"Daming Palace?"
Li Shimin repeated the name and immediately thought of the Daming ode from the Book of Songs.
Then jealousy hit him right in the face.
So this Tang dynasty of later generations gets a Daming Palace, Wu Zetian gets the Myriad Phenomena Divine Palace.
Only he and Li Zhi have to live in this hot, damp Taiji Palace and get tortured by humidity every summer?
Instant bad mood.
Just thinking about it, two years ago when dampness sickness had him suffering, Changsun Wuji suggested building pavilions to avoid moisture, and he had hesitated for ages before agreeing.
How come later descendants go wild with construction without blinking?
No wonder every one of them looks like a foolish ruler.
No wonder there are "nine imperial escapes."
Li Shimin immediately changed his mind and muttered:
"When the Western Regions are somewhat settled and the seas are temporarily calm, I will personally build this Daming Palace."
Empress Changsun immediately burst out laughing, then quickly covered her face:
"If Your Majesty had this intention earlier, why suffer dampness sickness year after year?"
Li Shimin did not mind at all and nodded in strong agreement.
Of course, he would not waste the people's strength to cast some once in a lifetime 'wonder' like the Myriad Phenomena Divine Palace and ruin the state.
But the Taiji Palace, passed down from the Sui since the second year of Kaihuang, truly no longer matched the grand atmosphere of the Great Tang he intended to personally create.
The husband and wife's teasing stopped at that. Empress Changsun instead seriously took out paper and brush, using the low table by the couch, and carefully copied down the bits and pieces about New Year customs mentioned by later generations.
Li Shimin leaned over to look.
What he saw was concise but extremely practical notes.
For example, that Laba porridge must be made from mixed grains and fruits.
For example, the sugar versus honey issue for Little New Year.
She even wrote in neat small characters on the side: "Might try new bee keeping methods in the imperial park."
Li Shimin immediately understood her intention.
Leizu, as the Yellow Emperor's principal consort, invented sericulture.
Now, although bee domestication was started by Jiang Qi, if they could figure out later generation bee keeping methods, that too could be counted as a great merit.
So Li Shimin only smiled and said nothing more.
The chief ministers were nitpicking ritual matters, even debating whether mosquitoes should really be ranked alongside rats.
Yan Lide, meanwhile, did not stop moving his hand, trying to deduce the locations based on just the two characters "Xiang" and "Gan."
As someone deeply familiar with construction, he was probably the person in the hall who best understood how important this was.
Mortar and paste made from lime were top grade for wall coating and bonding bricks and tiles.
Adding lime during iron smelting under the Directorate of Works could also purify iron and make steel forging easier.
Now learning that it could also kill insects, Yan Lide seemed to already see its massive future potential.
...
"These Xiang and Gan likely refer to the Jing and Yang regions."
Pang Tong felt this was an easy judgment.
After all, when he was in Jing Province, he had traveled the Xiang River, which runs through southern Jing and is unforgettable.
Gan was also simple. The seat of Luling was in Gan County, and he remembered it clearly.
Zhuge Liang silently wrote down the three characters "high temperature kiln," then drew a line between "high temperature" and "kiln."
When he learned that later generations could also fire porcelain, he had already thought about how to achieve it.
The good news was that he finally saw hints from later generations.
The bad news was that after traveling through Jing and Yi, he had long since broken his earlier misconceptions. Back in Chengdu, he had already tested a temperature boosting method using charcoal as fuel and sealing the kiln with yellow clay.
The hint was good, but it came a bit late.
Zhuge Liang smiled helplessly and crossed out all three characters together, though he felt a sense of accomplishment in his chest.
But then he thought of something else.
"This Tiangong Kaiwu of the Ming is a treasure to us. It must also have been a treasured book in the Ming. It is hard to believe it contains mistakes."
"Later generations can look down from above and spot its errors. Then how will generations after them view this era they call 'the greatest in five thousand years'?"
The wording was awkward, but Pang Tong easily understood.
He could not immediately grasp the key point, so he shook his head and gave a non answer answer:
"Change allows passage. Passage allows endurance. Endurance gives rise to change again. Perhaps that is the cycle."
[Lightscreen]
[Twenty fifth day, grind tofu.
Some say that Chinese history is a history of eating.
In that history, tofu absolutely counts as one of the most important characters.
China is undeniably the birthplace of tofu, but exactly who invented tofu in Chinese history can no longer be verified.
In the Five Dynasties period, Xie Chuo's Song Shiyi Lu says that tofu making began with Liu An, Prince of Huainan of the Han.
Zhu Xi of the Northern Song also wrote a poem on tofu and annotated that tofu began with Liu An of Huainan.
But what is strange is that if you open historical records, from Han to Tang, nearly a thousand years, the word tofu never appears.
After the fall of the Northern Song, Meng Yuanlao, who had lived in Bianliang, was forced to move south. He wrote Dongjing Menghua Lu to recall the splendor of the Northern Song capital.
That book described the pre fall prosperity in great detail, listing over three hundred kinds of foods and drinks, yet still no tofu.
So in earlier years, some people believed tofu was actually invented in the Song, and that Song scholars, who favored antiquity and belittled the present, simply pinned the invention on Liu An.
That is not the truth.
The reason is simple. According to current Japanese records, in the same era as the Five Dynasties, offerings to their gods included something called "Tangfu."
In Japanese texts, this item appears as doufu, doufu, and other variants. Whether by name or pronunciation, it is clearly tofu. From the name "Tangfu," it is easy to infer it was transmitted from Tang to Japan.
Not until after the fall of the Southern Song did Wu Zimu, recalling the splendor of Lin'an, write Meng Liang Lu, where fried tofu and tofu soup appeared for the first time.
Wu Zimu annotated that these were foods for the lower classes, eaten by common people just to fill their stomachs.
This helps explain why Han and Tang records lack tofu.
Most likely, before the Song, paper was still expensive, and tofu was considered too low class to deserve a place in books.
In fact, the four simple steps modern people know, grinding beans and filtering slurry, boiling and coagulating, pressing into shape, and removing excess liquid, were extremely difficult for ancient people to rediscover when techniques were lost.
Especially the coagulation step. Whether using gypsum, vinegar acid, or brine, the resulting tofu could be completely different.
Not until the Ming did tofu techniques advance greatly, producing tofu smooth like water and bright like a mirror. Only then did it truly enter high society and gain the favor of scholars.
Therefore, the New Year custom of "twenty fifth day, grind tofu" likely can only be traced back to the Ming at the earliest.
But tofu, in the Ming, would go on to display a power no one could have imagined.]