is essential if mankind is to survive & move toward higher levels... Albert Einstein

 Pagan Trivia: China

Smell was important in Ancient China. Body odor, they believed, was a sign of barbarism, and so the wealthy would go to great lengths to keep it off. Women would walk around with aromatic bags attached to their waists. When a man was in the presence of the emperor, he was required to suck on cloves to fight bad breath. In those times, so much of a Chinese noble’s paycheck went toward hygiene that they called it a “subsidy for clothing and hair washing.” For the poor, though, money for hygiene just wasn't available, so they resorted to some more desperate options. One ancient Chinese doctor, for example, recommended that, at least once each year, every person should wash their armpits with urine.

In the north part of China, however, people would go the whole winter without bathing, fearing that touching water in the cold would make them ill. The Taoists, meanwhile, barely bathed at all. They believed that bathing spread illness, and so, while Koreans were bathing twice a day, they were staying as far away from soap and water as humanly possible, because they didn’t want to be unclean.

When a massive part of your country is afraid to bathe, it causes a few problems. And so it might not particularly surprising that ancient China was infested with lice. Lice were so widespread that early Chinese doctors used them to make diagnoses. If the lice were crawling all over the patient’s body, an early Chinese medical document says, he will survive. If the lice are scrambling off his body like rats fleeing a sinking ship, he will die.

The poor were so used to being covered in lice that many would compulsively pluck them off their hair and eat them. This happened so much that they had remedies to help people who ate too much of their own lice. They would be fed ashes and boiled water from old combs. The next time you visited the bathroom, the doctors promised, you would pass a belly full of lice.