"A thousand acres of fertile land, ten miles of red makeup" was once the dream wedding of many ancient women. In the vast procession, there are naturally large sedan chairs with gorgeous decorations. What I want to talk about today is the gold foil applique sedan chair, which enjoys the reputation of "the first sedan chair in the world". This is a treasure of Zhejiang Museum and has been selected as a "national treasure".

This gold foil applique sedan chair is a Ningbo sedan chair in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. It is exquisite, gorgeous and resplendent, just like a miniature palace made of gold. There is a three-dimensional golden lotus in full bloom on the top of the sedan chair, which is symmetrical from front to back and carved with various figures, flowers, birds, insects and beasts, lifelike. Each painting is a fragment of a famous classical drama. Its manufacturing process is extremely complicated, it takes more than 65,438+00 craftsmen 65,438+00 years to complete, and it takes about 65,438+00,000 man-hours. Therefore, people vividly call it "Wangong Reef".

This is the real Qing Dynasty sedan chair. In the TV series, the plain red sedan chair is added with a ribbon and hydrangea. Compared with this sedan chair, it is really too plain, even more shabby.

This "universal sedan chair" is said to be the most luxurious sedan chair in existence. Surely the owner of this sedan chair must be rich or expensive, and the woman riding this sedan chair must be from a big family, right?

In fact, this "Wangong sedan chair" belongs to a furniture store, which specializes in renting festive supplies, which is equivalent to the current wedding company. But even if it is rented, the average woman can't afford it.

Careful you may find that this sedan chair has no special door. How to fuck the bride?

It turned out that this sedan chair was assembled by hundreds of wood carving panels, all of which were connected by tenon-mortise structure without using any nails. The disk is not fixed. Just take off the flower tray before the bride gets on the sedan chair!

As we all know, sedan chair is the most indispensable prop in traditional wedding customs. However, this kind of sedan chair has a very high specification. It is carved with twenty-four phoenixes and thirty-eight dragons, but it is still a big sedan chair with eight lifts.

It stands to reason that carving dragons and phoenixes should be exclusive to the royal family. Why is there such a sedan chair that goes beyond etiquette? This has to start from Song Gaozong. It is said that shortly after Song Gaozong Zhao Gou acceded to the throne, Nomads from the South, Zhao Gou, who was afraid of Golden Disease, fled to a lake in Ningshaoping. There is no way out, and the nomads from the army is close at hand. A girl dancing by the lake tactfully hid Zhao Gou in the water and covered it with white gauze, so that Zhao Gou had a narrow escape. Later, Song Gaozong ordered to look for the girl who saved the driver, but she couldn't find it. So she decided that women in eastern Zhejiang can enjoy the special treatment of half a phoenix when they get married, and they can carve a phoenix on the sedan chair and draw a phoenix.

There is no way to verify the authenticity of the legend, but the custom of the bride sitting in a sedan chair has been handed down and gradually evolved into a "ten-mile red makeup."