A Useful Chengyu - Hébù Shí Ròumí 何不食肉糜

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In a way, the story behind this Chinese Saying conveys a lesson. When rulers forget the basic needs of the people, catastrophe follows. And when the dam broke in the early 4th century and the Jin Dynasty royal family and all their aristocratic hangers on got chased out of the capital, it marked the end of the Western Jin and the start of the Eastern Jin.”

“Okay, next time you see your king, prime minister, president, or high up officials living high on the hog making comments that suggest to the people to just suck it up and tighten the belts one more notch, remember, why not eat meat?”