How many holidays can ancient people of different dynasties take in a year? When it comes to holidays, many friends may think that the holiday system only appeared in modern society, but this is not the case. Even in feudal societies with strict hierarchies, there was a term for holidays.
Our country had a complete vacation system as early as the Han Dynasty . Every year at the summer solstice and winter solstice, the court would give officials a few days off. In addition, officials can take one day off for every five days they work, and there is a special title called Xiu Mu. In other words, the court would have a holiday every five days, allowing officials to go home and take a bath, so it was called Xiu Mu. By the Tang Dynasty period, the vacation system had been very complete. Every year during traditional festivals, such as the Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Qingming, Summer Solstice, etc., the state had to give officials vacation. Among them, there will be a full seven-day holiday during the Spring Festival and the Winter Solstice, so people during the Tang Dynasty could enjoy two golden weeks. In addition, during the Tang Dynasty, there was also one day of rest in the first, middle and last days of each month, which was called ten days off . It is somewhat similar to our current weekend rest day. Not only that, officials in the Tang Dynasty also enjoyed vacation benefits such as farm leave, family leave, marriage leave, bereavement leave, and . Lin Lin had to calculate that officials in the Tang Dynasty had at least 100 days of rest per year.
Does that mean that the Tang Dynasty had the most holidays? actually not. The number of holidays comparable to those of the Tang Dynasty is also and of the Song Dynasty. In Song Renshu Wenchang's Miscellaneous Records, there is a detailed introduction to the official vacation system in the middle and early Northern Song Dynasty. It was introduced that there was a court organization in the Northern Song Dynasty called the Ancestral Department, which was equivalent to the current National Holidays Office that was responsible for holidays.
statutory holidays in the Northern Song Dynasty are mainly divided into two categories. The first is traditional festivals such as the Spring Festival, Cold Food , Dragon Boat Festival, and Double Ninth Festival, as well as seasonal solar terms such as the Winter Solstice, Beginning of Spring, and Qingming. The second major category is the Tianqing Festival, Xiantian Festival, etc., which are official political festivals. As we just mentioned, traditional holidays such as Lantern Festival and Cold Food Festival have seven days of rest each, totaling 35 days. During the summer solstice, spring festival and other festivals, there are three days off each, for a total of 21 days. The Beginning of Spring, Qixi Festival, Autumn Equinox and other festivals each take one day off, totaling 21 days. You may find that why does the summer solstice have three days of rest and the spring solstice has only one day of rest? This is because during the Northern Song Dynasty, the summer solstice was not an ordinary solar term, but a day with festive significance. So there are two more days off during the summer solstice. In addition to the many festivals we just mentioned, in the Song Dynasty, like the Tang Dynasty, officials also had three days of ten-day holidays every month, which totaled 36 days in a year. In addition to the holidays of various solar terms we just counted, people in the Song Dynasty also had more than a hundred days of vacation time a year.
Moreover, the Song Dynasty also stipulated that if parents lived 3,000 miles away, officials could have 30 days of family leave every three years. In addition, there are holidays such as weddings and funerals. Therefore, people during the Song Dynasty had many more holidays than they do now. What we just talked about are the holidays that court officials can enjoy. So do ordinary citizens also have the right to take vacations? The answer is yes.
In the handicraft cities of the Song Dynasty, hired workers also had vacations, including various festivals and ten-day holidays, about 60 days a year. Craftsmen work about ten hours a day. In the hot summer, from the first day of May to the first day of August, within these three months, the daily workload will be halved, and only about five hours of work will be done.
This can also be a short summer vacation in disguise. By the time of and in the Yuan Dynasty, the statutory holidays had dropped sharply, to only 52 days. Festivals such as the Spring Festival and Cold Food Festival only had three days off, and only one day off per month. The emperor's birthday officials also only had two days off. Later, in , Ming Dynasty and , these holidays became even fewer. Only the three holidays of Lantern Festival, Winter Solstice and New Year's Day had only 18 days of holidays in total. Even the monthly ten-day holiday was cancelled. There were so few holidays in the Ming Dynasty, which may be related to the fact that Zhu Yuanzhang was born in poverty and hardship. He believed that comfort would corrupt people, so he canceled most of his vacations.The vacation system of Qing Dynasty is almost the same as that of Ming Dynasty, and the holidays are also very few. It was not until the 1880s that the Qing government began to use the Sunday rest system in some Western-style schools.
