There is a magic prescription for ancient cold storage and preservation.
-Ceng Houyi Ice Guide in the Warring States Period
Guo bainan
Although ancient ice storage has many uses, it is mainly used for food refrigeration, preservation and preservation. Lingyin is a place for storing ice, not for cold storage. There is an ice kitchen in the court, which is the cold storage. The ice kitchen is located underground, which can also be called underground freezer. There are many ice wells dug indoors, which are covered with ceramic wells to form the shaft wall, and there is a ceramic guide with the same diameter as the well as the bottom hole, which can be called a quite clean ceramic refrigerator.
This kind of palace ice chef has been found in Gelao village in the northwest of Xinzheng County, Henan Province. There are five wells side by side in the ice kitchen, and a large number of bones of pigs, cows, sheep and chickens have been unearthed. There are words on the pottery indicating "Left Chef" and "History of Palace Chef". It can be seen that this is the palace ice kitchen and ice well in Korea during the Warring States period. Similar remains of ice wells and Tao Jing Circle have also been found in the old places of Qin, Chu, Yan and Zhao. According to documents, this kind of cold storage is not only found in the vassal states of the Yellow River basin, but also in wuyue, the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, which is famous for its intense heat. Yue Jue Shu records that He Lv's "Ice Room" is outside Wuchang Gate, that is, outside the West Gate of Suzhou. Gou Jian, the King of Yue, has an "ice kitchen" outside the east gate of Huiji, which is the east of Shaoxing.
He Lu's The Ice Room. Today no longer exists. However, archaeology discovered his son Fuxi's bronze ice guide (44.8 cm high, 76.5 cm in diameter and 47.2 cm in bottom diameter), that is, the big ice basin for cold storage of food, which is not smaller than today's big bathtub. This is used to store a small amount of food in the palace kitchen.
Many ice sculptures were unearthed in the pre-Qin period, the most famous of which was Ceng Houyi's. There are two * * *, which are square boxes (6 1.5cm high and 76cm wide) instead of pots. This ice guide has a cover. There is a pot in the ice guide. Jane's pot cover is hollow, in the shape of "back". Cover Jane's pot cover, and the pot cover of the square pot just emerges from that hollow center, which is ingenious in design and convenient to use. The ice sculptures in Ceng Houyi are very exquisite. It is a rare treasure in the history of ice storage in China, and it may also be the oldest bronze refrigerator carefully designed in the world.
The square pot in the ice guide is obviously filled with wine. The gap between the sword and the pot is for ice wine. There is a sentence in "Chu Ci evokes the soul", which Guo Moruo translated as "it's so cool to have a full glass of frozen sweet wine." This poem is the earliest account of ice wine in China literature, about 2300 years ago. Special refrigerators used to cool wine in Ceng Houyi have existed for at least 2,400 years. There is reason to believe that the history of cold drinks in China is much earlier than it!
I don't know when the refrigerator ice boat started, but I know that coastal fishermen have long stored ice in winter and used it to freeze fresh fish in summer, so it is called "ice fresh boat". During the Wanli period of Ming Dynasty, the poet said:
"In June, Shade was cold with snow.
Three thousand miles to Chang 'an. "
Jiangnan shad, with a weather of 3,000 miles in June, was transported to Beijing, and the tool was an ice boat that protected the river with ice and snow on a hot day.
In the history of world civilization, keeping food fresh by cold storage is a great contribution of the Yellow River civilization. In the west, British scientist Francis Bacon (156 1- 1626). In order to uncover the mystery of the freezer, I caught cold inside and outside the freezer and became pneumonia, giving my life for science. In China, the ancients were not satisfied with the long-term use of natural ice, but put forward the ideal of "making ice in Xia Yue", but it failed to come true. As a result, this ideal has come true in the west. It should be said that the second part of the world refrigeration history marked by the invention of artificial refrigerator was written by western scientists. It has opened up a positive and broad prospect for the future of mankind.