DONGJING MENG HUA LU / 卷十
冬至
Saving up for the solstice.
The winter solstice as the capital’s heaviest festival: a year of saving and borrowing spent on new clothes, food, offerings to the ancestors, licensed gambling and visits of congratulation.
READ THE SOLSTICE ↓1. The festival that outranks the others.
十一月，冬至。京師最重此節，雖至貧者，一年之間積累假借，至此日，更易新衣，備辦飲食，享祀先祖。官放關撲，慶賀往來，一如年節。
The eleventh month, the winter solstice. The capital gives no festival more weight than this one. Even the poorest, who have been saving up and borrowing for it all year, on this day change into new clothes, prepare food and drink, and sacrifice to their ancestors. The authorities release wager-selling, and people exchange congratulations and visits, exactly as at the New Year.
The entry is a ranking followed by a list. It states the festival’s weight first (the capital treats it as the heaviest), then proves the claim with the poorest household, whose year of saving and borrowing is spent in a single day. The items run from the body to the table, to the dead, to the market and to the neighbors: clothes, food, ancestors, licensed gambling, visits. Meng then measures the solstice against the New Year, a festival the book has already described at length. What the entry leaves out is the state. There is no court, no altar and no sacrifice here; the household festival is given first, as the frame, and the Grand Sacrifice enters with the entries that follow.
Three places the short text turns on.
The Siku scan runs the month and the festival together with no break. The page reads them as two items, the eleventh month and then the solstice.
The phrase pairs saving up (積累) with borrowing (假借). The page takes 假借 as borrowing money or goods; the text does not say which, or from whom.
關撲 is a wager-sale in which goods are staked on a throw. 官放 presents the authorities as releasing it for the festival; the entry gives no further detail.
The day of the shortest daylight, in the eleventh month, which the entry calls the capital’s weightiest festival.
Meng’s usual word for Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital whose life the book records.
Taken here as borrowing money or goods against the festival; paired with 積累, saving up.
A sale or game of chance in which goods are staked on a throw; the entry says the officials allow it.
The household sacrifice of the day, the only ritual the entry names.
The festival of the year’s turn, which Meng uses as the yardstick for the solstice’s visits and congratulations.
Entry 75 is one sentence that sets the scale: the solstice weighs as much as the New Year, and even the poorest household pays for it in advance. The next entry leaves the household for the state, and the Grand Sacrifice begins with carts and elephants in the street.
官放關撲，慶賀往來，一如年節。The weight is Meng’s. The punctuation is editorial.
The primary text is read from the Siku-family witness (Kanripo KR2k0111, 卷十); punctuation and the standardization of Siku variant glyphs are editorial. The Siku text has no lacuna in this entry; 往来 is normalized to 往來.