Adeline Mah - A Thousand Pieces of Gold - A Memoir of China’s Past Through its Proverbs

One Written Word is Worth

A Thousand Pieces of Gold

ADELINE YEN MAH

Dedicated to my husband Bob,

who knows me better than I know myself (zhi ji) and makes everything worthwhile.

Note on Pronunciation

Preface

1 Loss of One Hair from Nine Oxen

2 Precious Treasure Worth Cherishing

3 One Written Word is Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold

4 Binding your Feet to Prevent your own Progress

5 Clapping with One Hand Produces No Sound

6 When the Map is Unrolled, the Dagger is Revealed

7 Burning Books and Burying Scholars

8 Words that Would Cause a Nation to Perish

9 Pointing to a Deer and Calling it a Horse

10 Little Sparrows with Dreams of Swans

11 Destroy the Cooking Cauldrons and Sink the Boats

12 This Young Man is Worth Educating

13 Banquet at Wild Goose Gate

14 Dressed in the Finest Brocades to Parade in the Dark of Night

15 Plot to Sow Discord and Create Enmity

16 The Heart of the People Belongs to Han

17 The Human Heart is Difficult to Fathom

18 Devising Strategies in a Command Tent

List of Proverbs

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Adeline Yen Mah

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chinese is a pictorial, not a phonetic, language. Words are pronounced differently in different provinces, even though they are written in the same way and have the same meaning. This was true even during the time of the Warring States (475–221 BC). The historian Sima Qian began the biography of the assassin Jing Ke with these words: ‘Jing Ke was born in the state of Wei [present-day Henan province]. The natives of Wei pronounced his name Master Qing, but those from the state of Yan called him Master Jing.’

After the Communists conquered China in 1949, they standardised the phonetic spelling of Chinese characters throughout China according to the Beijing dialect, or Mandarin, and called it Pinyin. Pinyin is defined as the phonetic, alphabetic spelling of Chinese writing.

I would like to introduce a few famous figures from Chinese history to western readers using Pinyin. This is not an exhaustive list of all the names that appear in this book, of course, but it gives an overall flavour of how Chinese names are pronounced.

Unlike the western world, Chinese surnames are pronounced first, to be followed by the given names. For instance, my maiden surname is Yen and my given name is Junling . Thus my Chinese name is Yen Junling .

My husband Bob’s surname is Mah . When I married Bob, my Chinese name became Mah Yen Junling , whereas my English name became Adeline Yen Mah.

In a similar vein, Deng Xiaoping’s surname was Deng . His given name was Xiaoping .

Mao Zedong’s surname was Mao , and his given name was Zedong .

Sima Qian’s surname was Sima , and his given name was Qian .

The word Haan in the state of Haan during the Warring States period is the same character as the surname of General-in-chief Hahn Xin . The word Han in Han dynasty is an entirely different word from the other two. However, all three are pronounced Han and are spelt identically as Han in the Chinese-English Pinyin dictionary and in history books. To distinguish them and avoid confusion, I have chosen to spell them differently in this book.