Brother Feng
introduction
During the Lantern Festival, the constraints of ethics and morality and etiquette norms represented by traditional Confucian concepts were temporarily diluted, and members of society widely participated in rich performances and entertainment activities, consciously creating a common vision of "prosperity and prosperity" and "national peace and security".
However, "Jinwu Can't Ban" does not mean that the official control is completely withdrawn, nor can it avoid the prohibition or cancellation of the activities of specific subjects and some folk art links.
The authorities still have the power to set the duration of the festival and to withdraw permission for specific festivals in exceptional circumstances.
1. Holiday period and curfew regulations
The Ming Dynasty began with the Hongwu Dynasty and gave subjects the Lantern Festival holiday according to the old system of the Tang and Song dynasties.
In the process of visiting, members of the society can often experience the feeling of men and women traveling together, regardless of whether they are high or low.
The relatively relaxed and harmonious atmosphere gave the Lantern Festival customs the symbolic meaning of "the prosperous era of Xiuming", which was continuously strengthened in the hearts of literati and people with the continuous development of festival folk customs.
According to official documents, the Ming Dynasty maintained and constantly reiterated the "night ban" policy.
Although the night ban policy in the Ming Dynasty had large regional and stage differences, and was not consistently implemented due to uneven punishment, official malfeasance, and the impact of commercial activities, at least until the Wanli period, violations of the ban were still punished according to the law.
The temporary relaxation of restrictions and the relative relaxation of control by many official decrees are not conducive to the timely detection and response of risks to social order and public safety, and provide opportunities for urban and rural wanderers, all kinds of thieves and thieves to commit evil.
In addition, the arrangement of the facilities in the Lantern Festival venue, especially the materials required in the palace, the wages of craftsmen, and the bounties cost a huge amount, and many lighting decorations are discarded after use, which will also cause waste.
As a result of these shortcomings, central officials have requested a ban on Lantern Festival activities from time to time, and local gentry have often made township rules and conventions to restrict or ban all kinds of performances during the Lantern Festival.
Exploring the stance, content, and effect of such bans is helpful to understand the essence of Lantern Festival bans, so as to have a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the relationship between official control policies and traditional festivals and folk culture, as well as the interaction between the two.
2. Fires, stampedes and other incidents triggered the Lantern Festival lantern ban
Lighting up and setting off fireworks on the first night requires the large-scale use of open flames. At the same time, the wooden frames, curtains, curtains and other facilities used to build and decorate theatrical stages and juggling venues are mostly flammable.
In addition, there are frequent light shows such as blowing fires, striking iron fires, and rolling lamps on various roads, and it is difficult for spectators to fill the streets and make it difficult to evacuate.
In such a situation, once a local fire breaks out, the fire can easily spread, causing serious loss of life and property.
The ban on Lantern Festival lanterns, fireworks, and amusement activities to avoid fires, stampedes and other accidents reflects the importance that the Ming Dynasty officials attached to people's lives and property, and was a reasonable and necessary control behavior.
However, from the perspective of time and effect, such bans and restrictions are mostly made up after the fact.
At the same time, crowd performances such as theatrical performances and god-welcoming competitions on other festivals often face the same problem.
In fact, while respecting traditional festival customs, dealing with all kinds of emergencies requires a lot of administrative resources, while the grassroots administrative structure of the Ming Dynasty was loose and belonged to passive administration as a whole.
The relatively sparse state of duty during the festival, some relatively arbitrary and crude management strategies, as well as many limitations such as urban and rural buildings and festival sets, make the risks of various festival carnivals and crowd performances never be properly solved.
3. Avoid gathering crowds to make chaos and prohibit the Lantern Festival
In addition to hidden dangers such as fire and stampede, the Lantern Festival also includes some ceremonial performances such as competitions and social fires held during the first month.
These group carnivals are large, mixed with men and women, and often accompanied by noisy drums, providing cover for burglary, human trafficking, and crowd fighting.
From the perspective of local prohibitors, the continuous carnival during the Lantern Festival has increased the burden of supervision and inspection, and increased the probability of the company accepting various cases.
In the eyes of the rulers, there is also the possibility of "rebellion" in the act of association and gathering, which is "a banner with a broken clothes and a hoe into a blade".
Some props such as hoes, dragon horns, broadswords, bell knives, double swords, horse whips, pumpkin hammers, steel forks, spears, and diamond whips used in performances are more lethal, and imitation of fighting scenes is even more indistinguishable from reality, which arouses the vigilance of rulers.
In Ming Dynasty novels and operas, there are many descriptions of the turmoil during the Lantern Festival and the situation of officials asking for a ban on Lantern Festival carnivals.
Although works such as "The Eight Meanings" and "The Legend of the Shark" tell the stories of the previous dynasty, they can also reflect reality.
In such stories, the begging Lantern Festival incident is often used as the fuse of plot conflicts, which shows that it occurs frequently in society and receives a lot of attention.
Fourth, avoid extravagance and waste and prohibit the Lantern Festival
Festive lanterns and related facilities cost a lot of money, and the Aoshan lanterns of the palace were often large-scale and richly decorated, reaching more than ten floors high.
The preparation of such landscapes often requires huge manpower, material and financial resources, and at the same time, the palace lighting facilities are difficult to dismantle and reuse, so it will cause huge waste every year.
On the grounds of extravagance, many officials oppose the holding of the Aoshan Lantern Exhibition and other activities.
In addition to accepting the ban on lanterns based on the abandonment of having fun, the ruler also avoided holding festivals and feasts in order to maintain a solemn and rigorous mood in his mourning clothes.
More importantly, some of the imperial court's measures of violating etiquette and extravagance are easy for the people to emulate, causing the negative consequences of working the people and disrupting customs.
In addition to the above-mentioned circumstances, there are also many cases where the Lantern Festival has been put on hold due to factors such as the lack of financial resources of the government and the people, the intrusion of wars and various natural disasters.
In the face of such disasters and turmoil, the imperial court took measures to ban Lantern Festival fireworks and cancel financial expenditures for festivals and entertainment.
In the face of the decline of the central government and the deterioration of the living conditions at the grassroots level, some officials and literati had infinite longing and nostalgia for the "prosperous picture of the early Ming Dynasty".
5. Female travel is prohibited on Yuan Xi
The rulers of the Ming Dynasty accepted the influence of the concept of learning, attached importance to the defense of men and women, commended the martyrs, and strictly restricted the social life of women.
Specifically, many township covenants and family rituals prohibit women from traveling, believing that women entering temples to burn incense, watch plays, listen to books and learn to sing, and associate with groups such as excellent monks and Taoists are easy to wear down good qualities, arouse lust, and tarnish the reputation of the family.
Even in the Lantern Festival, which is celebrated by the whole country, there are also areas where women's lantern viewing and night tours are strictly prohibited.
However, the impact of the above-mentioned "prohibitions" is still relatively limited, and its true binding force is questionable.
The ban on women's travel on Yuan Xi is similar to the ban on many official festivals and performances in the Ming Dynasty, which is a typical manifestation of the administrator's autonomy in exercising management authority based on the traditional Confucian etiquette norms and existing central laws and regulations, and is also the use of moral concepts to interpret and practice national laws.
As an "exceptional" festival, the Lantern Festival also allows women to temporarily break the shackles of daily etiquette and enjoy the physical and mental freedom brought by the mixing of men and women.
In the process of putting on lanterns, burning incense in monasteries, watching operas and listening to music, and participating in various social and consumer activities, women come into contact with vivid social life, and use this to understand themselves and obtain short-term individual liberation.
6. The essence and effect of the Lantern Festival ban in the Ming Dynasty
The essence of the Lantern Festival ban in the Ming Dynasty was that the central and local officials and gentry controlled the festival activities through edicts, official edicts, township covenants, family mottos and other forms based on self-discipline, chaos control, and orthodox.
On the whole, this type of policy has the following characteristics.
First of all, there are differences in the nature of the Lantern Festival ban in terms of behavioral attributes, constraint objects, and position emphasis, which are multi-layered.
Compared to the lower classes, the elite of the Ming Dynasty enjoyed greater freedom during the Lantern Festival.
This laissez-faire behavior at the expense of others reflects a distinct sense of privilege and hierarchy, which reduces the credibility of government decrees and makes it more difficult for policies to be effective.
Second, some of the restrictions go against long-standing festival traditions, ignoring the need for recuperation and the nature of lyrical entertainment for members of society.
In addition to the above-mentioned prohibitions, many officials have also imposed prohibitions on the performance of certain musical instruments and the appearance of certain characters during the Lantern Festival.
Finally, in the process of actual implementation, the Lantern Festival prohibition mainly plays the role of moral exhortation. In the case of disasters, wars, national costumes, etc., some activities were banned, the scale of celebrations was reduced, and the lights of Aoshan were canceled in order to avoid waste and show compassion for people's livelihood.
7. Contemporary reflections on the ban on Lantern Festival in the Ming Dynasty
As an important part of cultural governance, festival policy urgently needs to be discussed and reflected on from different perspectives and positions in combination with contemporary reality.
Taking the official governance behavior of the Ming Dynasty as an example, firstly, from the perspective of good luck and evil, the festival activities represented by the Lantern Festival have formed a distinct connotation of "happiness" in the long-term development process, and there is an obvious conflict with the images of "fierce" and "mourning" in traditional culture.
Secondly, the management and control ideas such as advocating frugality, opposing depravity, avoiding gathering crowds to cause chaos, and maintaining social order also contain positive value guidance.
Therefore, from the perspective of customs governance and social order, the governance concept contained in the prohibition of Lantern Festival in the Ming Dynasty has a certain rationality.
However, these ideas are also characterized by abstraction and emptiness, which conflict with the values of the people.
The drawbacks of the formulation and implementation of this kind of law are an important reason for the general ineffectiveness of the prohibition of performing arts and festivals represented by the Lantern Festival ban.
The process of formulating moral concepts into policies will inevitably produce different degrees of simplification and certain biases, and there may also be certain deviations.
On the whole, the Ming Dynasty was confined to the limitations of the organizational form of political power, the confinement of ideological and cultural traditions, and the limitations of cognition and ability to many social problems.
Unable to meet the above governance requirements, it was unable to properly handle the important tasks of the time, especially in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, such as the governance of festivals and performing arts and the reform of customs.
epilogue
Festival folk customs include all kinds of activities to entertain the gods and people, and are an important carrier of culture.
The Ming Dynasty officials tried to achieve their goal of unifying the moral concept of etiquette and music of all social strata and stabilizing the social ruling order through the Lantern Festival ban policy.
However, the content of the ban is simple and crude, and the imbalance in the control object, scope of effect, and punishment measures makes it impossible to form an effective transfer and management of festival customs.
How to find a balance between the rule of ethics and the rule of law, between official and folk moral values, and between the intensity of external control and festival customs were the key issues in formulating festival customs policies in ancient times.