Chopsticks can be said to be a unique cultural symbol of China. It is both light and flexible. It is unique among tableware from all over the world and is praised by Westerners as "the civilization of the East".
Chinese people use chopsticks, which has a history of about four thousand years. In fact, before using chopsticks, our ancestors also experienced a process of eating with their hands. But how to get hot porridge and soup? So I had to break some grass stems and sticks from everywhere to help. Legend has it that the invention of chopsticks is related to Dayu. At that time, Dayu was very busy controlling floods and wanted to finish his meal quickly so that he could go to work. However, because the food was too hot, he could not grab it with his hands. Dayu was so anxious that he broke the branch next to him and used it to hold the rice. , so you won’t burn your hands. Other people followed suit and also used branches to hold rice, so the special chopsticks like today gradually evolved. However, this statement has not been confirmed by archeology and is just a legend.
King Zhou of the Shang Dynasty made chopsticks made of ivory, which were very luxurious. This is the earliest record of the use of chopsticks. But this does not mean that chopsticks began in the Shang Dynasty. King Zhou used ivory chopsticks, which shows that the chopstick making technology has been quite mature. It can be seen that chopsticks were already popular in the Shang Dynasty. In the pre-Qin era, chopsticks were called "jia" (jia), a phonetic character that means holding food with your hands. In the Qin and Han Dynasties, it was called "箸" (or "篯" zhu). "箸" is a kind of bamboo on the south coast. It can be seen that chopsticks were made of bamboo at that time. In the Ming Dynasty, it began to be called "chopsticks". The reason why "Zhu" was changed to "Chopsticks" is because the boat people along the southeast coast are particularly taboo about "Zhu", because "Zhu" and "Zhu" are homophonic. If the boat stops, the boatmen will have no business, and they are more afraid of the boat. If the boat is "eaten" by insects, it will leak. How to fish and how to do business. Therefore, for the sake of good luck, they changed "Zhu" to "Kuai". Since chopsticks are mainly made of bamboo, they added a "bamboo prefix" to the word "Kuai" to form a proper noun - chopsticks. However, during the Qing Dynasty, the official did not recognize the folk word "chopsticks" and still called "chopsticks" "Zhu". Until the Republic of China, people still called chopsticks "Zhu". For example, in Zhu Ziqing's article "Back View", his father wrote in a letter that "it is inconvenient to lift chopsticks and pick up a pen", which is evidence of this.
