Little Book of Chinese Proverbs

A brooch, two pearls in tortoiseshell
Entwined with jade, the jeweller's art
Now I hear you have another
Hurt, I twist my gift apart
Burned and broken, wind blows ashes
Never tell who broke my heart
-- Yue-fu: Nineteen Ancient Poems, Han Dynasty

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This is one of my most successful books, having made it into at least five other editions that I know of. Last I heard from the publishers, it was on its sixth printing in the UK alone. The reason is simple. As we only discovered after the fact, it's not that little after all: it's possibly one of the largest collections of Chinese proverbs available in English, and the only one to attribute and date its sayings. It also isn't all proverbs, either. It includes popular songs from the distant past such as the teen-angst ditty above, and poetry from the last 3000 years. A future project for me, as yet uncommissioned, is to return to the ancient Chinese Book of Songs, and translate the whole thing.

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The English-speaking world is often too wrapped up in itself to notice other cultures. Even in the wider, Western world, the mysteries of the Far East remain mysterious partly because so few mainstream works are prepared to tackle them. As this book will show, the concerns of the Chinese people are much like those of any other. They laugh, they cry, they tell jokes and they get into arguments. Over the centuries, they have also provided us with many phrases which we now take for granted. There was a time when nobody had heard that the grass was greener on the other side, when no-one scoffed at the thought of a paper tiger, and when none had heard that many a true word is spoken in jest. And yet we share many of these ideas with the Chinese, either through coincidence or a long-forgotten meeting of cultures. For this reason, this book also gives approximate dates where available for many of these sayings, so the reader can see just how old they are.

When even large dictionaries of quotations struggle to contain a few dozen Chinese proverbs, a little book like this can hardly redress the balance. Where known, attributions have been given, but the Chinese practice of alluding to classical books means that many wise men are in fact quoting the words of even older sages. This practice continues today; though Deng Xiaoping famously said: "'What matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice," he was not coining a phrase, but repeating an age-old saying. Many famous quotations from Chinese history actually begin with the words "We all know the saying..." or "As the ancients used to say..." showing that even these phrases have an even older provenance. For this reason, perhaps a fifth of the quotes in this book are merely headed "Traditional". Even in modern times, many writers are unwilling to be identified for fear of persecution, which has occasioned several cases in the book of an anonymous saying attached to a definite date.

Particularly large numbers of proverbs are clustered in the end of the Zhou Dynasty, which is divided into two sub-periods: "Spring and Autumn" and "Warring States". This is chiefly because this was the time at which the great sages of Chinese history lived: Lao Zi, Confucius, Mencius (Meng Zi) and their followers generated a great number of sayings and comments, and it became customary for the Chinese to allude to the masters in later years. For over two thousand years, one was only considered educated if one could regurgitate the words of the Classics verbatim. This has meant that most of the Chinese proverbs known in the West, and indeed, the majority of those contained within this book, are the sayings of a handful of men. To imply otherwise would be misleading.

A proverb in China can be many things. This book collects a number of wise sayings, but also many quotes from songs and famous poems, which are often used proverbially in Chinese conversation. The Book of Songs collects hundreds of ancient poems, almost all anonymous. The Imperial Yue-fu (or Music Bureau) would keep records of the most popular songs, in order to show the Emperor the general mood of the country. In this way, the Yue-fu songs are as accurate a barometer of public feeling as the modern pop charts, and many of the songs are truly timeless. Just as today, many phrases from the lyrics worked their way into conversations, and became proverbial in their own right.