Selling fruit-background

Raising ancient folk customs in Beijing was popular in Beijing in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. At that time, people in the palace and in urban and rural areas liked to play and raise slugs. The containers for raising Guo Guocan are cages made of straw or sorghum stalks, especially gourds. Gourd royal nobles are mostly made of ivory nanmu or Jingdezhen famous porcelain. Folk gourd making is also very fine. Old Beijing only has gourds and craftsmen who process and carve gourds. In the Qing Dynasty, there was a greenhouse in the imperial palace for incubating slugs and crickets. The cultivated autumn insects are put into kits or delicate gourds for emperors to play with, and often put in court banquets to listen to beautiful sounds while eating.

According to "Selected Poems of the Qing Dynasty", ladies-in-waiting in the Qing Dynasty love to keep slugs. Once, a maid-in-waiting was waiting for Cixi to take a bath when the slug in her arms suddenly cried out. The maid-in-waiting was scared to death at that time. I didn't expect Cixi to be angry, but she smiled happily. Old Beijingers keep autumn insects until winter, which means prolonging life.

In old Beijing, if you want to buy winter slugs, you need to plant flowers in a greenhouse in Fengtai. At this time, the price of winter slugs is of course the most expensive. There are old and young men who beat Guo and raise Guo in quadrangles, and there are also people who live in miscellaneous hospitals, such as rickshaw pullers. Most people who cultivate and raise winter fruits are celebrities or literati in mansions and pear orchards. Celebrities such as Jin Shaoshan, painter Qi Baishi and Wang Xuetao all like to raise fruit. In winter, some people put the gourd on the special back of cotton robe and enjoy the singing of the gourd when they go out to work. I remember the great painter Qi Baishi once painted a famous Chinese painting of Chinese cabbage slugs!