. However, ancient envelopes are very different from the envelopes we use today. Before the Han Dynasty, envelopes were made of two wooden boards carved into the shape of a carp, serving as a bottom and a cover, with the letter sandwiched between them. Three grooves were carved on the wooden board to facilitate wrapping it with a rope, and then put on a square The holes are tied, and then sealing mud is added to the holes. Bamboo and wooden slips in the Han Dynasty were sealed with mud and handed over to the post station for transmission. If the seal was found to be damaged or removed, the person who sent it would be punished according to law.
After the Tang Dynasty, there were special envelopes, but thick cocoons were used as envelopes, with carp patterns painted on both sides. Li Bai, a poet of the Tang Dynasty, has a poem that goes: "I sigh when I send a letter, and I can't keep silent when I shed tears." The "Silent" mentioned here refers to the sealed letter in ancient times, also known as the letter, and there is also "Reply to Cui Du" written by Tang poet Wei Yingwu. In the poem "Water", there is a line that "I often leave with my mouth shut, and it is time to return with a beautiful chapter in vain"
It should be "letter"