Gourds play the significant role in Chinese agricultural society because it is not only a kind of food, but also an important material which poeople of the early periods could apply to make utensils for their daily life just because of its woodlike feature. Its various role made people lead a better life. The uses of gourd were related to different ways, including the ways of eating, clothing, communication and recreation. All in all, the gourds deeply influenced the way of life.

Well-known Food

        From Westen Chou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period in ancient China, many books and poetries recorded that people planted gourds and cooked them with many methods in ancient China. When people cooked porridge, they put some gourds to add the special flavor. Besides, people tried many ways to raise the production of gourds, inclusive of graft in Han Dynasty. At the same time, people considered a lot of ways to preserve gourds. For example, they dried gourds that the gourds won't spoil until wintertime.

Curative Plant

Gourds have close relationship with the Chinese medicine in Chinese. A long time ago, many books said that bitter gourds could be cured dropsy and jaundice.

In addition, gourds were one of the important containers for medicine. At an early time, quack doctors and the drug stores usually used gourds to contain medicine. It was the reason why gourds played a significant part in the field of Chinese medicine. Sometimes, many doctors used it to be fascias of ancient drug stores, so people called a person who sells drug to heals people is Hsuan Hu” (it means hanging a gourd) and skillful doctors are Hsuan Hu Chi Shih.” (It means that a doctor usually hangs a gourd when he saves people.)

Gourd Serving Utensil

Third, another important purpose of a gourd is to make many kinds of utensils in daily life. From many historical relics, we can know that the ancient people had imitated the shape of gourd to make many containers. Aside from the historical relics, we can realize the role of gourds from Chinese hieroglyph as well. The figure of gourd shows that the gourd is used to contain some liquids, like water or wine.

Further, a gourd could be used as a container and a ladle; the white texture of a gourd could feed pigs and the seeds of gourds could make candle lighter. In fact, until now, many people in China still use gourds to make pots, ladles, basins and bowls to make their lives better and convenient.

Aside from being utensil in daily life, the gourd is used to be a buoyant board because of its density. Based on the Compendium of Materia Medica of Lee Shih Chen, it says that the round gourd is called lagenaria or bottle gourd. It is capable of floating on the surface of the water. Therefore, people use the buoyancy of gourd to float on the surface of water before the creation of boat.

Shell of Weapon

Fourth, gourds were used to make weapons: According to the Military Tactics Manuals in Ming Dynasty, Chinese people not only imitated the shape of gourds to make the shell of weapons, but also used gourds to make bombs. In addition, according to some data from scholars, some minor nationalities in western south area in China had ever used gourds to make hand grenades in Ching Dynasty.

Here, we provide some ingredients and manners of “Fire Gourd Bomb” for you: First, prepare a gourd. Second, stir yellow mud, purple dust and salty water together. And then, cover it on the gourd and wait until it dries. Third, using a gray cloth to wrap on the gourd, paint varnish on it. Fourth, use some ashes, nitric and sulfur to fill in the gourd. Finally, put heated charcoal in it. And Fire Gourd Bomb is done.

Music Instrument

Music instruments made of gourd is mainly popular in the out-of-the-way areas in China. It has unique regional style. The origin of gourd pan pipe are thought to go back as far as the Chin Dynasty: It developed from the gourd reed pipe wind instrument. It partly kept the structure of an ancient instrument. But it had obvious improvement on its structure and gamut. In 1958, the song and dance ensemble of Yun Nan expanded the gamut to fourteen notes. In the recent years, some arts companies make two different gourd pan pipes. One of them, gourd pan pipe with six tubes, can be played more complicated skills, such as double tone, single melody and summation tone. In the beginning of 1980, the central people musical group had ever used gourd pan pipe to play songs for Japanese and won a round of applause.