Some people say that if you dig a hole in the ground in Fuzhou, hot spring water will emerge. Life without hot springs is not the life of Fuzhou people. Because Fuzhou people are accustomed to refer to hot spring water as soup. Therefore, bathing is called washing soup.
When the famous writer Yu Dafu took office as the director of the Provincial Gazette Office in Fuzhou in the 1930s, washing soup was a major part of his life in Rong. His book "Traveling to Fujian" vividly describes this Describes the feeling of taking a bath in Fuzhou. In addition to bathing in bathhouses, the bathhouse was also a place for him to drink and meet friends. Once he took a bath in the Fulongquan bathhouse and became so inspired by poetry that he asked the accountant for pen and ink, and wrote "I whip famous horses because of drunkenness, but I am afraid that amorous feelings will tire beautiful women." Good sentences. Not only that, he even discovered a little secret in the hot springs in Fuzhou. "Another characteristic of Fuzhou women is their fair skin. The eunuch ladies who grew up in boudoirs and never see the light of day should also have white skin; The strangest thing is that the workers and peasants who live outside the city all have that kind of white and reddish skin, as if they have just applied makeup. It is probably related to the hot spring baths that are irrigated day and night." - " Eating and Drinking Men and Women in Fuzhou". Yu Dafu's free and easy style can be seen from this.
I always remember that when I was a child, there was a bathhouse called Xinrong in an alley near Wenquan Road in Fuzhou. There were skewed Chaicheng houses on both sides of the alley. Passing by there in the evening, you can see groups of women gathered around small, low-lying puddles, chatting about household chores and rubbing their clothes. There is hot water seeping out from the bottom of the pit, which is a hot spring.
That place was called Jintang more than a thousand years ago.
The ancient city of Fuzhou is like a gourd. It starts from Pingshan in the north. At the foot of Pingshan, there is West Lake on one side and East Lake on the other. The head of the gourd is made smaller. It gets bigger as you go south, until you reach Wushan. He Yushan wraps up the two towers, which is the widest gourd bottom, and the golden soup is on the shoulders of the gourd.
According to "Dongmen History": In the second year of Taikang (AD 281), Yan Gao, the prefect of Jin'an, built the city and dug an artificial canal at the east gate. Workers discovered the soup water gushing out of the ground and surrounded it with stones. A soup pool was built for bathing. Moreover, for the convenience of bathing, migrant workers also dug ten stone troughs privately. These stone troughs are all open-air. The hot water below should be constantly bubbling out. The happy migrant workers bathed every day. I think that even if the city is built, At the end of the day, they were still drinking, and they were addicted to it. The officials found out about this, and they thought it was a pleasure, so they surrounded the stone trough for the use of officials only. This soup also became the official soup. Li Gang, a famous minister of the Southern Song Dynasty, took a dip in it when he was demoted to Fuzhou, and he even sighed: "The Yuchi Golden House bathes in the fragrance of orchids. It is the first pool in Huaqing through the ages. How can this spring water the sick old man, he might as well go to Lychee Township."
Those addicted migrant workers who could no longer drink water were depressed and dug a soup well in the back well area of ??Fuzhou City. The happiness gurgled out of the Bajiao Well again. Fortunately, there were not many officials or civil servants in Fuzhou at that time, so the Bajiao Well was not taken over by officials.
I saw a map of hot springs drawn by an old man, which marked sixty-three hot spring bathing places in Fuzhou City. The old man regretfully said that he had only taken twenty-three or two hot spring baths in his life. Sixteen hot springs. From this point of view, Fuzhou people’s leisurely, restrained, and peaceful citizen character was all created in a wasteland. So, I also started to think about how many bathhouses I had soaked in? Nanxing, Gaoqiao, Hot Spring, Dazhong, Xinrong, Ancient Three Towers, Huaqing Tower, Xiao Canglang, there seemed to be so many, not counting those outside Fuzhou City .
A bathhouse I often went to when I was a child was called Xiao Canglang. I didn’t know what it meant when I was a kid. Later, I read some books and learned about this sentence, which I also liked very much: The water in Canglang is clear. You can take care of me. The water in Canglang is turbid, you can wash my feet. To put it simply, clean water can be used to wash your hair, and unclean water can be used to wash your feet. In fact, looking at it now, you also need clean water when washing your feet, because there are still many bacteria similar to athlete's foot. But at that time, Xiao Canglang should have thought like this, and he could take care of me. It opened on Fuxin Road near my home. At that time, it was still a small asphalt road. Next door, there is a shed for drinking tea and enjoying the coolness. It is also filled with bamboo deck chairs. On summer evenings, you can still vaguely hear the comments accompanied by gongs and dots.
At that time, the bathhouses had a high counter, and there was always an old man sitting behind it. He was the ticket seller. If you bought the ticket, he would give you a small piece of soap wrapped in wax paper. There is also a pack of jasmine tea wrapped in raw edge paper.
When we arrived at the bathhouse, there were naked bathers everywhere. You have to look for an empty seat through the mist of the soup. Those seats are made of bamboo recliners, covered with a thin bath towel with the name of the bathhouse printed on it.
Almost all bathhouses have three or four pools with different temperatures, and there are channels between the pools for temperature adjustment. The largest pool is usually the Dazhong Pool, which is usually where people who are new to a "hot spring restaurant" stay. Old soup drinkers, either because of the low temperature or because the water is turbid, rarely take a dip in it. Most of them put on a towel and dragged their feet with wooden clogs. They first went to the second pool to "warm up" their bodies. Then they would sip their mouths and squeeze their legs tightly, as if they were very shy, and slowly move to the second pool. He scalded the water in the pool three times and then remained motionless. At this time, the people around him became silent and stared at the people in the pool.
In about a minute or two, the man would jump up from the pool, slump down on the stone bars beside the pool, exhale heavily, and his whole body would be red, as if a layer of skin had been peeled off, and all the blood vessels would be damaged. Filled with blood. As for the fourth pool, called the soup head, the temperature is so high that it will burn the skin and remove hair. Even hardcore soup drinkers can only look at the pool and sigh.
How about it? People around you will ask. (Good, what does it mean in Fuzhou dialect)
Touka! That’s what the person who comes up will answer like this. (Touka, in Fuzhou dialect, means complete comfort)
Those who had already soaked in "Touka" were naked, lying on bamboo recliners while drinking from enamel-covered cups. While drinking jasmine tea, chatting with friends about the news and current affairs around you, or simply putting a few chairs together to set up a "Longmen Formation" table, this is the most pleasant thing for old Fuzhou people. In addition to bathing and bathing, the bathhouse also has many services, such as ear care, back rub, pedicure, etc. If you are hungry, you can also ask the bathhouse waiter to ask the outside snack bar to deliver some fried noodles, boil the dried noodles and wait for the snacks to come in.
At that time, I liked to follow my grandfather to wash soup, not mainly for washing, but for eating. Grandpa’s hands were very heavy, and he always rubbed my body until it turned red and painful. So while grandpa was rubbing, I shrank. When I was almost shrinking, I was pulled closer again and continued to rub. When I saw that my body was cold, I was dragged down to the pool. I couldn't go into the public pool because it was for people who had just come in. I had to go into the heated pool in the middle. The heated pool was already extremely hot for children. The feeling that old people feel when they go to the scalding pool. I gritted my teeth and squatted motionless, taking the opportunity to jump out of the pool every time someone came down. Because when the water in the pool moves, it will burn to the bone.
What I look forward to the most is, of course, finishing the soup and returning to the recliner, feeling very tired and hungry. At this time, grandpa will ask, are you empty? (This means I am hungry) and I will nod feebly. Because there was a hawker not far away, carrying a cooking utensil on his head, shouting: cake, cake... It was a Putian person selling japonica rice cakes, which were sweet, tough, and very white. Or there is a kind of glutinous rice called Ganminen, which is also delicious. Especially when it comes to jasmine tea, you can't swallow it immediately after taking a small bite of it. Then you take a sip of the scented tea, which fills your mouth with fragrance. There are still such top-selling dishes in soup pool shops. I heard that a man named Er Ge was still selling his own handmade sugar packets and light cake folders in Detianquan Bathhouse and workers' bathroom.
A few friends came over for tea today and asked me what I was going to do in my spare time during the Chinese New Year. I said, the hot spring pool shop. Their eyes widened, this is depravity. I said, my outlook on life has changed.
Why not? I won’t go into details about the beauty of this hot spring. There are a hundred Hamlets in the hearts of a hundred readers. But there are probably few cities in the world that are as bathed in hot springs as Fuzhou. In other places, when you go to hot springs, you have to take a vacation, drive long distances, etc., and when you come back from the hot springs, you are covered in stinky sweat again. It's not like Fuzhou. After soaking, you'll be home before your hair is dry. So I called my friend in Guangzhou and said that I would bring my family to Fuzhou as soon as possible during the Spring Festival to take a bath in the hot springs.
Thinking about it, there are still many people who can’t be forgiven, whether they are officials, businessmen or employees, and they are still complaining and complaining, but I am already naked and soaking in the hot springs of the Blessed Land. "We're here, do you think we can avoid falling into depravity? I laugh out loud just thinking about it.