Is it fake that Sima Guang smashed the vat? Ma Weidu said that there were no such big tanks in the Song Dynasty. Is it credible?

Sima Guang was a politician, historian and writer in the Northern Song Dynasty. His representative work is "Zizhi Tongjian". Sima Guang is a hard-working person, and he has always been regarded as a role model for many students. Most of what we know about Sima Guang does not come from "Zi Zhi Tong Jian", but from the famous story "Sima Guang smashed the vat". Sima Guang's calmness, decisiveness and intelligence left a deep impression on everyone.

The story of "Sima Guang smashed the vat" has been questioned by many people, but this story has existed for a long time. Whether it is correct or not is difficult to verify. The famous cultural relic artist Ma Weidu questioned the authenticity of this story from a unique perspective. The reason is that the technology of the Song Dynasty could not produce a large vat that could drown a child. The technology of firing large vats did not appear until the Yuan Dynasty, and no vat from the Song Dynasty has been unearthed so far.

We also try to question this story, because Sima Guang was only seven years old at the time, and his tool at that time was a stone picked up at random. From this, it can be inferred that Sima Guang was not only very talented in learning , and he is also a born strong man. He is really good at both civil and military skills since he was a child, and he is the envy of others. According to normal understanding, what can a seven-year-old child do? They are probably playing with mud, while Sima Guang is smashing a vat. Everyone has seen how thick the vat is, and it is not that easy to break. According to normal understanding, a seven-year-old child The children lack the strength to smash the vat.

The open mouth is a cylinder, and the constricted mouth is an urn. The mouth of the cylinder is larger than the mouth of the urn. The urn is taller than the cylinder. The manufacturing process of the urn is simpler than the cylinder, and the wall of the urn is much thinner than the wall of the cylinder. The urn was therefore more likely to be smashed. Some people may question whether there were urns in the Song Dynasty. In the early Western Han Dynasty, Lv Zhi was jealous of Mrs. Qi and made Mrs. Qi into a human pigeon and put it in an urn. It can be seen that the urns appeared in the Western Han Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, there was also an allusion of "asking the king to enter the urn", so there must be an urn in the Song Dynasty. It was fake that Sima Guang smashed the vat, because what he smashed was not a vat, but an urn.