better to light the candle than to curse the darkness - 1907

[Randy Alexander]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
> Many thanks for your response. It is interesting that Anna Louise
> Strong may have brought the quote to China. I spent some time
> attempting to trace another saying that may or may not be Chinese:
> "May you live in interesting times".
>
> The citations that I found from Frederic R. Coudert in 1939 and Hughe
> Knatchbull-Hugessen in 1949 I placed in Wikipedia. Both references
> point to the British Embassy in China as a key locus of creation or
> propagation. (YBQ already had a citation from 1939. This was before I
> purchased YBQ.)
>
> Have you looked into this saying?

I haven't until now.  I found this page:

http://www.007china.com.cn/thread-3763229-1-1.html

The answer quotes stuff from the Ming dynasty, and since my Ming-era
Chinese isn't so great, I forwarded the page to Victor Mair, who thus
replied:

====

I believe that "May you live in interesting times" is another example
of pseudo-Oriental wisdom.

On the page that you sent me (URL below), the first post (totally in
English) just tells where / when the "curse" was supposedly first used
in English.

The second item (in Chinese) cites two stories collected by the late
Ming short story writer, Feng Menglong, in which this expression
occurs:  å®ä¸ºå¤ªå¹³ç ¬ï¼ŒèŽ«ä½œä¹±ç¦»äººï¼ That means "I'd rather be a dog in times of
peace than a human in a time of war and separation."  The sentence the
poster begins with (宁为太平狗，不做乱世人) is but a slightly modernized version
of the "curse" I previously quoted in Chinese.

SO, the upshot of this is that it has nothing to do with the "May you
live in interesting times" curse.  Still pseudo-Oriental.

====

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
Blogs:
Manchu studies: http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
Chinese characters: http://www.bjshengr.com/yuwen

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