That day, I bought a small bucket made during the Daoguang Ding Hai period at the antique market. When I first got this little fight, I also attracted the onlookers of the "connoisseurs".
After buying it back, I carefully admired it. The bucket is a plank structure with very fine workmanship. Made of all wood, large and small, the opening is round, the four sides are conically reduced, and the production form is a fit, without a nail at all. The upper and lower two round edges are wrapped in iron, and there is a large iron ring tightly hooped in the middle of the small bucket, which divides the surface of the small bucket into two parts, and each has three iron rods to connect the middle large iron ring with the iron sheet of the upper and lower two round edges. The large iron ring and the upper and lower round edge iron wrapping pulp are very good.
The upper part of the small bucket is engraved with three big characters of "Fu, Lu and Shou", and the lower part is engraved with the words "Xiao Dou" and "Daoguang Dinghai" The exterior of the small bucket is coated with red paint, which is the big lacquer of the early years, after hundreds of years of history, the paint color is still very bright.
There is a small iron ring on the side of the bucket, which can hang the bucket rice, and the rope should be able to move up and down. When loading rice, you can go low, and when you pour rice into a cloth bag or rice hoard, you can hang the rice bucket high and make it fall in.
The ancient standard bucket and liter are completely connected by tenons and tenons, and the craftsmanship is exquisite, and there is not a single nail to be seen. The "little bucket" I bought can still be used normally after nearly two hundred years of erosion, condensing the wisdom and crystallization of the ancestors.
Buckets are ancient tools for people to hold grain and measure grain. Due to the different ages, the region is different, and the capacity of the bucket is also slightly different. Buckets are divided into small fights and big buckets. A bucket is a bucket with a capacity smaller than the standard amount. One stone equals ten buckets, one bucket equals ten liters, one liter equals ten, and one sum equals one-tenth of a liter. Dadou, its shape and system are basically consistent with the city bucket, and the production process and color are basically the same. But the size of its production is larger than that of the city bucket. Rice buckets are utensils developed with grain production, as early as the pre-Qin period. Rice buckets are mostly made of the finest wood. There are two shapes, one similar to the one I bought, and the other is a square opening with four sides that are tapered down, and the small bucket is now very rare.
This little bucket in my collection is an early instrument of Daoguang. According to connoisseurs, this was an indispensable tool for the official warehouses of Shonan and Guibei in the Qing Dynasty, grain stacks, rice rows, and landlords' homes, and some people's homes also had them.
During the Daoguang years, due to the increasingly prominent grain problem, silver was expensive and cheap, and grain in official warehouses, grain stacks, rice rows, and landlords' homes was particularly scarce. "Bucket", a tool used by people to hold grain and measure grain, was widely used.
Guangxi Guibei is close to the southwest of Hunan, and the folk customs, social and economic development of the two places are roughly the same. At that time, in the Shonan and Northern Guizhou regions, many landlords often used the form of exploitation of big buckets and small buckets to exploit pit people. When tenants pay rent, the landlord will use the bucket to collect it. When the peasant household cannot open the pot and must borrow grain from the landlord, it becomes a small bucket to lend out and a big bucket to take it back. There are also official governments that when collecting official grain, they also use the method of big buckets entering small buckets.
In ancient times, although "dou" was sometimes used by some corrupt officials and black-hearted landlords to deceive the people, the people's understanding of "dou" was still positive. It is believed that "dou" has an auspicious meaning, is a symbol of abundance and abundance, and now it has become a kind of interesting collection. (Text: @An Rengu)