千字文, The Thousand Character Classic

 The other day, while indulging in one of the greatest pastimes known to man, i.e., browsing the shelves of a used bookstore*, I ran across a wonderful 1963 edition of the 千字文, or Thousand Character Classic, edited by Francis W. Paar, that features the original Chinese text in several different scripts along with translations in English, French, German, and Latin. The 千字文 is probably the oldest extant primer for learning Chinese characters, and dates back to the sixth century A.D. There are versions available online, including the very same edition at Hathi Trust.

For my own edification, and hopefully that of anyone reading this, I think I'm going to try and post something about each verse of the 千字文 regularly. This version has a page for every four-character verse, which means 250 posts. We'll see how that pans out.

That said, here's the first four characters of the 千字文, AKA the Qiānzìwén or, in the old and aesthetically appealing but otherwise annoying Wade-Giles romanization system, Ch'ien Tzu Wen, along with some brief commentary by yours truly. Any statements that aren't mine are taken from the Paar edition I'm using as a source, and any other sources are noted accordingly. Let's learn Chinese like it's circa 1000 A.D.!

天地元黃
tiān dì yuán huáng

Well, this is a hell of a way to start. I transcribed the characters directly from this book, and 元, according to Paar and Kraal (in the latter's A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese), is a "taboo-substitute" for 玄, given the latter character's use in the names of 宋 Sòng and 清 Qīng emperors. I wonder how many more substitutions there'll be where the replacement character's meaning bears no resemblance to that of the character it's replacing.

So, returning the line to its original form, we have:

天地玄黃
tiān dì xuán huáng

Or, literally, "heaven earth dark yellow." Since nobody talks like that, let's say "heaven is dark and the earth is yellow." The earth is yellow in this case because much of the soil of northern China is yellow loess.

Kroll notes that 玄黃 is an analogue to 天地, since 天 is 玄 and 地 is 黄. Dark and yellow=heaven and earth.

One down, 249 to go.

微臣
史大偉


*The Portuguese word for a person or shop that deals in used books, alfarrabista, not only has a wonderful ring to it, but, according to the Dicionário Priberam, has its etymological roots in Al-Farabi, a medieval Muslim philosopher and polymath. I dig that.