In ancient times, when there was no toilet paper, how did people solve the problem of going to the t

The Hong Kong TV series "Looking for Qin" tells a story of time travel. In this TV series, there is such a plot: Hong Kong special police officer Xiang Shaolong was sent to Zhao Guo in the Warring States Period by a time shuttle, stayed at a resident's house overnight, and was anxious to go to the toilet, Xiang Shaolong asked the old man for "toilet paper", and the old man didn't know what "toilet paper" was.

Xiang Shaolong was anxious and said to the old man: "Then how do you wipe your buttocks?" The old man picked up a piece of bamboo from the edge of the pit and said, "This is it!"

Please use it casually".

Seeing this, I can't help but make people laugh dumbly. Could it be that in ancient times, when there was no toilet paper, people used bamboo chips to go to the toilet? According to Wang Zhixuan, a doctor of history, in the article "Miscellaneous Examination of Toilet Chips", before the Tang Dynasty, Chinese had records of using toilet chips, but there was no evidence of using paper to wipe dirt.

The so-called toilet chip is also called toilet Jane. It is a wooden or bamboo strip that is used to wipe the filth after going to the toilet. This type of toilet was also used in parts of China and Japan over the last century.

During the Tang and Song dynasties, paper was not only used for writing, but also for daily use and burning to worship ghosts and gods. Since there is daily paper, it is logical for people to use it to wipe dirt.

Therefore, during this period, people continued to use not only traditional toilet chips, but also coarse paper, which is used as a daily commodity, during this period. During the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, people began to wipe the filth with hand paper, and as for whether the hand paper used in the palace was coarse paper or fine paper, there was no research at present.

It should be noted that most of the paper used to wipe dirt at that time was "coarse" paper with no words. As for why we use paperless paper, it is because there is a tradition in our culture of respecting the paper of words, and folklore has it that there is retribution for wiping away defilement with printed paper. In the Ming Dynasty palace, there was even a department dedicated to the management of this handpaper.

And it was already very common for people in the Qing Dynasty to use paper to wipe filth. For example, in the forty-first chapter of Dream of Red Mansions, there is a description of Grandma Liu's diarrhea: "Grandma Liu felt a chaotic noise in her abdomen, and she was busy pulling a little girl, and she asked for two pieces of paper and undressed."

The crowd laughed and drank him, 'No here!' A mother-in-law was busy and took him to the northeast. This description shows that during Cao Xueqin's life, whether it was the Grand View Garden or the characters in the countryside, they had already commonly used hand paper to wipe off filth, and it is also impossible to test whether the folk used finger coarse paper or fine paper.