In order to ride a bicycle, the emperor of modern China dared to saw off the threshold that his ancestors refused to move

“We heard about the progress the Chinese had made, but we didn’t see it with our own eyes. What happened yesterday afternoon – a Chinese man riding a bicycle on the road, wearing a pair of suede gloves – confirmed that All this.” On February 8, 1870, the North-China Herald, founded by the British in Shanghai, reported such a trivial matter almost with joy.

The bicycle newly created in Europe was introduced to China only a few years later. In the beginning, most of the bikers in China were foreigners. At that time, missionaries who spread the Gospel were the most common type of foreigners riding bicycles. At that time, bicycles were rare and expensive, and the elites who could afford them were rich and well-fed; the technology of bicycles themselves was not perfect, and they were still difficult to control large front-wheel bicycles. Buyers not only need to practice at home for a long time, but also may fall in public on the street. Therefore, the bicycle did not win the favor of the Chinese at first. Hedland recorded the story of Emperor Guangxu learning to ride a bicycle in “The Court of the Late Qing Dynasty in the Eyes of an American”, “One day, his long braid got caught in the rear wheel of the bicycle and fell off the bicycle. Like the Chinese, he never learned to ride a bicycle again.”

The authenticity of this story of Emperor Guangxu remains to be verified, but the story of the last emperor Puyi and his bicycle is well-known. Puyi himself really talked about his cycling experience. In his memoir “The First Half of My Life”, he wrote: “For the convenience of riding bicycles, our ancestors have not felt inconvenient palace thresholds for hundreds of years, and I have them all sawed off.” In his later years, he revisited the Forbidden City, When passing through the palace gate without a threshold, he pointed it out to people and said with a smile: “This is my achievement. In order to ride a bicycle, I dared to saw off the threshold that my ancestors refused to move!” Puyi, who was cowardly by nature and was swayed by various factions all his life, had a rare moment of resistance; on the other hand, the last emperor who was supposed to maintain the orthodoxy of traditional China, saw off the bicycle as a Western artifact because of his love for the bicycle, which was a part of pre-modern China. The symbolic threshold of “ancestors refused to move”—this move almost presents the core of all choices and confusions in modern China.

In people’s eyes, the bicycle is no longer a laborious and useless tool, but a wonderful tool that can delight the body and mind, and it has become a symbol of “modern” and “advanced”. Even in 1900, the first modern machine flour factory invested and established by Chinese national capital changed the brand of flour from “Old Car” to “Bicycle” in order to integrate its own products with modern lifestyle and the most advanced life. Idea hooks.

In addition to Shanghai, there are also reports of Chinese riding bicycles in other cities. In 1898, in Jiangxi, people saw a young man galloping around on a double-steel bicycle. In 1909, when two foreigners, Fullerton and Wilson, who went deep into the mainland of China passed through Shanxi in a mule cart, they were very surprised that “a local gentry overtook them on a bicycle”. In the early years of the 20th century, more and more Chinese cities had bicycles.

Cycling is the bearer of the western way of life, and it embodies a cyclist’s attitude of yearning for civilization. Since then, China’s bicycle market has gradually opened up, and the social class of cyclists has also flowed downward. As cars and motorcycles have become new hobbies for the elite, the Western flavor of bicycles has become weaker and weaker, while the Chinese color has become more and more thicker and thicker.