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In ancient times, cooking and dining were at the same place. Bonfire or a stove, on which meals were cooked, was set in the centre of the residence. People sat around it and dined. This dining-together custom was handed down to the offspring.
In the Shang and the Zhou dynasties, cooking utensils and dining place were separated. And people sat on mats and dined together.
In the Warring States Period, teapoys were invented for dining and read-ing. Though people sat on mats in dining, they no longer put food on mats but on teapoys. Meanwhile, food chests and wine chests were invented for outing.
Tables and chairs appeared in the Han Dynasty. They were multi-func-tional and the chairs resembled the folding stools nowadays. Since then teapoys, tables and chairs have been widely used in dining.
As for dining methods, people grasped or tore food with their bare hands at the beginning. Chopsticks, forks, knives and spoons were used much later, of which chopsticks are a wonder of Chinese dining tools with a history of thousands of years.
Chopsticks are dining utensils most frequently used in people's daily life. In ancient China, they were called "zhu." Their upper parts are square and lower parts round, or they are all round with thick upper sticks and thin lower parts. Whatever their shapes are, the pair must be identical to each other. Usually people hold chopsticks with right hand to pick up food. A westerner once said:"Chinese chopsticks are the full reflection of lever principle. " Fur-thermore, to properly handle chopsticks requires the coordination of more than 130 bones and muscles all over the body. The invention of chopsticks fully dis-played the dexterity and intelligence of Chinese people. Zheng Chuanyin and Zhang Jian made succinct summary about the invention and development of chopsticks in the Dictionary of Chinese Folk Customs: chopsticks, a food-picking utensil made by bamboo or wood, is widely used by the Hans and some minority ethnic groups. In remote ages, it was made of branches, bam-boos or natural animal bones. Later it was made by scraped bamboo or wood. Ivory and jade chopsticks appeared in the Xia and the Shang dynasties; bronze and iron chopsticks emerged in the Spring and Autumn Period. Laquer chop-sticks did not appear until the Han Dynasty. Later silver and gold chopsticks were made. Among them, chopsticks made with rhinoceros horns, jade or e-bony inlaid with gold were the rarest.
Chopsticks has a time-honored history. According to textual research, people in primitive society already used branches and bamboo sticks to pick up food. Later they evolved into wood or bamboo chopsticks. Ivory and jade chopsticks appeared in the Shang Dynasty, which was as early as three or four thousand years ago.
But before the Qin Dynasty, chopsticks were not so important in dining. In the Zhou Dynasty, spoon and knife were main dining utensils. Though sometimes chopsticks were used to clip food, they were not essential utensils. It was recorded that people in the Zhou Dynasty used chopsticks only for dish-es.
After the Han Dynasty, chopsticks gradually became more and more im-portant in daily dining. As recorded in the Book of the Han Dynasty : "The emperor bestowed food to Yafu -- only large pieces of meat with no chop-sticks. Displeased, Yafu looked back and asked Shangxi to fetch him a pair of chopsticks. " From this we know that chopsticks were already very important in dining.
Since the Han and the Wei dynasties, chopsticks had become a must in daily dining and were increasingly recorded in ancient books. It was rumoured that a short-tempered man was about to eat an egg. He poked it with a chop-stick, but the egg did not break. Infuriated, he threw it to the ground. The egg started rotating and he stamped it with his wooden shoe heel but failed again. Greatly annoyed, he picked it up and put it in his mouth. Then he bit it and spat the broken shell.
It was generally held that chopsticks began to be called kuaizi since the Ming Dynasty. In Soybean Garden Notes by Lu Rong:" Different areas have dif-ferent taboos. In central area of Jiangsu Province, people abstain from saying 'zhu'(homonym of chopsticks, meaning stop), instead they say 'kuaier'." So since the Ming Dynasty, zhu (chopsticks) has been called "kuaier" due to taboo in Jiangsu Province. In north China, it was called "kuaizi." But in documents of the Ming and the Qing dynasties, "kuaizi" was seldom used. Especially in literary works, zhu was often used to refer to chopsticks. As a story goes:" A person invited his friends to dinner but miscounted the number of zhu. When the dishes were served, everybody picked up their zhus and started eating except one who only watched and did not move. After a while he said to the host:' Please give me a bowl of water. ' The host asked: ¡®What for?' He answered: 'To clean my hands so that I may pick up food with them. ' "
"kuaizi" was not widely called till modern times. Meanwhile, the call of "zhu" became obsolete.
As for the dining rules, it was uncertain whether there was any rules at all as people were often starved in remote ages. With the development of primitive agriculture, people formed the habit of eating two meals daily in ac-cordance with the timetable of "work when the sun rises and rest after it sets." That is, they went out farming, or hunting after breakfast and re-turned in the evening for supper. But three meals a day in ancient China was unanimously recorded in historical documents, which was similar to the cus-tom in foreign countries. Only minor differences existed in dining details.
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