In the past, many families in Northeast China shared a room with their parents after their sons were with their wives and children. In order to avoid inconvenience, rooms with two or three bays are often used as "soft partitions", which form two internal and external spaces from the kang surface to the beam, and some of them are also equipped with movable grids in corresponding positions, which are removed during the day and placed at night. In addition, just above the edge of the kang, a long pole, called "curtain pole", hangs from the top of the gate to hang the curtain, which can be put down at night to avoid the wind catching cold overhead, and can also play a shielding role between the north and south kang.
The indoor array of northeast folk houses also corresponds to the pattern of cross-health. The kang cabinet is placed on the northern and southern kang heads (near one end of Fangshan wall), with bedding, pillows and other bedding stacked on it, commonly known as "quilts". On the Xikang, a "hall box" (or "lying box") with the same appearance as the Kang is placed to hold food and clothes. There are incense burners, candlesticks and other supplies on the box cover, as well as daily furnishings such as dusters, hats and clocks.
The main function of kang is to keep warm. Because kang is burned by a cooking stove, as long as you eat and boil water, kang is hot. In winter, in order to keep out the cold, some people build a flue under the indoor ground, which is called "fire ground" or "underground kang". In the particularly cold season, increase the fire to raise the room temperature. Although it is freezing outside and dripping into ice, the indoor kang surface radiates heat with the ground and is still warm as spring.
The cooking pot and kang are not in the same room. The fire pit is hollow, forming a flue for heating.
"Southerners learn to sleep in bed, while northerners prefer to sleep on kang" is a heating and sleeping facility invented by northerners to adapt to the cold climate. In the north of China, especially in Jiaodong, Shandong, the winter is long and the climate is cold. Farmers here are used to heating with kang in winter. The main rooms of rural houses in Jiaodong usually sit in a row with three or four rooms facing south, and two of them have kang. The outer door near the two doors has a stove about three or four feet square. Between the stove and the south wall behind the door, there is usually a place to place bellows. There is an iron pot with six to eight prints on the stove. The flue connected to the stove chamber under the iron pot runs from the kang in two rooms, through the wall to the chimney on the outer wall, and the richer people have a utility room in the east or the west of the east.
The heating kang is built in the south of the room, accounting for nearly half of the room area, with three sides against the wall and large glass windows in the south. Below the edge of the kang, that is, to the north, there is a kang wall two or three feet high. Rich people use blue bricks to tick off seams, and even have brick carvings. Most people build it with adobe and then coat it with mud or white lime. The structure inside the kang is very complicated. To make "stove-flue-chimney" form an effective thermal circulation system, the heat in every place of the kang can be preserved and realized, and it can be discharged smoothly without leaking smoke. When building a kang, use soil and sand on the ground first. There are also several pits in the flue, which are called "ash rooms" to store ash. After the flue is completed, install the kang surface. The kang board is a rectangular frame surrounded by four wooden strips on the flat ground in advance, with several wooden sticks on it and filled with soil. After drying, remove the frame to form a kang board about two feet long, one foot wide and three inches wide. Originally, it was made of mud, grass and water, and the kang wall and crib were made of adobe. One side of the "plate" is connected to the chimney, and the other side is connected to the pot. When cooking, it is more economical to use waste heat to warm the kang.
The principle of this heatable kang is to use the hot airflow generated by burning fuel such as straw and branches to dissipate heat to adobe when passing through the flue of the heatable kang. Adobe is a poor conductor of heat, so the temperature of heatable adobe will last for a long time. It is comfortable to sleep on the kang in winter. There is a thin layer of cotton or straw mat on the straw mat, and the quilt is also very thin. In rural Jiaodong, Jiaodong people sit cross-legged on the kang. Kang is also a place for eating, embroidering, chatting and studying, and there is a kang table about a foot high on it. Convenient and practical. Every year, the old ones are demolished and the new ones are built. Kang soil is an excellent fertilizer. Even in newly-built buildings, most of them are still heated kang, just brick kang walls and kang stacks, and the kang surface is changed into cement prefabricated panels, so the hot air is more concentrated and the kang is heated, which is very popular with the old people.
In order to cooperate with the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, Hebei Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics excavated the site of Dongheishan in xushui county, Hebei Province from April to June, 2006165438+1October, and unearthed a Western Han dynasty fire kang, which advanced the history of the fire kang to more than 2,000 years ago.
Nowadays, due to the popularity of building heating and various heating facilities, fewer and fewer families use fire kang, and only rural areas still retain such fire kang.