There is a word "haze" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. What is the ancient haze?

Recently, Chai Jing's in-depth investigation film Under the Dome has attracted wide attention. However, with the con

There is a word "haze" in Oracle Bone Inscriptions. What is the ancient haze?

Recently, Chai Jing's in-depth investigation film Under the Dome has attracted wide attention. However, with the continuous entry of various perspectives, people's focus has gradually shifted from smog and environmental protection itself to the surrounding areas of famous middle-aged women in Beijing. Things have changed, so it is no wonder that there is an article calling for: Pay attention to smog and forget about Chai Jing.

In fact, long before Chai Jing's loud reminder, in China in the past few years, the topic effect and attention caused by smog have greatly surpassed the traditional topics such as housing prices and wages, and become the "leader" in the field of environmental protection. Since 20 1 1, the terms "PM2.5" and "smog" have been known to the public one after another.

To say that "smog" is a local product, it may be necessary to distinguish it slowly. Any Chinese character, as long as it is not created today, is obviously not passive water. The word "haze" is no exception. It has existed since ancient times. So, what did haze mean in ancient times? Did the smog phenomenon we talked about today exist in ancient times?

The mainstream interpretation of "haze" in ancient times was close to dusty weather.

And the "wind and rain are haze" in the engraving "Er Ya Zhu Shu".

Erya explains the word "haze" as "wind and rain soil is haze", which means that the soil under the wind is called haze. Here, "rain" as a verb is a noun, meaning to fall like rain. Er Ya's explanation is aimed at the sentence "When the wind blows, you come" in the poem "When the wind blows" in the Book of Songs. Final Wind is the earliest extant document that records haze, and it is also the only written source that people can see after the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period. Since then, the ancients' understanding of haze can only be found here.

The word "haze" in the evolution of fonts.

After Er Ya, The Book of Songs Mao Zhuan simplified the definition of haze as "haze, rain and earth." In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi and Zheng Xuan's Shi Mao Jian completely copied Er Ya. Zeng studied under Zheng Xuan's Three Kingdoms figure Sun Yan, and explained Erya in detail as "the wind blows the dust, and the soil rises from top to bottom", but it was only specific and there was no new information. Since then, from Guo Pu in the Eastern Jin Dynasty and Confucius in the Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, scholars have not made any new statements on this issue.

Without literati, it is even more difficult for poets and literati to invent. For example, the book Langya in the later Han Dynasty quoted a sentence from nirvana in fire in the Eastern Han Dynasty: "The sun is not only chaotic, but the weather is also wrong, and the haze covers the sun." In the Tang Dynasty, Li Xian noted the haze as: "Erya" said: "Wind and rain are haze."

From this, it is not difficult to see that the interpretation of Erya based on the sentence "the wind is ending in Lan" in the Book of Songs has become the mainstream understanding of Lan by the ancients. This understanding, from the connection between "wind" and "rainy soil", is closer to what we call "dusty weather" today, and it can also be further said to be a sandstorm, such as "Long drought in late autumn, deep dust, wind and frost combined, and red flowers everywhere" in September of the second year of the Northern Wei Dynasty (5 19), and another example is "Biography of Empresses and Empresses in the History of Jin Dynasty".

However, is the ancient people's understanding of haze limited to this? Beyond the interpretation of pure words, did the ancients observe a weather phenomenon closer to today's smog?

A few literature records are closer to the "haze" in the present sense.

First of all, it must be clear that the understanding of smog and observation records are two different things. Just as the ancients could not understand the solar eclipse according to today's natural science, this did not prevent them from observing and recording the solar eclipse. Similarly, the mainstream definition of smog in ancient people is different from today's, but it does not prevent them from recording weather similar to today's smog phenomenon into the category of "haze".

The word "Tan" on Oracle Bone Inscriptions's copy of Oracle Bone Inscriptions Collection (13466 edition) (upper left).