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In the China Fire Protection Museum, there is a very valuable collection – the so-called “most expensive” water tap, which comes from Changxi Village, She County, Mount Huangshan City, Anhui Province. The Changxi Firefighting Association used to have an old water faucet, which was purchased with funding from local Huizhou merchants in the late Qing Dynasty and made great contributions to the people of Changxi. According to the recollection of Wu Shunlai, a veteran member of the firefighting association, from 1945 to 1954, the old water hose extinguished multiple large fires such as Baoshantang and Wu Yanshou’s house. Later on, the components of the old faucet were severely worn and could no longer fulfill the heavy responsibility of firefighting. In 1955, Liu Wenbin, who was responsible for militia work, proposed to replace a new water faucet. However, in the early stages of liberation, funding was extremely difficult. What should be done? Everyone thinks of the four landscape paintings “Spring”, “Summer”, “Autumn”, and “Winter” collected by the Jishan Hall of the Wu Clan Ancestral Hall. The author of these four paintings is Tang Bohu.
Tang Bohu was born in 1470 AD, which is the year of the Yin Tiger, so he is also known as Tang Yin. Changxi Village sold these four famous paintings of Tang Bohu to the Shanghai Museum for 1600 yuan, and then purchased a new faucet produced by the Zhendan Iron Factory for 600 yuan. The remaining funds were also used to purchase equipment such as alarms and hoses. 1600 yuan was a huge sum of money at that time, and four famous paintings by Tang Bohu are even more expensive today. The people of Changxi, in order to ensure the safety of the village, are admirable for exchanging famous paintings for water hoses. This is also because they follow the ancestral motto of “it is better to have three meals without food, and fire cannot be prevented for a day”, and have always placed fire prevention in a top priority.
Li Shizhen, a famous medical scientist in the Ming Dynasty, also belonged to the tiger family and was born in 1518. This year, a major event in the history of firefighting occurred in the West – the world’s first recorded fire truck was launched. This fire truck was manufactured by Antoine Bratner, a metal craftsman from Augsburg, Germany. According to the Craft History of Augsburg, this fire truck was pulled by horses and was equipped with a large water pump operated by a lever.
Looking back at history, the earliest fire trucks in the world came from Europe, and the earliest professional firefighting teams came from China. The China Fire Protection Museum displays a burial item from the Eastern Han Dynasty – the “Dongjing Fire Extinguishing” well railing pottery, which confirms the existence of specialized firefighting teams during the Han Dynasty. However, due to the lack of historical records and physical evidence, there is currently no detailed information on this. During the Northern Song Dynasty, “military patrol shops” emerged, mainly responsible for public security in their jurisdiction, including fire inspections and firefighting. Later on, the shops built watchtowers and equipped them with specialized firefighting equipment, forming the embryonic form of fire brigades. During the Southern Song Dynasty, Lin’an began to establish a specialized “fire brigade” called the “hidden fire army”, which was the earliest official fire brigade in China and even the world. London in the United Kingdom, Paris in France, and New York in the United States established dedicated fire brigades in 1666, 1699, and 1853 respectively, more than 500 years earlier than in China.
At that time, there were no fire trucks in China, and people adopted the primitive method of using buckets to hold water and using brooms to extinguish fires. After about the mid Qing Dynasty, a main equipment in China emerged – a manual pump, commonly known as a “faucet”, which is a vacuum pump driven by human power, equivalent to today’s fire trucks.
The China Fire Protection Museum has a collection of many well made large faucets, most of which come from the firefighting societies of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China period. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the country attached great importance to firefighting work and actively carried out the research and development of domestically produced firefighting vehicles. In 1957, the first domestically produced water tank pump firefighting vehicle was launched. Nowadays, this water tank pump fire truck is also displayed at the China Fire Protection Museum.