"Fang Shengping in Tanzhou, Dani Temple in Baita Street is more dangerous, and it is extremely bright red, extremely purple, and extremely fine vermilion, splashing two beads, orpiment, and solid spoon reinforcement. Buyers please test the paint to see if the colors are different. Siyuan customers please recognize the red card at the door as a token. "
This is the earliest printed advertising material and advertising text found in China so far. This advertisement vividly outlines the sales art of Changsha lacquer shop owners in the Yuan Dynasty. The advertising text is not long, but it shows the product production and sales address, product quality and product trademark. What is particularly interesting is that it reminds consumers that the product is too hard, so they can "check the paint to see the color is different". Because "the world is bustling, all for profit", it is inevitable that counterfeit business signboards will occur from time to time, so the producers of advertisements remind customers to "recognize the scarlet letter at the door as a signboard". It can be seen that there is more than one paint and pigment industry in Fang Shengping, and it can even be speculated that Fang Shengping is the production and sales center of Changsha paint industry in Yuan Dynasty. The fierce market competition made the owners come up with a unique trick, which fully showed the owners' awareness of market development.
There are two lines of Yu in a slightly smaller font on the upper left of this advertisement. An advertisement for buying raw materials: "Customer, buy silver cinnabar, please recognize the date." Another behavior: "Zupu, internal and external books, printed as a record." The seal number is the trademark. There are also three seals on the top of these two lines of advertisements, and the middle one is a complete basket-shaped pattern, which is the first in the trademark of plant patterns. The next two pieces are slightly smaller, one is square and the other is mound-shaped, and the imprint is between clear and unclear, so it is difficult to distinguish their functions. Some scholars believe that this may be "the earliest anti-counterfeiting mark in the world".
Although the word "advertising" is imported, the history of advertising has a long history in China. The story of "buying bamboo slips and returning pearls" recorded in biographies of everything done wrong, tells that Chu people (including Changsha people) pay great attention to packaging when they sell their jewelry to Zheng people. Bamboo slips (boxes) are actually "smoked cinnamon, decorated with pearls and jade, decorated with roses and decorated with feathers", so Zheng people "bought them". There is a completely opposite example in Han Feizi, that is, "Lu sells his own fur instead of selling it." It is said that humble herders in the north wear rags to sell noble leather clothes, and as a result, people earn their dirty clothes and can't sell them. It seems that the commodity economy consciousness of "Chu people" and "Lu" is quite different.
The tradition of Chu people paying attention to commodity decoration has been fully exerted in the products of Changsha kiln in Tang Dynasty. Advertising directly on goods is a great invention of Changsha craftsmen. Changsha kiln craftsmen are good at using brown characters as porcelain decoration, which makes the products unique. This is a new creation of China porcelain decoration. Besides poems, couplets, proverbs, aphorisms and idioms, there are many advertising words written on porcelain. For example, the porcelain pots unearthed in Changsha kiln in North Korea are written with the words "the small mouth of the border family is famous in the world" and "Jia Zheng's small mouth is the best in the world". Some customers hesitate to make a purchase decision, such as "buying people's hearts is melancholy, selling people's hearts is uneasy." The inscription on the vase will be seen by the buyer. "More text decorations catered to the social atmosphere and needs at that time, which can be said to be a higher level of" advertising planning ",such as some that reflected" parting lovesickness "; Some reflect the frontier battles; Some write about scenery and love and entertain guests; Others reflect the philosophy of life, warning people that "wealth comes from top to bottom, poverty never comes", "there are thousands of trees in the world, and there are hundreds of people under them", "you can't help yourself when you are in full bloom" and so on. There are also poems by Tang literati Wei Chengqing and Liu Changqing. Such a wide range of content can naturally attract customers from all walks of life. In order to expand its export, Changsha Kiln also painted the porcelain exported by West Asians with favorite patterns, such as palm pattern and coconut tree double bird pattern, and some even wrote "God is the greatest" in Arabic. The effect of advertising can be imagined.
The advertising inscription on Tanzhou bronze mirror in Song Dynasty is also very distinctive. The designed words mainly praise the purpose of the mirror, inspire people to love beauty and make up their minds to buy it. For example, "Take care of me for a hundred years", "Be successful on all sides, not affected by a dust", "Take cast iron as a mirror, and be well dressed", "The bright moon reunites with Qingshuiyang, so that the fragrant pavilion can have leisure, and Qingluan need not be ashamed to be alone, and open the box to meet an old friend". There are seal script, official script, regular script and so on. The calligraphy is exquisite and fascinating.
In the Song Dynasty, the wine flag advertisement in Tanzhou City was also a scene. There are many beautiful sentences describing Changsha wine flags in Tang and Song poems, such as "The drums are heard in the water, and the wine flags are hidden on the river bridge" in Tang, and "The tourists are eager to sell fish, but the wine is cold along the river" in Song Fan Chengda. Wang Yining, a poet in the Song Dynasty, sang "Man is on the height of Ziting, looking at Changsha City Wall, hunting wine curtain wind" in "Water Carving Song Tou Pei Gong Ting Nostalgia", which is similar to Du Mu's "Water Village Mountain Guo Wine Flag Wind" in the Tang Dynasty. Pei Gong Pavilion was built at the head of the bureau and was destroyed after the Yuan Dynasty. From the poet's swan song, we can imagine that Changsha in Song Dynasty, like other metropolises such as Nanjing and Bianjing, was a city with a particularly developed hotel industry. The owner's flag is hung high, competing to attract people who drink heavily from all directions. Under the south wind, the wine flag hunted, and the emigrant poets drank at the same table with ordinary people, holding mellow glasses and drinking to their heart's content. How nice it is to see the riverside scene on Qingming Festival in Changsha.