When did the ancients eat at the table?

Recently, I read an article "Eating through the Western Zhou Dynasty", and the style of painting is like this.

The content of the article is so vivid that there are so many people reprinting it that I can't find the original author. I hope to see more excellent works by the original author.

Not only can't you eat a lot when you travel to the Western Zhou Dynasty, but you can't even lose your temper with the bartender and want to lift the table, because it's useless to eat at that time. It is also worth discussing whether the business model of restaurant and snack bar and the occupation of bartenders appear, which will be discussed later. Today, let's talk about eating at the table.

Before the Han dynasty, we used the word "case" to inspect tableware. There is an idiom about Mei Qi, which comes from the Book of the Later Han Dynasty. "Liang Hongchuan" refers to holding the food box as high as the eyebrows when delivering meals. This happened in the early years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, which shows that the ancients still ate with cases instead of tables. Why don't you use the table? I would say it's because there is no stool, and even the sitting posture is with legs hanging down, which is imported. You don't think I was sent by a monkey to be funny, do you? But the current historical data seems to be true. Let's see what it is first.

Contemporary furniture can be divided into Yi and Ji. Didn't Fan Kuai call me a fish for a knife at the hongmen banquet? There is still a difference between Yi and Ji. I don't know exactly, but it's not too high, much shorter than the current coffee table.

Does this look like a buffet tray? It's about the same size, but it's not used on the table but directly on the ground.

People in the Han Dynasty ate like this.

At that time, people sat on their knees instead of hanging their legs. Mazha appeared in the late Eastern Han Dynasty, when it was called Hu Chuang. As soon as you hear the name, you will know that it was introduced from minority areas. Perhaps the northern minorities were frozen stiff in the cold, too cold to sit on the floor, so Mazar was invented. Tatami and Maza -a- Maza were already on the school book map of the Northern Qi Dynasty in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and people sat higher and higher. But eating is still on the tatami, and there is no table yet.

In the Dunhuang murals of the Northern Wei Dynasty, which were earlier than the paintings of the Northern Qi Dynasty, stools appeared and several beautiful women sat on them. I'm not mistaken! Are you wearing a miniskirt and high heels? These legs! There was a fight with Yang Mi.

Haha, I'm really joking this time. This is the mural on the back wall of Cave 257 in Dunhuang. The cartoon "Nine Colors Deer" I watched as a child was adapted from this mural. First of all, this part is not a stool, but a bed with curtains on it. There is a man lying on a similar bed on the left. Why is the bed painted like a bench? This painting was restored in the Song Dynasty, which does not rule out the possibility of the restorer's creation. In addition, because the murals are blurred by smoke, the image on the bed can only be said to be like two beautiful women, which needs detailed study.

Why did you take out this mural? I mainly want to say that the Buddha in Cave 257 sits with his legs down, which is obviously different from our ancient kneeling posture. He is not sitting on a bed or a couch. Religion has a great influence on living habits. Although most of the Buddha statues in Dunhuang murals sit cross-legged, a considerable number of them sit cross-legged, and the height of their seats is similar to that of modern times.

Stools and chairs appeared at the same time, that is, in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, they were not originally used for eating. Habits are very powerful. Monks sit on high places like bodhisattvas, but their posture is still sitting in a pot or kneeling, rather than hanging their legs.

The Tang Dynasty is a turning point. The following three paintings are murals of the Tang Dynasty.

Although there is a chair, I still sit cross-legged and sit in the same posture. Everyone sat around the furniture like a coffee table.

Sitting furniture appeared, between sofa and bench, hanging legs and sitting cross-legged. But the table is still short and as high as the coffee table.

The butcher shop and table in the murals of the late Tang Dynasty are the same as now, and we don't have to cut meat on the table anymore!

During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, furniture, especially chairs, was very modern.

To sum up, during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, with the prosperity of Buddhism and the great ethnic integration, people sat higher and higher, and gradually sat around the table to eat. By the end of the Tang Dynasty, the use of tables, chairs and benches had become very common.