A Useful Chengyu - Hébù Shí Ròumí 何不食肉糜

**Laszlo Montgomery** (0:00)
Hello again, all ChengYu lovers all over the world. Laszlo Montgomery here with another worthy addition to the ever-expanding Chinese Sayings Podcast. This is the second one I've done since I started to revive the CSP and just record them as the inspiration, ebbs and flows. I was in Svayring, Cambodia last week. Well, last week as I record this, consulting to a China factory boss who has a nice size footprint there, manufacturing and exporting to the US market. Now, in the course of our chit-chatting during one evening at this Cambodian version of a Korean barbecue, he used this chung-yu in response to something I said about how governments often ignore the poor and the working poor. So he replied with this chung-yu that we're going to look at today. And it goes, He bu shi rou mi. Five characters, five syllables, one more than we normally see. But sometimes you have to be flexible and allow for that extra syllable to drive the point home. So let's do the usual and break this chung-yu down character by character. He bu shi rou mi. He, well, aside from being one heck of a common surname, in its literary form, combined with the character bu means why not. He bu, why not? And the character shi as a verb means to eat. And the last two characters, rou mi, that's a kind of a minced meat porridge. That's quite a delicacy compared to, you know, the normal rice porridge or xi fan that would be consumed by the masses. And we paste it all together and we get Why not eat meat porridge? He bu shi rou mi. This is one of those cheng yu's that doesn't seem to mean anything unless you know the backstory. And that's what we're going to look at right now. This Chinese saying goes back more than 17 centuries to the time of the Jin Dynasty. All three kingdoms' lovers remember the Sima's. They were the aristocratic family whose most famous figure, Sima Yi, had achieved high rank reporting to the Cao's and the Kingdom of Wei. Sima Yi became a formidable military man in the kingdom and later a regent to the Cao Wei kid rulers. Now following Sima Yi's death in 251, his sons Sima Shi and Sima Zhao, well, they outmaneuvered the declining Wei rulers of the Cao family. And in short order, these emperors became no more than figureheads. Finally, in 265, we're in the Common Era, Sima Zhao's son, the famous Sima Yan, he went and usurped the Wei throne and proclaimed the founding of the Jin Dynasty. And we remember him as Emperor Wu of Jin. His Jin Dynasty in its western and eastern parts ran from 266 to 420 And the Jin capital was at first in Luoyang, then to Chang'an, and after they got chased out of there, it moved to the south side of the Yangtze River to Jiankang, today's city of Nanjing. And by 280, the Jin armies, early in the western Jin, they put the eastern Wu away, and with the last of the three kingdoms vanquished, finally, after 60 years, China was once again unified. And the extended Sima clan, they began to take on a bit of a fall odor following the death of the founding emperor Sima Yan. Yeah, it happens. I mean, he had gone and done the same careless thing that the Zhou dynasty kings had done, distributing princely titles and handing out large fiefdoms to his numerous relatives. He thought this, in theory at least, would shore up the dynasty and that he'd be able to better maintain control out in the provinces. But despite his best intentions, all he did was plant a few seeds that would bear fruit later on in the form of internal division. Meanwhile, in the Jin capital, the government was run by a number of aristocratic families with good bloodlines. And to the last one, they were masterful at scheming, but not too good at managing the bureaucracy. And it probably won't come as any surprise, because nothing much has changed since then. A kind of social order was constructed, whereby the fat of the land was only enjoyed by those elite clans who had the benefit of easy access to the royal palace. Now, China may have been unified, but in the late third, early fourth century, northern China in particular was rife with famine and banditry and natural disasters. And nomadic tribesmen were constantly probing south, looking for opportunities for some quick scores. And like it is today, someone had to carry that unbearable burden on their back and the common people, well, aside from carrying that load, were taxed to death and at wits end, what to do next? Then in 290, Sima Yan, Emperor Wu, well, he up and died, leaving the throne to his eldest son, Sima Zhong, posthumously known as Emperor Hui of Jin. The Book of Jin, the Jin Shu, portrayed Emperor Hui as utterly lacking in intelligence, slow to respond in conversation and unable to grasp complex matters. Some anecdotes suggest he also was easy to manipulate. And his manipulator-in-chief was one of China's great villainesses, his wife, Empress Jia Nanfang. She was the daughter of the powerful official Jia Chong, who some of you may remember from an old, old CSP episode, Muren Shi Xin. Well, Empress Jia, using her husband's authority and all the perks and power that came from the emperor ship, strong-armed other members of the Sima imperial clan. And for every slot in the government that she was able to open up, she filled it with relatives from her Jia clan. And all this rancor led to what became known as the Bawang Zhe Luan, the War of the Eight Princes. It was a decade and a half of protracted wars among a gaggle of Sima princes, all vying for the top leadership spot. And as you can imagine, this did nothing to ameliorate the sorry state of the peasantry. So with this civil war going on in the background, things in the countryside went from bad to worse. And to make matters even more miserable than they already were, greater numbers of non-Han Chinese nomadic tribes, often referred to as the Wu Hu Five Barbarians, went on the rampage all over North China. And this, of course, ultimately contributed to the collapse of Jin authority in the North. And if you recall from that other CSP episode, Go Wei Xu Diao, one of my personal favorites, there were a whole lot of Sima's all trying to seize the throne. These were, in no particular order, Sima Liang, Sima Wei, Sima Lun, Sima Yong, and Sima Zhong. These conniving Sima's were all allying and plotting against each other to bring down Empress Jia, and proving, Jimmy Cliff correct, that you can get it if you really want. In the year 300, they were able to get rid of her. And with that, the Jin Empire descended into complete chaos. The War of the Eight Princes went into overdrive, and as a result, entire provinces were burned and plundered, and civilians were massacred, and famine spread farther and wider across the land. And the hapless Emperor Hui remained at the center of the storm, becoming an unwitting pawn, passed around from one faction to another, oblivious at all times to all that was happening around him. Well, if you're wondering where's the beef already, well, now we come to the part of the Book of Jin, and later on in the Northern Song Dynasty, in the Zizhi Tongjian, when one of Emperor Hui's court officials informed him that the peasant masses were starving out in the countryside and hadn't any grain to eat, and were perishing in great numbers. And the Emperor replied, He bu shi rou mi? Why do they not eat meat porridge? Seriously? You know, when Marie Antoinette allegedly said, Qu'il mange de la brioche. She never lived that one down, even though she never said it. Let them eat cake. Well, Emperor Hui, who preceded Marie Antoinette by some fourteen and a half centuries, he couldn't have possibly been more insensitive to what was going on. No grain to eat, no rice, wheat, millet or anything to consume. So in saying, He bu shi rou mi, why not eat meat porridge? Well, this kind of reasoning sort of encapsulates the total obliviousness a ruler has of the deprivation of their subjects. This was an expression of sheer elite callousness.