Teacher Dong Aiguo from Xi'an Foreign Institute taught with me, sang songs, made dumplings, and gave me a lot of inspiration on English issues. Recently, Teacher Dong sent her and Huang Jianmin's translation, Lawrence Wright's "Cleaning and Elegance" tells the history of the development of Western bathrooms - it focuses on the issues of bathing and toileting. The materials inside are interesting and inspiring.

Many people take it for granted that China has lagged behind the West in terms of hygiene since ancient times, and often uses Western examples to insult China. This impression is from Western film and television works - clean cities, neat men and women, and from China's regrettable reality - dirty cities, sloppy men and women. But in fact, getting rid of this misalignment comparison, overall, China is cleaner and more particular than the West for most of the time. In ancient times, bathing was a rare thing. Bathing in ancient Greece

, not to clean the body but to exercise the body. Only in the Roman Empire, public bathrooms were developed, but they became places for sexual prostitution. Rome finally destroyed its own corruption. It was lewd as soon as it was taken, which shows that it did not develop the habit of taking a bath with a normal mind. China had a long time ago the exclusive vocabulary for cleaning different parts of the body: bathing, bathing, bathing, etc. The plots related to bathing frequently appear in history books and mythological stories, and "bathing and changing clothes" became a daily vocabulary early on.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Europe had been living a life of basically not taking a bath or urinating or defecating anywhere. In medieval Europe, ordinary people basically did not take a bath for life, claiming to be "Europe that has not been washed for a thousand years". Only in the monastery, cold water bath was used to express punishment for repentance, and in addition, they took a bath for treatment. Until the early 19th century, those who took a bath were regarded as "patients". The early church had commanded: "For those good people, especially young people, they should be basically not allowed to bathe." In the 4th century, a female Christian who went to Jerusalem to show that she had not washed her face for 18 years, so she felt that she was the most "pure". (Page 33)

Until the 1860s, when the British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace and occupied Kowloon, Hong Kong. After "freely" sold opium to China, the city of London was still full of stench. Just because of cholera, more than 14,000 people died in London in 1849, more than 10,000 people died in 1854, and more than 5,000 people died in 1866. The city's drainage system was filled with the corpses of cats, dogs, mice, and the internal organs and feces of various animals. (Page 198) After the war, tens of millions of people died of influenza in the West. Starting from Spain, it gradually spread to Europe.

The continent and America, then gradually spread with the flow of the army and virus-infected people, spread to the whole world. This caused many soldiers to fall before they even went to the battlefield, and the villages they passed by were not spared. Because of the limitations of medical and medical conditions at that time, pathogens and effective treatments were never found, so 25 to 50 million people were killed. The death toll was far greater than the number of people who died directly in the war. Even in our so-called highly developed technology, special medicines were not developed. In China's 1968 flu pandemic, the military

The team, factories, schools and rural areas cooked large pots of soup effectively controlled the spread of influenza virus, and fully demonstrated that Chinese herbal medicines have extremely powerful and effective in preventing and treating influenza!" But by defeating you, they have the right to put the hat of the "sick man" on you. The gentle and elegant Western gentlemen and ladies seen in the movies of the Chinese are actually full of dirt on their bodies and lice in their hair, relying on perfume to solve the problem. If they take off their clothes, Ah Q and Wu Ma will definitely be cleaner than them. In the summer of 1665, Charles II

On vacation with the royal family members, an antique businessman wrote in his diary: "Although they looked neat and happy, they were very rude and rude. When they left, there were feces everywhere, in the chimney, in the study, bedroom, and in the cellar." (Page 99) In fact, this cannot be blamed for their rudeness, because the sanitation conditions and hygiene habits at that time were just like that. China had long popularized toilets and squat toilets based on the conditions and customs of various places. As for the aristocrats' way of using toilets, it is enough to imagine when looking at "The New Words of the World".

The West has lived in cesspools for thousands of years, suffered from filth and died of illness by more than half of the population, and realized the importance of public health. With the help of the gold and silver robbed by the industrial revolution and aggression and expansion, it began to popularize modern health systems. I wrote an article about toilets in the Qing Dynasty more than ten years ago. In fact, China has always been the leading in the world in terms of toilets and bathing. Until the late Qing Dynasty, when Chinese students from the United States arrived in the United States, they had to take a bath every day, and the Americans were still very strange: "Why do you Chinese have to bathe every day.

Bath?" At that time, it was also the era when Europe and the United States began to change the traditional concept of hygiene. In 1899, Postel invented the straight-down toilet. The manufacturing of a large number of washers made the people of Europe and the United States accustomed to washing their faces every day. This move of changing customs and habits has been called on by people of knowledge for hundreds of years. After 1916, due to the breakthrough of the ceramic industry, modern bathtubs began to be mass-produced. Europeans and Americans had spare money, leisure time, and leisure hope, and finally felt the joy of bathing, so they came from behind and became "clean people".

The first mention of brushing teeth in the UK was in 1651, in the early Qing Dynasty in China. Queen Elizabeth's teeth were yellow when she was young, and black in her later years, which was much behind Lin Daiyu and Jia Mu. (Page 313) The earliest toothpaste in Europe was made of ash charcoal and honey, and they used tooth powder before. However, the habit of not having public toilets and not loving to take a bath for thousands of years was not immediately changed after the Industrial Revolution and snatching other people's gold and silver treasures. In the 18th century, a French municipal government held a large ball in the municipal hall and rented 51 chamber pots. Because only two were broken, it was considered that the dance was very successful. (Page 162) There was no toilet in the municipal hall. Elegant gentlemen and ladies had to borrow chamber pots for convenience, and other places could be imagined. Until 1958, 84% of families in the United States had black and white TVs.

But the population with a bathtub is less than 1 million. In 1958, West German investigators visited 200 families in a town and saw 125 TVs, but only 3 bathtubs. A statistician pointed out an amazing fact: Until today, one in five people in London basically do not take a bath (page 335). As for the regulations on washing hands before meals, they abide by it because before the knife and fork appeared, Europeans directly grabbed the meal with their hands. In the eyes of Easterners, Western lifestyles are indeed "barbarians and Rongdi", but this may also help people to be strong and have strong resistance. They are not afraid of eating, are covered with yellow hair, work after giving birth, and work in the ocean without seasickness. There is a headache and fever, and they will recover immediately after taking a hot bath.

Chinese people are eating, drinking, having fun, flowers, birds, fish and insects, and they make everything delicate to the point of being corrupt. As a result, things will turn back, causing the family to be destroyed, and even the problem of taking a bath and going to the toilet is backward. The dirty and messy heart disease has accumulated for many years, so once the economy is prosperous, they will wash up wildly. Today, many urban residents take baths many times a day, and they are both consuming water and slack. This is actually a manifestation of national inferiority complex, and they may be criticized for being unclean. There are also some perverted women who spray alcohol everywhere and will not stop without getting tired of cleanliness. At that time, the Eight-Nation Alliance rushed in all the way, but they were not worried that the Chinese people would laugh at them for being hygienic or not.

Life, just kill people and set fire, whoever wins will be the spokesperson of "civilization". A few years ago, I wrote an article titled "Thinking from the "Powder Room"" to talk about the advanced Korean toilets and criticize the polarization of Chinese toilets. I think Chinese people should get out of extreme psychological misunderstandings and promote a healthy living habit from the original meaning of the word "hygiene". * said: "Precautions for hygiene, reduce diseases, and improve people's health." This should also become the purpose of cleaning activities. Along with such a policy, the average life expectancy of Chinese people has doubled. Under today's medical and economic conditions, there is obviously a lot of room for growth in life expectancy for Chinese people.

Nowadays, the hygiene rhythm of the ancient Chinese washing their hair every three days and bathing every five days is still relatively scientific, which can both remove pollution and protect health. The hygiene habits of Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Vietnam are both natural and scientific. As long as the ethnic groups in East Asia have a certain economic strength, men and women look much cleaner and cleaner. They don’t need to wash every day, and the texture is delicate and the body is fragrant. Cleanliness and elegant may be the turn of Feng Shui. In today’s world, with high nose, deep eyes, messy hair and sandpaper all over the body. Tomorrow, is it time to use the beautiful eyebrows, beautiful eyes, smooth skin, round and smooth skin, as elegant?

Another: Interesting words from a history professor

You know that China's greatest contribution to the world is to drink hot water. Even beggars know to set up a small pot to heat the water before drinking. Europeans are stupid, don't know, and they will pick it up and drink it generously. The second biggest contribution is to invent chopsticks, and what about Europeans? They have to grab it with their hands. You said, if you eat Chinese hot pot or something... Some Europeans put their hands into hot water every day to practice in order to eat faster... Although Chinese people are very smart, for some reason, they do not lay foundations when building houses, so Chinese houses are not high, but this is a bit good. Europeans' houses

The cover is very high, four or five floors high, but think about it, when was the invention of the flush toilet? So how did people who live on the fourth and fifth floors clear the toilet? Then you have to pour the toilet out of the window! The streets of Paris are smelly and Franklin went to Paris for the first time and was fainted! As a civilized citizen of Paris, one thing is: Before pouring the toilet, shout three times before making sure there is no one. However, not all people are so civilized. Some people just ignore these and fall down casually. Therefore, shopping in Paris is a very painful thing, which is why the European top hats are created!
Chapter completed!