One Written Word is Worth A Thousand Pieces of Gold

History 190
11/17/05

“One Written Word is Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold” – “yi zi qian jing”



When the Merchant Lu published the essays of his sponsored scholars, titled Spring and Autumn Annals of the House of Lu, he hung a thousand pieces of gold above the publicly displayed tablet pages declaring that anyone who could improve the work by adding or removing a single word would be so rewarded. Nobody dared suggest any changes. This incident took place around 250 B.C.E, and reflects a Chinese cultural attitude about the power and value of the written word. The phrase “yi zi qian jing,” or “one written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,” has become a Chinese proverb used to describe any work of literary merit.1

The written Chinese language was standardized as China was united under the first Qin emperor and has remained very true to its ancient forms. Pronunciations vary from place to place but the characters are universal to the Chinese mind. The driving Confucian force of education, usually involving reading classic texts, furthers this cultural expression of the power of the written word. Students study Confucius’s Analects, Sun Tsu’s Art of War, Lao-Tse’s Tao Te Ching, and other texts. More than one tomb has been opened and found home to beautiful scroll-painted copies of classic texts. Despite certain political periods in which many books were seen as dangerous by the imperial power and ordered destroyed, copies of these classic texts can still be purchased in any myriad of translations.

Lao-Tse’s Tao Te Ching remains one of the world’s most-translated, most-distributed books, ranking up with the christian Bible. It is interesting to read this ancient Chinese classic, restored from the original characters carved onto bamboo, with the proverb “yi zi qian jing,” in mind. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching read something like “the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant way; the name that can be named is not the constant name.”2 Lao-Tsu believed that the “way” could not be put into words, because words were finite and subjective; any word that tried called preconceived notions to mind, and ruined perception of the “way” as it really was.

Other chapters in the Tao Te Ching reflect a disdain for frivolous use of language. “Wise men don’t speak,” says one of the chapters; Lao-Tse did not mean that they didn’t speak parsay, just not frivolously. Legend has it that he was a court librarian who left finally for a life in the woods. One of the guards saw him leaving and noticed he was a holy man, and asked him for his wisdom; the things he told the guard were later compiled into the Tao-Te-Ching. While he can’t truly describe the “way” with a word, he does manage to talk around it eloquently enough for the understanding of a western mind, thousands of years later.

Maybe it is the continuity within the language, but China is the only one of the great civilizations to have survived fairly intact into the modern day. Since the first emperor of Qin standardized the language, it has remained fairly constant. When new words were needed, new characters would be created – old characters were constant. Anyone who can read modern Chinese can read ancient texts without too much difficulty.

There are extensive historical records, too, because of the way that writing was valued within the culture. For example, Sima Qian’s Shiji, an account of the warring states period, before the unification of China under Qin. Sima Qian earned the emperor’s attention and displeasure when he stood up for Li Ling, an critic of the emperor’s, in court. He was thrown in jail. Later he was accused by the emperor of deceit and sentenced to death. He couldn’t pay the steep fine offered in exchange for his life, but could submit to total castration in exchange for the right to continue living. Sima Qian chose to become a eunuch so that he could finish writing Shiji, his history, his life’s ambition. The completion of his work was so important to him that he called the cost as insignificant as “the loss of one hair from nine oxen,” in a letter (c.93 B.C.E.) to his friend Ren An, a Chinese governor.3 This book, when released, became a cultural classic of China and the model on which future histories were written.

In A Thousand Pieces of Gold the author retells a little her grandfather’s story. “…when he was a boy growing up in Shanghai he saw… large red boxes placed at major street corners. Each had… four gilded characters written on it…’jing xi zi zhi,’ or ‘respect and cherish words.’”4 Men with bamboo poles would collect all of the trash on the ground with written words on it at a great expenditure of energy for the Confucian paper burning ritual at the temple. Candidates who had passed the imperial examinations could attend this ritual to give worship to Heaven until all the paper had turned to ashes. There were boxes on the way out for donations; each was labeled with the famous proverb, “yi zi qian jing,” or “one written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold.”

Another example of the Chinese reverence for the written word is the practice and art of calligraphy. The art of writing characters is considered the a priori art in China. It is considered to “come before” other arts and strongly influence them, especially painting and swordplay. Many Chinese hang scrolls of beautiful calligraphy on their walls and admire them as one would admire a Monet print. It is common in American open-air marketplaces or “Chinatowns” (for example, in San Francisco) to find a Chinese calligraphy artist who will write your name or whatever you like in lovely flowing script. It won’t even cost you a thousand pieces of gold; and that fact won’t change its worth. In English we have a saying “words are cheap,” but this statement applies to itself. When someone creates a work of literary art that changes the cultural consciousness in the western world (Shakespeare et. al.), we call it a “masterpiece” or a “chef d’ouvre” but in China they would say of it that “one word is worth a thousand pieces of gold.”