A crescent moon in winter was a symbol of melancholy.
A man with shoulders like an owl’s was assumed to be cruel.
A woman’s eyebrows were commonly compared to hills in spring.
After a failed coup, the warlord Tung Chou was executed and his body was displayed in the street. He was excessively obese; a flame that was lit in his navel burned for days.
An ancient king gave his servant five hundred measures of gold to find and purchase the finest stallion in the land. The servant bought a horse that was dead. The ministers expected the king to be furious, but he praised the servant’s expertise, for the stallion had indeed once been the finest in the kingdom.
Clouds were thought to be produced in rock crags, so rocks were called the roots of clouds.
Comets were called broom stars.
Confucius met a woman weeping by a tomb. She explained that her father-in-law had been killed by a tiger, her husband had been killed by a tiger, and now she was burying her son, who had been killed by a tiger. Confucius asked why she didn’t move somewhere else. She replied: “The government is not cruel here.”
Deer who were fifteen hundred years old turned white.
Dimples were signs of beauty, and women applied a yellow makeup to highlight them.
Fireflies were thought to be spontaneously generated by damp grass.
Five hundred thousand pieces of silk were used to buy horses from the Uighurs, overworking and devastating the silk industry.
Flickering in the Pleiades meant trouble on the northern frontier.
Following his unjust execution, the blood of the minister Ch’ang Hong turned into white jade.
Ho-p’u precinct was famous for its pearls. In times when its officials were corrupt and hoarded the pearls, the oysters would move to another precinct.
Horses with long teeth were considered difficult to train but, once mastered, capable of travelling great distances in a single day.
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It was the White Maiden who instructed the Yellow Emperor in occult sexual practices.
Ken Ying brought down a goose simply by pulling his bow without an arrow. He knew that the goose had been wounded by a previous hunter and that, merely hearing the twang of the bow, it would give up all hope.
Li Meng planted a thousand orange trees, which he called “wooden tree slaves,” as they would support his descendants.
Lines of frozen rain running down bamboo were known as “snake drool.”
Master Huang of Tung-hai had magical powers that could subdue tigers. But he drank too much, his power waned, and he was killed by a tiger.
Night herons were kept as pets, as they would cry out in case of fire.
No chickens were raised within the palace walls. The task of the Master of the Roosters was to announce the dawn.
On the seventh night of the seventh lunar month, it was the custom for women to leave seven needles threaded with silk in the moonlight.
One breaks a willow branch to show one’s longing for an absent relative.
People over ninety were thought to have skin that resembled that of a goldfish.
Po-lo saw a beautiful thoroughbred reduced to carrying bags of salt up a steep hill. He wept, and the horse neighed back, knowing that Po-lo had recognized its true worth.
Quercus dentata, the big-leaf oak, was known to be completely useless for any practical purpose.
Sold into the harem of Emperor Wen, Hsueh Ling-yun wept red tears. They were collected in a jar and coagulated like blood.
The Candle Dragon lit the places on earth that were so remote the sun couldn’t reach them.
The carving of insects was a common phrase for mediocre writing.
The Empress Hsu had a lover who was blind in one eye. When she knew that he would be coming to her quarters, she would only make up one side of her face.
The epitome of vulgarity was expressed in the phrase burning a lute to cook a crane.
The first emperor of the Wei dynasty had instructed that, after his death, his concubines were to live in his mausoleum, the Bronze Bird Tower. Twice a day they brought food and wine to his bed, and twice a month they sang and danced before it.
The giant osmanthus tree is on the moon. Wu Kang was sentenced to an eternity chopping it down, watching it grow, and chopping it down again.
The imperial carriage was decorated with the wings of kingfishers.
The locks on the palace doors were in the shape of fish, as fish never close their eyes and are considered watchful.
The orange day lily was a symbol of maternal love.
The peaches of the Queen Mother of the West took three thousand years to grow. One became immortal by eating them.
The rich ate bears’ paws; the poor ate frogs.
The severe floods of 813 were attributed to an excess of yin in the palace. To alleviate this, the emperor sent three hundred of his concubines home.
The student Ch’e Yin was so poor he couldn’t afford oil for his lamp. He gathered fireflies in a cloth bag so that he could study at night.
The verb beng was used formally for the death of an emperor and informally for a landslide.
The whitewash for interior walls in the palace was mixed with ground Sichuan peppercorns to create fragrance and a warmer colour.
“Think of your children” was a vine that grew wild in the mountains.
“Thousand-day wine” was so strong that drunkenness lasted for a thousand days.
To guard the chastity of the palace concubines, a paste—made from the bodies of salamanders who had been fed exclusively with cinnabar and had turned red—was applied to their skin. This left a stain that disappeared if a woman had sexual relations.
Tribute from Korea included “under the fruit” ponies, small enough for someone to ride under the low-hanging branches of fruit trees.
When the army of Chao surrendered to the Ch’in forces, four hundred thousand Chao soldiers were buried alive. A thousand years later, their relics were still being unearthed by farmers.
When the singer Ch’in Ch’ing sang, the clouds stopped moving so that they could listen.
When the singer Master Yu sang, the dust on the roof beams swirled.
While she was performing for a prince, a string on Fang Hsiao-lien’s pipa broke. She quickly invented new lyrics for her song: “If you want to know how broken my heart is, / look at this string on my lap.”
Will-o’-the-wisps over a woman’s tomb represent the candles she lit for a lover who never came.
Yellow was the colour of earth. Boatmen wore yellow hats so that the earth would tame the water.
ELIOT WEINBERGER’s most recent books are Angels & Saints and The Life of Tu Fu, both published by New Directions.