"Driving piles" is a bad habit in the construction industry in the early years, to put it bluntly, before breaking ground, using living people to sacrifice to the gods of the land to ensure that the project is smooth.

According to legend, the piling came from Lu Ban, the ancestor of the construction industry.

In ancient times, when people were building houses or building bridges and roads, there were often accidents of collapse of houses and bridges, which not only caused property losses, but also caused casualties, so people asked for help from Luban, the ancestor of the construction industry.

Lu Ban believes that there are all kinds of ghosts and gods in the land, and people may destroy feng shui and disturb the ghosts and gods when they break the ground, so it is necessary to use human sacrifices to appease the local ghosts and gods, which is the origin of the stake. These contents are recorded in the section "Disgust with Victory" in the "Book of Luban", but later generations generally believe that this is the content that was maliciously added by later generations in the "Book of Luban".

Because the purpose of Lu Ban's book is to protect the labor of craftsmen and take revenge on those unscrupulous employers, the cruel method of driving piles is completely out of Lu Ban's original intention.

So how did "driving piles" appear in the ancient construction industry?

Now it seems that it is likely that some unscrupulous sorcerers at that time borrowed the cloak of "feng shui" and "disgusted with win" to "rationalize" the vicious evil arts, and used them to spread them vigorously and make profits from them.

You may ask, what is the benefit of sacrificing a living person to a charlatan?

It is nonsense that there must first be a living person in the sacrifice of a living person, but this is also a key question: where do the living people come from? Who will sacrifice their lives for the smooth construction of the project? But let's not forget that in ancient times, there were many poor people, many people were so poor that they could not open the pot, and there were many children in the family, so it became common to sell children and daughters.

These charlatans coaxed their employers, saying that if the project was to be successfully completed, they must drive stakes, and those employers would let these warlocks find boys and girls to sacrifice for the sake of profit, for example, two lives were worth twenty taels of silver, and the warlock used ten taels of silver to buy two children, and the remaining ten taels naturally went into the warlock's pocket, which is the benefit!

Take bridge repair as an example, the bridge is called "lock" in feng shui, and the river is called "dragon", building a bridge on the river, at that time it was considered to add a shackle to the dragon, if there is an accident in the process of repairing the bridge, people think that it is angry with the dragon king, at this time it is necessary to drive a pile. 27KK

After the warlock bought the boy and the girl back, he buried the boy alive in the pier at the head of the bridge, and buried the boy and girl alive in the pier at the end of the bridge, and the boy and girl became the guardian spirits of the bridge, and the dragon king had the boy and girl as companions and no longer made trouble.

Even in modern times, this feng shui theory is still popular. In 2006, the skeletons of at least seven children were found underneath a water mains project at Ho Man Tin Road on Hong Kong Island. Since few people would bury children in such a group, there were rumors at the time that this was the body of a child buried by "driving a stake" when the project was started in the past, and this horrific incident also caused an uproar in the local area.

Even if it is not a living human sacrifice, this feng shui technique is still appearing in other forms. In the nineties of the last century, the support of the main column at the intersection of an elevated road in a certain place encountered obstacles during construction, and later invited a mage to do things, and the method of this law is to let the construction team after the column is repaired, wrap a circle of white steel around the periphery of the column, and install a dragon-shaped ornament on it, forming a "nine dragon column", the project was finally successfully completed (I won't say where it is, if you are interested, you can check it on the Internet).

"Boss Qian has ever made a stake?" Du Lin's eyebrows rose, he was very disgusted with this kind of thing, if this Boss Qian really caused trouble because of the stake, then Du Lin would not help him anyway, and the karma he created himself had to be repaid by himself.

"That thing...... Boss Qian poured himself another cup of tea, took a sip, and said slowly, "That was the year when I just started engaged in real estate development, about ten years ago, also in Hongzhou City, it was a high-rise residential building with an underground garage, according to the construction regulations, it should be digging a foundation pit first and then laying the foundation, and then repairing the underground garage first, and then building a floor by layer, but there was a problem when laying the foundation."

In fact, in the excavation of the foundation pit is troublesome, according to the beginning of the measurement, the groundwater level in that place is not high, but we dig the foundation pit only to find that the groundwater level is very high, we need to do a circle of precipitation around the foundation pit, finally wait for the fence to be done, when it comes to laying the foundation, how we play are crooked, sometimes the pile that was laid the day before, the next day, a amount, and crooked!

A small foreman in the engineering team said that this was to shock the Earth Dragon King, and the best way was to 'drive a pile', which was the first time in my life that I had heard of such a thing. Of course, my reaction at the time was not to agree, this is too cruel, I can't do this kind of thing in exchange for a human life. ”

"But you did it anyway. Du Lin said lightly.

"Yes, but I can't help it, this project is too important to me, if I can't build this building, and I can't pay off the loan owed to the bank, my company will go bankrupt and go bankrupt, I don't care, it's a big deal to start all over again, but what about the 100 or so workers who work with me?" Boss Qian sighed deeply again, " The little foreman told me that he had a fellow villager who was also on the construction site, sixteen years old, who was mentally retarded, and had a bad brain, so he could only do some hard work on the construction site, and the family was particularly difficult, and the little foreman had already contacted the child's parents, and if they could give him a sum of money, the child's parents would be willing to let the child do the work of driving the stakes.

Although I still disagree in my heart, I have to be responsible for the hundred or so people under me, and the child's parents are willing to sell the child's life to me, so I have no choice but to agree. ”

Qian Yuan seemed to be very reluctant to recall this experience, and as he spoke, he hugged his head painfully: "I will never forget that day, that night it was raining lightly, and the concrete mixer truck poured cement mortar into the foundation little by little, and the stupid child stood on the edge of the foundation pit, and the foreman and several other workers put the child in a large bag and threw it into the foundation pit, and I stood on the edge of the pit and watched the cement submerge the child in it...... His parents didn't even want to take one last look at him, and came to the construction site in the afternoon to withdraw 50,000 yuan and went back to their hometown. After saying this, Boss Qian's tears flowed.