The Mule and Horse Market in Qingshuihe County has a long history and a long history, dating back to the Ming Dynasty when the Menghan mutual market was held. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were thousands of cattle, horses, and alpacas in Mongolia outside the mouth of the Great Wall, with abundant fur and meat, and the fur was inexhaustible, but there was an extreme shortage of cloth, grain, tea, iron pots, handicrafts... The first neighbor, Altan Khan, repeatedly asked the Ming Dynasty for tribute, but was repeatedly rejected by the Ming Dynasty.
Altan Khan repeatedly led his people into the Central Plains and plundered some grain and cloth to relieve the hunger and cloth of the Tumut people, and at that time, the people of Altan Khan often came and went in and out of the mouth of the tiger killer. In the fourth year of Ming Longqing (1570), the Ming court finally agreed to "pay tribute to each other" with the powerful Alatan Khan, and in 1571, Aletan Khan, the first neighbor of the steppe of southern Mongolia, accepted the title of "King of Shunyi" of the Ming government and made a thirteen-article covenant with the Ming court to keep peace, which is the famous "Longqing Peace". Since then, Mingmeng has turned Gange into a jade warrior, and Mongolia and Han have been friendly and mutually friendly. The Ming government opened up mutual markets such as Zhangjiakou, Xinpingbao, Deshengbao, and Shuiquanying in the east of the towns of the Great Wall to Yanning in the west.
At the time of the Mongol-Han mutual market, the Mongols brought mules, horses, cattle, sheep and other livestock, carrying milk, medicinal materials, furs, and meat; the Han people rushed to the convoy and pulled millet, rice, salt, camellia, and cloth to trade with each other at the red gate of the Ming Great Wall Shuiquan Fort on the border between Mongolia and Han. Among them, the Shuiquan Camp of Weimin City is in the territory of Biaoguan County in the north of present-day Shanxi Province, adjacent to Beibao Township of Qingshuihe County. To this day, the ruins of the Red Gate Mutual City outside the Shuiquan Camp still tell people the story of the past here, teams of military brigades, merchants haunted at the foot of the Great Wall, haunted by canyons and passes, to complete the business they wanted to complete.
From the Qing Dynasty to the early years of the Republic of China, with the operation of the four princesses of the Qing Dynasty for many years and the radiation and drive of the Merchants of Mongolia and Jin, the agriculture, commerce and culture of Qingshuihe were well developed, at that time, "there were about sixty merchants in this street, mainly Shanxi people, plus at that time, there was no exploitation of harsh taxes and miscellaneous taxes, and the prosperity of commerce was everywhere, and the prosperity of commerce could be described as the pinnacle." (1)", at that time, the mule and horse trade was mostly carried out during the temple fair, and every year on April 18 was the ancient city slope temple fair, on May 25 for the Leihupo temple fair, on June 13 for the small temple village temple fair, during the temple fair", "torture animals perform dramas, use answers to the gods, all the national scholars, women, merchants, all salty to visit the temple (2)". After the middle of the Republic of China, with the warlords fighting and bandits raging, the economic development in the Japanese invading counties stagnated, and the mule and horse market was also affected.
Since the founding of New China, the temple has changed, removing the superstitious prayer activities of the old times, and focusing on material exchanges, mule and horse trading, and literary and artistic programs. During the Cultural Revolution, the material exchange meeting was suspended for a time, and the mule and horse market was also interrupted. In 1983 Chengguan held the first session of the material exchange conference, after the scale of development is getting bigger and bigger, the content is more and more abundant, in 2006 Chengguan material exchange conference officially renamed the Great Wall Cultural Festival, its main content for commodity trading, literary and artistic performances, mule and horse mutual market three parts, the duration of the meeting is generally seven days to nine days, over the years Qingshuihe County Chengguan Town material exchange conference venue is located in the playground of the third primary school, come to trade more business people. The mule and horse market is one of the important transactions, and now with the construction of urban infrastructure, the scale of the mule and horse market in the city is declining, and the mule and horse market of the former Qingshuihe County Chengguan Material Flow Association has disappeared, and only the rural exchange meetings and temple fairs can be seen.
During the exchange meeting, people from eight villages in ten miles will bring their mules and horses to the venue. The seller beckons customers, enthusiastically introduces, groups of merchants shuttle back and forth, pinching their fingers in the sleeves and under the placket to hint at the price, lively and extraordinary, the grandeur is unprecedented. Every year, hundreds of cows, donkeys, mules and horses will pour into the exchange meeting to complete the transaction.
There is a commodity transaction, there is a need to have a person who coordinates the sale and purchase of both sides, such people are called intermediaries, in the Qingshuihe County area called "intermediaries" or "gangs" or "said to be together". Their main job is to "buy short and sell short", that is, they do not operate any commodities, specialize in intermediaries for both parties to the transaction, recommend commodities and coordinate prices to facilitate transactions, and obtain certain profits from buyers and sellers.
In the Mule and Horse Market, the intermediary merchant who coordinates the transaction between buyers and sellers is called "Bridge Tooth". As the name suggests, the bridge teeth are divided into bridges and teeth, "bridge" refers to the market, in the past in the naturalization city around the livestock trading market commonly known as "bridge". As the "bridge" of the market, it may be extended from the Niuqiao Bridge in Hohhot.
"The Niuqiao Bridge is seven feet long, seven feet wide, and has three arched culverts under it, and is a stone bridge, officially called Qingkai Bridge, which was built by the rich man who operated the garden in Naturalization City (the owner of the Dongjia Garden), and the giant Qing monks of the Guandi Temple and the naturalized merchants raised funds to welcome the Kangxi Emperor's triumphant return from the conquest of Geldan."
The terrain on both sides of the Qingkai Bridge is open, and after the completion of the qingkai bridge, people who buy and sell cattle often gather here, and over time they form a rule, and the business of making cattle can only be operated here, so the area around the Qingkai Bridge has become a special market for buying and selling cattle. When someone was walking down the street with a cow, his friend asked him, "Where are you going?" He said, "Go to the Cow Bridge, and everyone knows he's going to sell cattle(3).
Slowly, the cattle dealers and fur merchants in Naturalization City traded cattle, sheep and furs on the beach on both sides of the Qingkai Bridge and along the West River, so people also called it Niuqiao. Every morning, here cattle and sheep flocks, crowds of people, people and horses are not bustling, becoming the largest livestock trading market in northwest China, starting from Niuqiao, and later returning to Sui Old Town, the bridge generally refers to the livestock market, which is a market specializing in horses, cattle, sheep and camels. This is the origin of the "bridge" of naturalization city. In this way, the tooth row and the "bridge" (that is, the market) in the area of the Tomo River are hung.
"Ya" was originally a "mutual" character, and because of the similar shape of the characters, it was mistakenly written as "ya" since the Tang Dynasty. Teeth are "tooth rows", an early intermediary, and a special and ancient trading method that continues to this day. The bridge "tooth shop" is a person who specializes in the "business" of buyers and sellers and takes a commission in the livestock trading process. The term "yaxing" has different names in different eras, the Han Dynasty is called Donkey, Donkey, Tang and Five Dynasties called Ya, Yalang, Yalang, Yalang, Later known as "Yaxing", later also known as "Tooth Man", "Tooth Ji", "Tooth Dealer", "Tooth Lang", "Mutual Lang", "Servant" and so on.
"Bridge Tooth" not only extracts remuneration from both sides of the transaction, but more importantly, secretly asks for profits in the "price", that is, to obtain the difference between the sale and purchase price. The "bridge teeth" can therefore obtain the difference between the sale and purchase prices, relying on a special and common way of doing prices in the livestock trading market. People call this method of pricing "gripping" or "pinching". When the buyer looks at the livestock to be bought, the buyer and seller do not negotiate the price publicly, but rely on the "bridge teeth" to bargain between the two sides through a pinch of fingers under the placket, so that both parties can finally agree to the transaction. Until the transaction is completed, the buyer and seller do not say the price. The buyer pays the "bridge tooth" at the price approved by himself and the "bridge tooth", and the "bridge tooth" pays the price approved by the seller.
In this way of trading, the buyer and seller do not know the actual price of the transaction between the two parties, nor do they need to know, because they pay and receive the amount of money they approve, although the buyer and seller know in their hearts that what they pay and receive is not the actual transaction price, but they are willing to admit this fact.
"Bridge Teeth" has a lot of knowledge in it. First of all, we must be able to speak the Tao, and our mouths are sharp. Second, understand the speech (age) and characteristics of livestock. Generally speaking, four or six mouths are the strongest age for livestock, that is, livestock are four to six years old, the middle canal is ten years old and zero, and the canal above the teeth is smoothed out, which means that it is old. When pinching the price, the way to engage in price under the placket is to hold the finger to negotiate the price, and the mouth will shout the price with the finger held, such as "this whole, add this zero" and so on. This way of making prices is only understood by both parties, and the third party can neither see nor understand how much "this" is.
The number of finger generations is more common in the folk. That is, the thumb is extended into one, the index finger and middle finger are held together as two; the index finger, middle finger, and ring finger are held together as three; the thumb curve and four fingers are extended as four; the five fingers are held together as five; the thumb and little finger are extended as six; the thumb, index finger, and middle finger are combined into seven (commonly known as the round pinch) The thumb and index finger are split into eight; the index finger circle is nine; and the five fingers are doubled to ten. The five fingers can represent both single digits and ten, hundred, and thousands As for the specific amount, it must be determined according to the market price at that time. If a mule could sell for hundreds of dollars at that time, the whole number was a hundred digits. If the market price is thousands of yuan, the whole number is thousands of digits.
In the tooth row, there is a special title for ten numbers, which is called "black Chinese" by the people. Because the average person does not understand this kind of tooth language, coupled with the teeth pretending to be an esoteric method of reporting, so that even if the teeth shout out the price after the transaction, others cannot understand how much it is, that is, (one) slip (two) 欻 (three) spelling (four) blind (five) abductor (six) scratch (seven) monkey (eight) Joe (nine) bend (ten) circle, it is indeed difficult for laymen to decipher exactly.
Good bridge teeth to see the mule horse does not need to look at the mouth of the teeth, you know how old this is, look at the eyes to know whether the mule horse is sick. Some qiao yazi specialize in running Shanxi Hequ and Biaoguan, and the Mengdi Damao Banner and the Four Sons Wang Banner pick thin mules and horses to buy, lead them back to their own sheds to feed fine materials, and in a month they can feed the skinny mules and horses fat and strong, and they can double the price with one shot, but this is biased towards the "livestock trafficking" industry.
At the livestock market, the buyer and seller agreed to "bridge teeth" as an intermediary, and the "bridge teeth" began to sell, looking at the teeth of the livestock, grooves, hooves, etc., first pinching the asking price in the seller's cuffs, and then pinching the price in the buyer's cuffs, after several cuffs pinching the price, most of them can be traded. The "tooth shop" extracts transaction fees from both the buyer and the seller, which is called "tooth money". After the transaction, the livestock draws a circle mark on the body, telling people that the animal has been traded, and no one will talk about it anymore, so that the sale is concluded.
Many years have passed, and now most of the rural farming has realized agricultural mechanization, the cattle, horses, donkeys and mules that were once the main force of farming have gradually faded from people's sight, and the centralized livestock trading market has become a rare picture. I vaguely felt that recording these stories, sorting them out, and telling a piece of the history of the Mule and Horse Mutual Market in Qingshui River, the origin of "Qiaoyazi", and the "Qiaoyazi" culture, is the biggest memorial to the fading livestock market.
concentrate:
(1) (2) Qiao Jiyan wrote "Outline of Qingshuihe County", which was originally published in the fourth edition of Suiyuan Republic of China Daily from April to May of the 21st year of the Republic of China (1933).
(3) Deng Jiugang's "Bridge" and "Tooth" in the Old City of Sui"
Author: Bai Wenyu