How to open a room when going out in ancient times

"Opening a house" requires a "letter of introduction"

According to Zhou Li, hotels in China developed as early as the Zhou Dynasty, and it seems to be a "chain" development. Zhou Wang stipulates that "posthouse" with the nature of "state-owned guest house" requires "Lu" every 10, that is, simple rooms; Set up a "road room" for rest every 30 miles; Every 50-mile town should have a "waiting room", which is a guest house where you can stay.

Modern popular city hotels and family hotels appeared in the pre-Qin period, mainly including "library", "apartment" and "residence". The grades and functions of these hotels are obviously different to adapt to travelers of different identities. The pavilion is more advanced and is used to receive distinguished guests. These hotels are all run by the government. Hotels such as "Jade" and "She" mainly serve ordinary business travelers, and most of them are private.

Moreover, the management of the hotel has long been standardized by the ancients, and passengers cannot stay at will. Although there was no modern ID card in ancient times, there were tokens equivalent to ID cards. Officials or businessmen will hold "Jeff" or "Fu Juan" for business trips or foreign affairs activities authorized by the government. Such "happiness", "knot" and "Juan" are all early identification certificates of staying in the hotel, which are equivalent to modern "letters of introduction". Later "mail roll" and "letter card" also belong to travel documents. Without travel documents, you can't stay in hotels, especially government-run hotels.

At night, we should also "make rounds"

Just like today, after guests check in, they have to register detailed identity information, and there is a special "passenger register". This kind of register was called "book storage" or "calendar storage" in ancient times. It should be properly kept, archived and submitted to the official inspection regularly every month.

Specific registration and inspection procedures, medieval Moroccan traveler batuta (also translated as "Bai Tutai") said in more detail in his "Travels of China": "At every stop on the road, there are anti-travelers, who can stay overnight, and officials can take care of it ... When it gets dark, managers and their secretaries come home, they will leave the guests, write down their names one by one, seal the doors and let them sleep peacefully. At dawn the next day, the clerk and the clerk came back and called the guests up according to the list to prove it. "

It can be seen that in ancient times, the registration management of passengers entering the store was quite strict, and rounds were also required.

In some cases, there is a "special room"

Modern hotels will also provide preferential rooms for a certain period of time, which is the so-called "special room". Ancient hotels also give discounts to their guests, even free of charge. Some dynasties stipulated that government-run hotels should be free of room charges on certain days.

For example, in the Song Dynasty, all government-run hotels at that time had free check-in days. According to the records of the Song Dynasty, Dazhong Xiangfu, who had been emperor in Zhao Heng (Song Zhenzong) for five years (A.D. 10 12), encountered a severe winter. In the first month of that year, on the grounds of "cold snow", the court demanded that "anyone who should rent a house as a shop should be exempted from cutting money for three days". He also said,' the poor living in the official residence are worth cold food for three days from winter to morning.' "

The so-called "saving money" means the room rate. This record makes it very clear that government-run hotels (official residences) are exempt from room charges on rainy and snowy days, "winter solstice" and "cold food". In addition, in the epidemic, there has also been a phenomenon of free rooms.

This kind of free hotel, in the eyes of the ancients, is a righteous move. According to "The History of the Scholars in the Later Han Dynasty", the family hotels opened by the Eastern Han Dynasty Taishou Zhou often provide convenience for passengers free of charge without being reported by passengers. In most cases, the popular "guild halls" in the Ming and Qing Dynasties were also used by villagers who went to live for free.

Provide "special services"

The service requirement of modern hotels is "feel at home", which existed in the pre-Qin period. "Thirty-one years of Zuo Zhuan's" xianggong ""Feel at home, no peace or disaster? " The meaning of this sentence is that guests staying in the Jin hotel should feel like they are at home. What other disasters will there be?

"Feel at home" was originally Zhou Wang's service reception requirement for the State Guesthouse. Since then, "feel at home" has become the common rule and the highest service level of the ancient hotel industry in China. Under the business philosophy of "feel at home", the ancient hotel industry tried its best to provide services within its power to satisfy passengers.

One of the basic services of modern hotels is to take care of valuables, which also existed in ancient times. When batuta was traveling in China, he saw that "the merchants should take care of the money and goods they received from the guests", and the guests should give the money to the guests when they checked out, and they should pay full compensation for the missing money.

Buying and selling for guests is also a routine service of ancient hotels, and some even provide "special services" for male adult guests-"purchasing" women, so that passengers can really feel at home. This incident also made batuta encounter: "If the guest wants to keep a concubine, the owner will buy a maid to be a concubine and live in the room for two people. The cost will be paid by the owner recently." The "owner" mentioned here is the hotel owner, because it is not illegal to keep concubines in ancient times, and it is not uncommon for concubines to take home in the future.

In the Ming Dynasty, Zhang Dai recorded what he saw and heard when he went to Mount Tai in Shandong Province in Tao An Meng. "Closer is the secret room, all enchanting." Sun's classic "Guangzhou Song" in the Ming Dynasty also recorded: "As beautiful as flowers, wild songs are dumb." Therefore, the ancients had the feeling that "life is like a family, except wind and rain"

Opening a house in ancient times