China Archives - Page 61 of 112 - understand-culture

The Vocabulary of Getting Closer

套近乎 To pull nearness. To act close with someone one does not know well. The Handian dictionary notes that the word is usually critical.

套交情 To pull friendship. To draw someone into a relationship in order to grow closer.

门路 A doorway. Also the connections through which a person reaches a goal. In Dream of the Red Chamber, a dismissed official hears that old officials may be reappointed and goes everywhere “looking for relatives and doorways” (寻亲找门路).

熟主熟客 Familiar hosts and familiar guests. In a Ming story by Ling Mengchu, the merchants who have sailed overseas before “are all familiar hosts and familiar guests.” Only Wen Ruoxu knows no one.

The Three-North Shelterbelt

The National Development and Reform Commission gives the schedule of the Three-North Shelterbelt Program (三北防护林): “The construction period is 1978 to 2050, in three stages and eight phases.”

The Vocabulary of Owing

欠情 To owe feeling. To have received a kindness and not yet repaid it. In The Plum in the Golden Vase, a man greets another: “I have owed you feeling for a long time and have not come to see you, brother.”

领情 To receive feeling. To accept a gift or a kindness and feel grateful for it.

回礼 To return a courtesy. To answer a gift or a greeting with one of one’s own.

雪中送炭 To send charcoal in the snow. To help someone in urgent need. A Ming story sets it against 锦上添花, adding flowers to brocade: “There is only adding flowers to brocade. Where is there sending charcoal in the snow?”

Tian Ji’s Horse Race

Tian Ji, a general of Qi, often raced horses against the princes for high stakes. Sun Bin noticed that the horses on each side were not far apart in speed and fell into three classes. He told Tian Ji: “Race your lowest team against their best, your best against their middle, and your middle against their lowest.”

Tian Ji lost one race and won two, and he took the king’s thousand pieces of gold. Afterwards he introduced Sun Bin to the king, who made him his teacher in war. (Records of the Grand Historian)

Su Qin Repays His Debts

When Su Qin set out for Yan as a poor man, he borrowed a hundred coins. Years later he was chief minister of six states. The Records of the Grand Historian says that he repaid the lender with a hundred gold and “repaid everyone who had ever shown him kindness.”

One follower received nothing and came forward to ask. Su Qin said: “I have not forgotten you. When you came with me to Yan, you wanted to leave me again and again by the Yi River. At that time I was in trouble, so I resented you deeply. That is why I put you last. Now you will receive yours too.”

Sayings on Looking Ahead

人无远虑，必有近忧 A person without far-reaching thoughts will have troubles close at hand. (Analects)

十年树木，百年树人 Ten years to grow trees, a hundred years to grow people. Training people takes long investment.

舍车保帅 Give up the chariot to save the general. A term from Chinese chess. To sacrifice something secondary to protect what matters most.

Gifts and Renqing in Xiajia

The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang did fieldwork in Xiajia, a village in Heilongjiang. As The Paper summarizes his finding, a gift “creates a spiritual bond between the giver and the receiver, which the villagers call renqing (人情).”

On Protracted War

From May 26 to June 3, 1938, Mao Zedong gave a series of lectures in Yan’an titled On Protracted War (论持久战). He rejected two views of the war against Japan: that China would win quickly, and that China would be conquered. The war would be protracted, he argued, and the final victory would be China’s.

An Old Student Repays Three Times

In the Ming story An Old Student Repays a Favor Over Three Generations (老门生三世报恩), the examiner Kuai prefers young candidates. Three times, without meaning to, he passes the same old man, Xianyu Tong. Xianyu passes the provincial examination at fifty-seven and the metropolitan examination at sixty-one.

Xianyu later clears Kuai’s son of a false charge. “This only repays a little of my teacher’s kindness,” he says. “I still owe much feeling.” He then keeps Kuai’s grandson at his official residence to study and gives him three hundred taels. Kuai thinks: “Plant thorns and get thorns. Plant peach and plum trees and get shade.”

Generation Names

In many old families, one character in each person’s name marks the generation. Since the early Ming, the descendants of Confucius have taken these characters from lists issued by the central government. Chinese Wikipedia gives the list for the 56th to the 105th generation, fifty characters in all. It begins 希言公彦承 and ends 永锡世绪昌.

Under the Qianlong Emperor, the court decreed that descendants of Confucius and of three other sage families must take their names from the granted characters, or they would not be entered in the family register.

The Ming founder set twenty characters for each line of his own descendants. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the former premier Zhu Rongji belongs to the generation 镕 in the line of the Prince of Min.