Bo Ya was a master of the zither, and his friend Zhong Ziqi understood his playing. When Bo Ya played with high mountains in mind, Zhong Ziqi said: “Splendid! Towering like Mount Tai!” The story is told in the Liezi.
The Annals of Lü Buwei tell how it ended. When Zhong Ziqi died, Bo Ya “broke his zither, cut its strings, and never played again for the rest of his life.”
The word for a close friend, 知音, comes from the story. It means “one who knows the tune.”
逢人且说三分话，未可全抛一片心 When meeting people, say only three tenths of what is on the mind. Do not throw out the whole heart. (Words to Broaden Wisdom, a collection of old sayings)
酒逢知己千杯少，话不投机半句多 With a close friend, a thousand cups of wine are too few. When the talk does not suit, half a sentence is too many.
In 1944, the Chinese anthropologist Hu Hsien Chin published “The Chinese Concepts of ‘Face'” in the journal American Anthropologist. Hu described two Chinese words for face, lian (脸) and mianzi (面子), as “two sets of criteria by which prestige is gained and status secured or improved.”
Lian, Hu wrote, is “a social sanction for enforcing moral standards and an internalized sanction.” It “is conceived of as being maintained or lost as a whole.”
赏脸 To grant face. A polite formula used when asking someone to accept a request or a gift. It appears in Dream of the Red Chamber.
撕破脸 To tear the face. To break with someone openly, with no regard for feelings.
死要面子活受罪 To insist on face to the death and suffer while alive. To go through great hardship for the sake of appearances.
人走茶凉 When the guest leaves, the tea goes cold. When an official leaves a high post, people turn cold toward him, because he can no longer grant them favors.
In August 2015, a People’s Daily commentary called the saying a vivid image of how warm and cold human relations can turn. It told retired officials to accept the cold tea and not interfere in the work of their successors.
The saying is about ties that rested on the post and not on the person.
一日为师，终身为父 Teacher for a day, father for life. An old saying: whoever was one’s master even for a day deserves lifelong respect as a father. It appears in a Yuan play by Guan Hanqing.
老乡 A person from the same home region.
战友 A comrade-in-arms. Someone who fought side by side with one.
Under the Tang imperial examinations, a successful candidate regarded the chief examiner who passed him as his zuozhu, his patron, and himself as the examiner’s mensheng, his disciple. In the words of the literary historian Hu Kexian, “the patron regarded his disciples as his ‘estate fields,’ and the disciples regarded their patron as the ‘owner of the garden.'”
Candidates who had failed many times felt especially grateful once they passed. After the examiner Gao Ying died, Bai Juyi passed his old house and still wrote a poem of gratitude.
In the 1980s, people from Wenzhou in Zhejiang settled in Beijing’s Fengtai District to trade. Their district became known as “Zhejiang Village.” The anthropologist Xiang Biao studied it. When people there needed workers in 1984, he writes, they wrote home or even went back in person, to mobilize relatives and find suitable girls through kin networks and in their own and nearby villages. “This was common in Zhejiang Village.”
“Our own people,” he notes, meant “direct relatives or good friends, who would speak up for one when needed.” By 1987, newcomers no longer needed a tie to someone already there. He counts 96,000 outsiders in the area beside 14,000 Beijing natives.
In Ming and Qing cities, people from the same home region built guild halls, huiguan. The earliest one known is the Wuhu Guild Hall in Beijing, built in the Yongle era of the Ming. At first the halls gave fellow natives a place to meet, to enjoy themselves and to stay the night. Some later became associations of merchants in the same trade.
In the first chapter of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei burn incense in a peach garden and swear an oath. “Though we are of different surnames, now that we are brothers we will join hearts and strength. We do not ask to be born in the same year, month and day. We only wish to die in the same year, month and day.”
The oath ends: “If one betrays righteousness and forgets kindness, may Heaven and men together destroy him.” The official history of the period records that Liu Bei shared a bed with the two men and that their bond was “like that of brothers.” The words of the oath come from the novel.