Why did the emperor wear a yellow robe (1)? (This is a data stamp, please review it after the text is updated and replaced.) ）

Reflecting rank through clothing was a particularly important means in ancient times to distinguish between the high and low social classes and the high and low official positions. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, successive dynasties have continued to repeatedly determine it in detail, in order to "distinguish between the noble and the low, and the humble and the humble", forming a developed and complex uniform system. The level of clothing can be distinguished by the different styles, accessories and patterns, forming a complete and standardized "color clothing" system.

So, why did the emperor wear a yellow robe?

To truly answer this question, we may have to start with the formation process of this color order of clothing.

The traditional Han and Jin dresses before the Northern and Southern Dynasties did not have a strict "clothing color" arrangement system, and were more distinguished by the differences in the crown, seal, ribbon, and wear.

For the first time in the Northern Zhou Dynasty, the mention of "color clothes" appeared in the guards' clothing, "Zhou Shu Xuan Di Ji": "The officials of the Tiantai guards in the second year of the elephant are all dressed in five-color and red, purple and green clothes, with variegated colors as the edge, and the name is the color clothes. If there is a big event, it will be served with the public service. But the system is not detailed.

Decades later, in the sixth year of the Sui Dynasty, for the first time, the color level of official uniforms was clearly formulated, "Sui Shu Etiquette VII": "The edict is from those who drive far away, and the civil and military officials are all dressed in uniforms." The high and the low are different, and the five colors are mixed. More than five grades, through the purple robe, six grades or more, with crimson green, Xu officials with green, Shu people with white, butchers with soap, soldiers with yellow. "——The purple robe was officially determined to be the first-class uniform color of civil and military attachés above the fifth grade, and the following were arranged in crimson, green, blue and white.

In the early Tang Dynasty four years, the clothing order was promulgated, inheriting its system and gradually adjusting and perfecting, "ordinary clothing, not bad, etc., has been detailed now, with other forms, it is advisable to issue it immediately, and the salty envoy knows it, so the three grades above the purple, the four grades below the scarlet, the six and seven grades are green, and the eight and nine grades are green", "the color of the foreign officials and the common people is yellow".

In the Tang Dynasty, after six or seven fine-tunings, the five-level clothing system of purple, crimson (zhu), green, green (blue) and yellow (white) was basically determined, and it was basically used by later generations.

There are many reasons for the appearance of this color sequence from the end of the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui Dynasty, but the deeper reason may also have a lot to do with the difficulty of dyeing various colors at that time.

The first is purple, which is at the top of the list.

Purple is an intermediate color, in addition to the traditional Chinese black, white, red, yellow, and blue five positive colors, Han Liu Xi's "Interpretation of Names": "Purple, flawed, non-positive color." The flaws of the five colors are also confusing people. "In the early days, it was not a noble color in theory, and it rarely entered the orthodox uniform system before the Wei and Jin dynasties, and except for the ribbon, it was basically informal and ordinary use. However, its color is quite attractive, can "confuse people", is a fashionable color, and has been worn more and more since the Warring States period to the Han Dynasty.

"Han Feizi Waichu Says Upper Left" once recorded a story of "Qi Huan Gong is good at purple clothes", because Qi Huan Gong likes to wear purple clothes, "a country is full of purple", the price of purple silk at that time was several times more than that of plain silk, and later because Qi Huan Gong took the initiative to disobey purple and the popularity subsided. But what we are talking about here is only the rise and fall of popular colors in one place and another, and it has not changed the color status of purple. "The Analects of Yang Goods": "The evil purple seizes Zhu Ye, and the evil Zheng Sheng's rebellion Yale also." "Despite its popularity, purple is still seen as an unorthodox color.

We can often see the use of light purple coats in the murals and terracotta figurines of the Han Dynasty, but the identity of the wearer is not superior to others, slaves and guards are all there, just one of the variegated colors.

Since the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the status of purple has risen rapidly, and in the Sui Dynasty, it officially surpassed vermilion and jumped to the first-class color of the hundred officials, and it is often said that it is related to the Taoist worship of purple and the promotion of Taoism in the Tang Dynasty, but perhaps this is also more related to the difficulty of obtaining purple dyes at that time.

The influence of the concept of purple in the West can be mentioned.

In the ancient West, high-quality purple dye was mainly extracted from a liquid secreted by bone snails produced on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, called bone snail violet. The purple dye produced in the Phoenician city-state of Tyre is the most famous, so it is also called "Tyre purple", and "Phoenicia" itself is derived from the Greek word "purple red". The snail itself is of limited origin, and it is said that it takes a few grams of purple dye to be extracted from thousands of conchs, and its value is extremely high, sometimes even ten grams of gold can buy only one gram of dye. Ancient Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome all regarded purple as a noble color, Roman ordinary citizens wore white toga, and high-ranking officials Toga could have purple trim, the Roman Senate stipulated that only the royal family was allowed to wear purple robes, and the code of Theodosia in the 4th-6th centuries and the imperial code of the Eastern Roman Empire all recorded in detail the royal family's monopoly on bone snail purple silk, so purple is also called "imperial purple".

After the Wei and Jin dynasties, various ethnic groups in the northwest entered the Central Plains on a large scale, and the Sogdian Hu merchants in the Western Regions also had frequent activities, which brought cultural exchanges between the East and the West. Since the Northern Qi Xianbei aristocracy re-opposed the sinicization, advocating the Xihu culture, the Xihu Su specific residence or the king opened the mansion countless, the Hu people's edging round-necked robes gradually became popular in the Central Plains, from the Northern Wei Dynasty after the Central Plains tomb terracotta figurines and Buddhist donors The image can also be seen that the proportion of Xihu clothing is getting larger and larger, and finally even surpasses the proportion of Xianbei clothing and Hanfu, as Shen Kuo said, "Since the Northern Qi Dynasty, it is all Hufu".

By the Sui Dynasty, Hufu had been completely integrated into the Central Plains and became the most commonly worn clothing in people's daily lives. At the same time, the official regular dress system based on the round-necked Hufu was formed, and the concept of color hierarchy was reflected in it, without touching the color system of the traditional sacrificial clothes and court clothes of the Han and Jin dynasties in the Central Plains that coexisted at the same time. At this time, purple became the first-class color of Hu-style regular clothing, and it seems that it cannot be ruled out that it will be influenced by the concept of imported Western clothes.

At the same time, in China, although purple does not need to be obtained from expensive bone snail violet, it is not easy to dye.

The traditional Chinese purple dye basically only has the root of comfrey, which is complex to make, and its pigment comfrey quinone is insoluble in water, and is not very stable, it can only adsorb a small amount of pigment at a time, and it needs to be dyed repeatedly more than a dozen times, and it is relatively easy to color only on silk, and it is difficult to dye on the common hemp and kudzu, and it is technically suitable to become a high-grade color. The dyeing of pre-Qin comfrey was mostly concentrated in the eastern part of Qi State, which is also the basis for the emergence of "Qi Huan Gong Hao Purple" mentioned above. There is also a "Purple Strategy" in "Pipe": "Xilai people are good at dyeing. Practice for Lai Chun. Its midweek gold ten. Lai people know it, and they smell it. "The purple silk dyed by the Lai people in Shandong is worth ten gold in Zhoudi, and the Lai people buy a large number of it and sell it to Zhoudi to make huge profits. This also shows that dyeing purple was not an easy thing to popularize at that time. It is worth noting that in the ribbons of the Han and Jin dynasties, in addition to the various red and yellow (纁) ribbons and green ribbons of the royal family and the princes, the purple ribbon is almost the highest among the rest of the official ribbons, which also reflects the continuous rise of the status of purple.

Since the Sui Dynasty set purple as the first-class clothing color, in the Tang and Song dynasties, "purple" is synonymous with identity and dignity, and it is the lifelong pursuit of countless people in the world to obtain a purple robe and gold belt, and it has also formed a system of "borrowing purple" and "giving purple". Interestingly, in the Ming Dynasty, perhaps because of the conflict between the "evil purple Zhu" and the national surname "Zhu", the status of purple plummeted, and it was canceled as a first-class uniform color and replaced by vermilion.

After the Song Dynasty, the purple dyeing technology gradually improved and enriched, at the beginning of the Song Dynasty, there was the oil purple blue and purple set dyeing method of "dyeing first for green, and Xu dyed with comfrey", and in the Chunxi period, there was a kind of "cover not first green, but change the scarlet to the feet, with less comfrey, and the sincerity can win the vermilion", so as to save the use of comfrey. Due to the large import of Sumu from the South China Sea, it has also become a new source of purple by Mordant with Sumu and alum.

Crimson, vermilion, and red under purple have been regarded as normal, noble, and auspicious colors since ancient times, and they are also relatively difficult colors to dye. In the early stage, the root of madder was mostly used for red dyeing, and alizarin dyeing can be obtained after adding mordants such as alum. Ruder is suitable for silk dyeing, but not as well on cotton and linen fabrics. Another traditional pigment, cinnabar, is also a red dye that is more difficult to color and difficult to promote.

Since the Han Dynasty, the petals of safflower have been used as red dyes.

Safflower, or red blue, is generally believed to have originated in the Near East and northern Egypt, and was introduced to the northwest of China in the Western Han Dynasty, and gradually began to be planted in the Central Plains of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Safflower contains yellow and red □□, and because other sources of yellow dye are abundant enough, the water-soluble yellow pigment in it is mostly discarded. After the safflower is picked, it is separated from the yellow pigment by the initial tao, the safflower is fixed by the re-scooping, fermented, and then exposed to dry safflower or dried into safflower cake by the shade, which can be further dyed, which is not an easily obtainable dye in the Northern and Southern Dynasties. The crimson dyed by the safflower is more bright and moving than the red dyed by madder, if compared with the relatively calm and simple green, it is indeed more dazzling and dazzling, and it is very popular in the six towns in the Northern Qi Dynasty and the Northern Zhou Dynasty, such as the "Book of Zhou" that there is a record of the Northern Tribe's noble scarlet robe, and the "Old Tang Book" also called the Northern Qi Dynasty "Gao's emperors, often wear the scarlet robe".

As a result, crimson and purple, the two colors with the highest dyeing cost at that time, became the two most expensive clothing colors.

However, becoming a high-grade color also stimulated a stronger pursuit, and there were still technical limitations in the early days, and in the Tang Dynasty, because of the expansion of the demand for purple and vermilion fabrics, the cultivation of comfrey and safflower was widely popularized, and nine of the ten ways of Zhenguan were planted. In addition, the introduction of new dyeing materials such as the Soviet side also provided the possibility for various transgressions in later generations, making red a color that has been repeatedly banned, such as "Purple clothes and red clothes to distinguish the noble and the low, so there are Lu Yan servants openly take it".

In the Ming Dynasty, because purple was abolished in the clothing system, vermilion jumped to the first-class official clothing color, and at the same time became the most popular auspicious clothing color among the Chinese people.

Compared with the noble warm colors of purple and vermilion, the cool colors of blue and green belong to the relatively lowly and ordinary third and fourth class colors.

The main source of blue is indigo, the raw material of indigo is rich in blue grass varieties, including indigo, woad, wood indigo, mountain indigo, etc., which is easy to plant and widely distributed. Chinese have a very long history of planting and using blue grass, and they are very early to discover and quickly enter the plant dyes used by ordinary people, "Xia Xiaozheng" has "May Qi irrigated blue water", "Li Ji Yue Ling" "Midsummer day, let the people do not love blue to dye", "Book of Poetry" has "final dynasty blue picking", and Northern Wei's "Qi Min Yaoshu" also records a more detailed method of making indigo. It can be seen that at least before the Qin and Han dynasties, bluegrass cultivation was relatively common.

So from the pre-Qin period to modern times, cyan has always been an extremely daily clothing color in China, "Hanshu Chengdi Ji" has "green and green people often wear", "Jin Order" has "soldiers and hundreds of workers have no green and white". In modern times, cyan blue is still an important color in the traditional clothing of many ethnic groups, including the Han nationality, and the only part of the traditional dyeing technology that has been preserved in the Han area is blue dyeing.

Green, on the other hand, is a lowly color in the traditional concept, a color with a low status, and it is also the most common color in nature.

Since the Tang Dynasty, the two have been sorted before or after, and most of them are in the lower position in the color of the regular clothes, and "green shirt", "green robe", "green shirt", "green robe", and "green robe" have often become the pronouns or self-humble words of humble officials.

In addition to low-level officials, ordinary women and lowly slaves and maids can also wear Qingbi, "New Tang Dynasty Book" said that in the late Tang Dynasty, "women's clothes are green and blue", "all the tribes, guest girls, slaves and maids are all dressed in Qingbi", so "Qingyi" has also become a synonym for maids, waiters and poor and simple women, such as Dunhuang's "Later Tang Qingtai Three Years of Fangjia Children's Book" recorded "Fangjia Tong Qingyi Female Jiajia." ”

In the seventeenth year of Hongzhi, Ming Xiaozong and Li Dongyang, Liu Jian, Xie Qian, etc. re-agreed to discuss the ban on clothing in the warm pavilion, and there was such a dialogue:

It said: "There are dark colors, black and green in the purpose, and black and green and blue are commonly used clothes in the world, and there is no need to ban them." The minister said: "It is black and green ears like black color." Shang also said: "Black and green are often served, and it is difficult to ban it, so there is no need to talk about it." He also said: "Dark color can be banned, black and green are common clothes in the world, and there is no need to ban it." "All promises to leave.

Emperor Xiaozong believed that black, green, and cyan were the colors of clothing used by the people every day, and repeatedly emphasized that there was no need to include them in the ban, although the minister explained that he was referring to black and green, which was close to the black color, and finally gave up. It can be seen that green was widely used by the people at that time.

The yellow, white and light colors after blue and green have basically been used as the clothing colors of foreign officials and commoners since the Sui and Tang dynasties, and there are also deep technical reasons.

In natural plants, the yellow pigment that can become a dyeing material is actually the most abundant source, locust flower, gardenia, horsegrass, coxagulus, barberry, oak, rehmannia root, mulberry bark, turmeric, turmeric, pomegranate peel and so on can be used as a variety of yellow dyes. In addition, its dyeing technology is also relatively easy, most of the yellow dyes are direct dyes, and different shades of yellow can also be obtained through different mordants. Therefore, yellow has become one of the easiest fabric colors to dye. And the cloth that is not dyed at all is the cheapest white pigment, and it is the lowest cost "color". Then yellow and white naturally became the end colors of the Sui and Tang Dynasty clothing color grades.

In the documents of the Tang Dynasty, in addition to the uniform system issued many times, it is mentioned that "foreign officials and concubines use yellow in the color of clothing", there are also records such as "husbands wear yellow and white", "slaves and subordinates wear yellow and white" and so on. In ancient times, there was a saying that "yellow clothes are selected", and since the pre-Qin period, "white clothes" and "white ding" have also been used to refer to commoners or low-level officials who have no meritorious official positions. There is a poem in the Five Dynasties that says, "The green robe is the color of spring grass, and the white is abandoned like an enemy", which means that once he takes up the official position, he can't wait to take off his white clothes and put on a blue official robe. In the 26th year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty, there was even a ban on color clothing, "When meeting people in the court, they should use colored clothes at four o'clock, and they are not allowed to be vegan", prohibiting those who enter the court from wearing the same pure white clothes as the common people.

In this way, since yellow is one of the lowest colors, let's go back to the question at the beginning, why did the emperor also wear yellow robes?

- To be continued. Author: Raising Eyebrows Sword Dance

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