千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 20

 鳥官人皇

niǎo* guān rén huáng 

"Bird officials and the sovereign of man"

Dragon masters, fire emperors, bird officials, and the sovereign of mankind—so many monikers and titles to learn. 

According to my edition of the 千字文, 少昊 Shao Hao, a legendary emperor, "designated his officials with the names of birds." The "sovereign of man" is 黃帝 Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor; he is the father of 少昊 Shao Hao. Huangdi is referred to here as the "sovereign of man" because each of the first three legendary emperors of China was associated with one of the 三才** Three Powers, i.e., 天 heaven, 地 earth, and 人 man. (Fu Xi and Shen Nong, discussed in the last post, are the emperors of heaven and earth, respectively.)

The Yellow Emperor is a major figure in Chinese history and mythology: the legendary ancestor of numerous emperors, inventor of Chinese medicine, symbolic center of the universe. I'd never heard of Shao Hao until I started reading about lines 19-20 of the Thousand Character Classic, but I've never been well-versed in Chinese mythology, or the part of Chinese history so shrouded in the mists of time it might as well be mythology. 

In the last post I mentioned a grammatical element connecting this line and the previous one. I'm still bad at catching unwritten contexts in classical Chinese, so I'm glad that my copy of the book situates line 19 temporally: "In the times of the dragon masters". It's not readily apparent that this should be read as starting with a "when" statement, but it makes perfect grammatical sense. (I also need to get better at reading ahead a bit to help establish context.) So,

龍師火帝  鳥官人皇

can be read "In the time of the dragon masters, the fire emperor, the bird officials, and the sovereign of men...", which in turn sets up the following lines.

Only five more lines and I'll be 10% finished! See you soon, dudes.

微臣

史大偉

*鳥 in modern Chinese is also pronounced "diao," and used as an alternate character for 屌, which  is also pronounced "diao" and means "penis" or, in Cantonese, "to fuck." Reading this line as "dick officials" seems like a not-so-subtle jab at the nature of bureaucracy, but amusing as that is, it seems unlikely.

**There's a Chinese martial arts form called 三才劍, "three powers sword." You can see a wonderfully grainy performance of it here.