5 Shocking Things About Life In Ancient China.
Number 5.
Smell was important in Ancient China.
Body odor, they believed, was a sign of barbarism, and so the wealthy would go to great lengths
to keep it off.
Women would walk around with aromatic bags attached to their waists.
When a man was in the presence of the emperor, he was required to suck on cloves to fight
bad breath.
In those times, so much of a Chinese noble's paycheck went toward hygiene that they called
it a "subsidy for clothing and hair washing."
For the poor, though, the tricks just weren't available.
And so they resorted to some more desperate options.
One ancient Chinese doctor, for example, recommended that, at least once each year, every person
should wash their armpits with urine.
In the north part of China, however, people would go the whole winter without bathing,
fearing that touching water in the cold would make them ill.
The Taoists, meanwhile, barely bathed at all.
They believed that bathing spread illness, and so, while Koreans were bathing twice a
day, they were staying as far away from soap and water as humanly possible, because they
didn't want to be unclean.
Number 4.
When a massive part of your country is afraid to bathe, it causes a few problems.
And so it might not particularly surprising that ancient China was infested with lice.
Lice were so widespread that early Chinese doctors used them to make diagnoses.
If the lice were crawling all over the patient's body, an early Chinese medical document says,
he will survive.
If the lice are scrambling off his body like rats fleeing a sinking ship, he will die.
The poor were so used to being covered in lice that many would compulsively pluck them
off their hair and eat them.
This happened so much that they had remedies to help people who ate too much of their own
lice.
They would be fed ashes and boiled water from old combs.
The next time you visited the bathroom, the doctors promised, you would pass a belly full
of lice.
Number 3.
Chinese women, whether they were rich or poor, were encouraged to bind their feet as tightly
as humanly possible.
The goal was to keep your foot less than 4 inches long, which left it a crushed, mutilated
mound of flesh they called a "lotus foot."
This wasn't just something a few people did.
At its peak, almost every upper-class woman and 50 percent of the lower class bound their
feet.
The really weird part, though, is how the men felt about it.
To ancient Chinese men, these deformed lotus feet were the sexiest things on earth.
Foreplay, in ancient China, was meant to start with a man fondling his partner's broken foot,
and they put a lot of thought into it.
During the Qing Dynasty, they even released a sex manual with 48 different ways to fondle
a mutilated foot.
It wasn't just that lotus feet were sexy.
They were the sexiest part of a woman's body.
There are early Chinese sex books where women brazenly display every part of their body,
except for their feet.
They would tantalizingly play with their bindings like they were going to reveal it, but they
would never expose their bare feet.
Genitals were one thing, but a bare lotus foot was a considered so erotic it was unfit
to print.
Horrifyingly, the practice of foot-binding appears to be re-emerging in modern China.
Number 2.
Chinese medicine made some incredible breakthroughs.
They invented, for example, endocrinology in the 200 BC, a science the West didn't develop
until the 20th century.
That's an accomplishment, but it's also a disgusting one.
Endocrinology involves separating hormones from human secretions.
When they were picking human secretions, the Chinese chose pee.
They would gather up 150 gallons of male urine in a large pan and boil it until it evaporated.
A crystallized hormone that they called "autumn mineral" would be left behind.
It was just crystallized urine.They couldn't exactly inject hormones, so they would take
the crystallized urine by eating it, and they ate a lot of it.
For each dose, one medical paper instructed, take five to seven pills with warm wine or
soup before breakfast.
They used it as a hormone, and it worked.
Amazingly enough, China developed a whole field of medicine 2,000 years before the rest
of the world.
Still, it's hard not to wonder about the man who first had the idea to get 150 gallons
of urine together, boil it, and pop whatever was left behind in his mouth.
Number 1.
By the fourth century BC, the ancient chinese would developed stool transplants, another
medical idea the West didn't discover until the 20th century.
The ancient Chinese way of doing it, though, was a little less than appetizing.
Chinese doctors would put together something they called "yellow soup," which was water
mixed with a healthy person's fermented stool.
They'd give it to patients who had diarrhea and order them to drink up every last drop
of that liquid feces.
Again, this worked well.
The healthy bacteria in the stool would get rid of the bad bacteria in the patient's body.
The same concept is used today to treat Clostridium difficile, a deadly disease, but in ancient
China, this was just listed as a diarrhea remedy.
The Chinese had a way to treat diarrhea that worked, but more than a few patients must
have seriously considered just toughing it out.