The case of the Chen family in Nishimura stealing children has come to a temporary end.
But the people of East Village became more and more displeased with the people of West Village, and it was considered friendly if they didn't spit at them when they met them.
Some women were even more exaggerated. They took advantage of no one's attention and pried all the laundry stones on the west bank of the Chuan River near Chen Laoshuan's house into the river to express their dissatisfaction and contempt.
The West Village has become a den of child thieves, and none of them are good people! They are not worthy of washing rice and clothes in the same river with the people of the East Village!
The Jiang family picked all the cotton seeds day and night, and the three brothers of the Jiang family began to pick cotton with their longbows.
You know what, this method is really good. The fluffed cotton is softer and easier to make into cotton-padded jackets and quilts.
So, the eldest sister-in-law of the Jiang family and the mother-in-law Jiang Liu were busy making new cotton-padded clothes for the family, all of which were made of soft ramie cloth.
These ramie cloths have been starched and dyed, and the colors are very beautiful.
In the past, poor families could not afford to wear starched and dyed cloth, so most of them made clothes directly with white ramie cloth.
Now that the Jiang family is rich, they can let every family member wear colorful and patterned dresses.
More than a dozen beddings were made to ensure that everyone had a bed filled with cotton, which was soft and warm, simply the treatment of an aristocratic family.
After picking the cotton, Jiang Sanlang went to Beishan with his two brothers and dug out the kudzu roots that had not been dug for four years.
This thing has grown thicker than an adult's thigh. It breaks easily with a hit, and the powder content is okay.
Scrape off the skin, wash it clean, cut it into small pieces, and pound it in a stone mortar.
Soak the kudzu root powder in water and slurry it, and the snow-white starch will precipitate out the next day.
Pueraria root powder is easy to store after being dried. In your spare time, you can grab a little and dissolve it in water and cook it. It has the same effect as lotus root powder. If you add some maltose, the taste will be even better.
This thing is the food of the common people. It has existed since ancient times, but it is not common.
It is because Pueraria root can only be dug up and extracted for powder when it grows to three or four years old, and the powder yield of most Pueraria roots is very low. Only two kilograms of Pueraria powder can be extracted from more than one hundred kilograms of Pueraria root. Not only is it time-consuming and laborious, it is also not cost-effective.
But kudzu vines can be harvested every year, and just like retting hemp, they require peeling and pounding, a rather cumbersome process.
The woven ramie cloth is people's favorite clothing material in summer, as it is cool and does not stick to the body.
Aristocratic families even regarded fine gauze as a holy product for cooling off in the summer.
Often the weavers would sell the ramie cloth to the cloth shop, and it would be bought by someone as soon as they left.
Yingbao watched her father and his friends pounding kudzu roots, making kudzu pulp, and filtering starch, and found it quite interesting.
The process of making tofu is similar, except that it lacks the step of boiling the batter and adding the brine.
Shennong's Herbal Classic says that kudzu is sweet in taste, neutral in nature, and is mainly used to treat thirst, high fever, vomiting, various arthritis, raise yin energy, and detoxify.
Mrs. Ke Wen said that Pueraria root is cold in nature, and people with weak spleen and stomach, pregnant women and children should not eat too much.
When talking about Mrs. Wen, I think of Mr. Wen.
Yingbao hasn't seen Mr. Wen for a long time, so Mrs. Wen has not been very happy recently.
She was a little too busy to teach two classrooms alone, so she arranged for Yingbao and Wenshu to have classes in the morning, and gave them homework to study at home in the afternoon so that she could teach Huzi and Erni and the others.
However, Mrs. Wen still purchased Yingbao's high-quality golden ear and snow ear.
In addition to the five catties of gold ears, Yingbao also received more than sixty taels of silver.
Adding the silver ingots she had obtained previously, she was already a wealthy woman.
My parents also made a lot of money this time, probably more than one hundred taels.
Lian Dani and Er Ni each earned more than seven taels of silver. They were so happy that they kept urging their eldest cousin to take them to the market.
Yingbao had nothing to buy, so she decided not to join in the fun and focused on studying medical classics at home.
The Medical Classics, also known as the Book of Prescriptions and Techniques, is divided into four parts: classics, pulses, prescriptions, and medicines.
Scholars say: The classics explain the principles, the pulse applies the techniques, the prescriptions achieve the effects, and the medicines identify their properties. If these four are complete, then all the matters of prescription and skill are complete.
This means that as long as you learn to use the four skills of "meridians", "pulses", "prescriptions" and "medicines", you can become a doctor.
The "classics" here are divided into 23 categories, including "Inner Canon of Medicine", "Difficult Canon of Medicine", five internal organs, acupuncture, gynecology, pediatrics, surgery, health preservation, classical prescriptions, materia medica, and food classics.
Yingbao has only learned the Neijing (Internal Chinese Medicine) and is still a long way from becoming a doctor.
The Neijing is also known as the Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine, which includes the Suwen and the Lingshu.
Su Wen mainly consists of questions and answers between Huangdi and his teachers. It talks about the deduction of the human body and internal organs and the relationship between heaven and man, which is somewhat imaginary.
Lingshu is a book on acupuncture, focusing on the practical operation of meridians and acupuncture.
Yingbao has finished learning Su Wen, and recently has been studying human acupuncture points and moxibustion with Madam Wen.
However, Mrs. Wen did not emphasize that she must learn the art of acupuncture well, she only asked her to have a basic understanding of it.
Because acupuncture cannot really cure diseases, it can only relieve some symptoms.
Just like a witch doctor using bloodletting to treat illness, it is just a medical technique.
Next, Yingbao will study the Difficult Sutra.
The Difficult Classic is also known as the Eighty-one Questions and the Yellow Emperor's Eighty-one Difficult Classics. It focuses on basic theories and analyzes a variety of related diseases.
The content includes meridians, internal organs, yin and yang, the five elements, diseases and symptoms, Ying and Wei, acupoints, acupuncture, etc., involving the normal physiology, anatomy, disease, diagnosis and treatment of the human body.
Studying medicine requires a lot of brainpower and a lot of things need to be memorized by rote. Yingbao finds it extremely painful.
In her spare time, she would call her two younger brothers over and ask them to recite to her.
The two twins are very smart and have learned to recite Three Character Classic and Hundred Family Surnames.
So Yingbao also taught them how to read and write.
She encouraged them that whoever learned ten words first every day would be taken out to ride a deer and to visit the piglets raised by Wen Hengyin.
The twins really became diligent, competing with each other to see who could learn more and faster.
"Look at what you wrote. One word takes up an entire page. How can you write the rest?"
You don’t know until you are taught. Once you are taught, you will be shocked.
When Yingbao saw the crab claw handwriting of the two children, she was so angry that she almost vomited blood.
Not only are the characters crooked like crabs, they are also written in huge sizes.
If she wasn't afraid of discouraging her two younger brothers' enthusiasm for study, she would have wanted to hit their little paws with a ruler.
Alas, in order to enjoy the blessing of my younger brothers becoming officials in the future, I have to endure it.
As the days passed, the weather became colder.
The Jiang family was spending the winter at home happily. They even bought a sheep and killed it. The whole family gathered around the fire to roast the lamb.
But the good days did not last long, as the village guards began to go door to door, beating gongs to announce the arrival of people to work on the river, which meant performing forced labor.
This river engineer is not in his hometown, but is dispatched to another place by the county magistrate.
The trip might last for ten to twenty days or even a month. If one gets sick or hungry during that time, no one will care because the county government will not provide food for the laborers or even care where they live.
So Chunniang hurriedly prepared bedding and dry food for her husband, as well as a straw hat and a raincoat, and also sewed a small tent for him with sheepskin.
In case it rains or snows, my husband and his two brothers will have a place to hide from the rain and snow.
Originally, their family could have paid to hire laborers, but the village head said that for a large family like theirs, even if they paid to hire laborers, at least one of the three brothers had to do the labor, otherwise it would be difficult to report to the authorities.
That is to say, you can buy up to two places, but the other one must go to work.
The three brothers of the Jiang family discussed it and decided that they should all go. It is not easy to be alone outside, and if something happens, no one will know.