The shapes of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang Dynasty and Yang Guifei are very good: bathrobes are "lovers' clothes"

Meng Hui, a writer, is the author of Scenery of Painting Hall and has translated books such as Appreciation of Western Antiques.

The famous sentence "It was early spring. In Bai Juyi's Song of Eternal Sorrow, the image of "bathing" and "bathing" of Yang Guifei has been deeply rooted in people's hearts for a long time. "Huaqing Pool" refers to the hot spring bath in Huaqing Palace. Every October of the lunar calendar, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty led his favorite concubine and princes to move to the Huaqing Palace in Lishan Hot Spring Palace, and returned to Chang 'an in the following spring when the weather turned warmer. So the allusion of "Huaqing giving bath" came into being.

Ming Taizu's Miscellaneous Notes, Zheng and Pan's works in the Tang Dynasty all described the specific shape of the bath pool in Huaqing Palace. More importantly, until the Northern Song Dynasty, the important architectural relics in Huaqing Palace were still preserved, and the relevant records were kept by Qian Yi, a poet in the Song Dynasty, in the Southern New Book. This is really precious and unusual information.

According to Southern New Book, there are 89 hot spring eyes in Huaqing Palace. Tang Xuanzong and Yang Guifei each occupied two springs at the top, and built a bath on them. Tang Xuanzong's special bath is called "Yu Tang", and the bath inside is tens of feet long and wide. Yang Guifei's bathhouse is located in the northwest of Yutang, and its area is slightly smaller than that of Yutang ―― it is called "Feizi Soup" in another Song annotation "Tang Yulin".

The decoration style of these two supreme baths has one of the biggest characteristics, which is "white". Both inside and outside the bath are paved with white stones. The pool is surrounded by a circle of platforms paved with white stones, and each side is equipped with white stone steps, and the first stage gradually descends into the pool water. The interior of the bath is a jade-like white stone wall with a jade-like white stone bottom covered with relief patterns of fish, dragons, flowers and birds, which are ever-changing and indescribable. Once the water in the pool overflows, the shadow of the fish pattern in the pool fluctuates gently with the water waves, as if it were alive and swimming underwater.

The water spraying equipment in the pool is very beautiful: two white stone pillars stand in the middle of Yutang pool, and a white stone basin carved in the shape of lotus is held up at the top of each stone pillar. Hot springs constantly gush from the center of the basin, providing geothermal hot water for bathing. In the princess soup, hot spring water keeps pouring out from the bottom of the pool, forming a gurgling undercurrent in the depth of the water.

The bathrooms in Yang Yuhuan and Li Longji are as clean as snow, which shows that they have a good style. Most interestingly, according to Old Tang Book and Biography of Zheng Lang, the romantic son of heaven and his beloved princess have a unique "couple costume", which is two colorful robes decorated with golden bird patterns, which they wear as "bathrobes" before and after bathing.

In Huaqing Palace, there are also many large and small baths filled with water and pushed out by a set of underground pipes. These baths are for the exclusive use of a favorite like An Lushan, or large public baths for the collective use of ladies-in-waiting or attendants. According to Ming Taizu Miscellaneous Notes and other books, contrary to the bath styles of Li and Yang, the baths where courtiers soak in hot springs are beautifully decorated and carved with golden colors.

These baths are all made of agate stone with natural patterns, and there are decorative rockeries in the pool water. One kind of rockery is to pile translucent blue glass blocks into the shape of a mountain and put them in the bath, so that the blue glass and the swaying bright waves reflect each other. Another kind of rockery is made of precious natural agarwood or sandalwood blocks. When it is soaked in the rippling water, it will spit out its fragrance into the steaming and humid air. In addition, there are painted boats with silver ornaments and wooden boats with white incense, which stand at the head of the pole and are inserted into the water. It looks as if these boats are floating on the surface of the pool, and the paddles are decorated with pearls and jade. This handicraft-like boat ornament should be used for placing toiletries.

In fact, it is not difficult to perceive from these descriptions that the bath decoration of Huaqing Palace is quite exotic, which is similar to the baths in Central Asia, West Asia and even ancient Rome. Modern archaeologists have successfully excavated the sites of "Lotus Soup" and "Begonia Soup" in Lishan, both of which are paved with stones and set up steps, which shows that the baths in Huaqing Palace in the Tang Dynasty are generally unified in shape, and the records in Southern New Books and other documents are quite reliable. Therefore, when people today recite the sexy poem "And, because of her tiredness, a maid is lifting her up" and imagine the body of the county town that evaporated in water vapor thousands of years ago, perhaps they might as well take Elizabeth with them. Taylor's luxurious bathing scene in Cleopatra is used as a reference.