“Victory and defeat in war cannot be foreseen. To bear shame and swallow disgrace is what makes a man. Among the young men east of the river were many of talent. Whether he could have rolled back the dust and returned, nobody can know.”
The Tang poet Du Mu wrote these lines while prefect of Chizhou, at the place where Xiang Yu, defeated in 202 BCE, had refused to cross the Wu River and had taken his own life. The last line gave Chinese the idiom 卷土重来, to roll back the dust and come again.