How did the name Meiyu season come from?

People living in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River often have such an experience: as soon as the sunny and rainy spring is over, early summer comes, but soon, the sky is overcast and rainy, and sometimes there will be bouts of heavy rain. This is what people often say, "Meiyu" is coming.

Meiyu refers to a period of continuous rainy weather from mid-June to mid-July and early summer. The middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China refer to the range of 28-34 N east of Yichang, or the narrow area from Jianghuai Valley to southern Japan.

How did the name "Meiyu" come from? Initially, it originated from a meteorological term in China. In ancient times, Meiyu was usually called Huang Meiyu. As early as the Han Dynasty, there were many proverbs about Huang Meiyu. In the Jin Dynasty, there was already a record of "summer rain to the sun, named Huang Meiyu"; Since the Tang and Song Dynasties, there have been many interesting descriptions about Meiyu. Liu Zongyuan, a writer in the Tang Dynasty, once wrote a poem about Meiyu: "Shi Mei welcomes Meiyu, and it is already late spring. I am deeply worried about the night of the ape, and my dream has run out in the morning. The sea fog connects the South Pole, Jiang Yun dark Beijin, plain clothes today, not for the dust of the imperial city ". Among them, "Shi Mei welcomes the rain" means that when plums are ripe, they welcome the rain from summer to three o'clock in the future. At present, the meteorological plum rain refers to a rainy weather that transits from early summer to midsummer.

Zhu He was once called "He Meizi" in the Song Dynasty, which is said to be because he wrote such a famous sentence in the word "Jade Case": "One Sichuan tobacco, the city is full of wind, and plums are raining yellow." In Song Dynasty, Chen also wrote in Gengshihua: "Plum blossoms are ripe in May in the south of the Yangtze River, and it rains for ten days, which is called it". In the Ming Dynasty, Xu wrote in Tang Yuzhi's Talk about Hui: "Plum blossoms stand behind the awn, and plum blossoms are broken after the awn." In history, "Huang Meiyu" usually refers to the precipitation of "Mei" Festival. People in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River are used to taking the solar term of "Mangzhong" as May Festival, which coincides with the mature season of plums, so it is also called "Huangmei".

In addition, due to the high humidity in the air during this period, everything is easy to be damp and moldy, so people gave Meiyu an individual name, called "Moldy Rain". Xie Zaihang's Five Miscellaneous Torches in Ming Dynasty? "Tianbu No.1" describes: "Every year in March and April in the south of the Yangtze River, it rains bitterly, and everything is moldy, commonly known as Meiyu, and it is covered when it is green and yellow. From Xu Huai to the north, it is often dry in spring and summer. At the turn of June and July, it rained heavily and everything was moldy. " Li Shizhen, an outstanding medical scientist in Ming Dynasty, pointed out more clearly in Compendium of Materia Medica: "Plum rain or mildew rain, when it comes to clothes and things, will produce black mold." .

It can be seen that the appellation of "plum rain" or "mildew rain" has a long history, and it began to spread in China, at least dating back to 1000 years ago.