The whole point of writing down history is to make it easy to find the patterns in human interaction, Spandrell reminds us:
As I often say, all things considered, the best historical tradition in the world is that of China. The imperial government has put lots of people and resources into writing history there for 3,000 thousand years. And one of the results of this emphasis is that they have left a lot of interesting stories about important patterns in political history, often in the form of neat 4-letter idioms.
By making them into tiny and neat idioms, you make them much more accessible to the public’s memory. Which is why any decently educated Chinese knows what zhi lu wei ma means.
Letter by letter it is “point deer make horse”. It tells the story of Zhao Gao, one of the closest ministers of the First Emperor of Qin. The Qin Emperor died in 210 BC, and soon after the Chen Sheng rebellion (another good example of history as a mirror for government) started, which in a few years destroyed the first empire that the Qin house had spent centuries to achieve.
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So Zhao Gao brings a deer into the palace. Grabs it by the horns, calls the emperor to come out, and says, “Look, your majesty, I brought you a fine horse.” The Emperor, not amused, says, “Surely you are mistaken, calling a deer a horse, right?” Then the emperor looks around at all the ministers. Some didn’t say a word, just sweating nervously. Some others loudly proclaimed what a fine horse this was. Great horse. Look at this tail! These fine legs. Great horse, naturally prime minister Zhao Gao has the best of tastes.
A small bunch did protest that this was a deer, not a horse. Those were soon after summarily executed. And the Second Emperor himself was murdered some time later.
This story made it into the Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, around 100 BC, through which it became part of common knowledge for Chinese intellectual life. From then on, every time somebody tried to pull off a similar stunt, opposing ministers could say “you’re trying to say a deer is a horse, huh,” which could get other lukewarm ministers to wake up and support you. Or get you killed with your whole family.
In the West of course we have Hans Christen Andersen’s tale about the kid and the emperor’s new clothes. The funny part is it’s fiction. And the story is just about a child, who having a pure heart, dares to say the truth against the powerful. The moral is that we should be ashamed of ourselves and aspire to be as virtuous as this child. But of course in reality this child would have been arrested and executed, alongside his parents. Which is obviously why nobody tells the king about his new clothes. They’re not stupid.
This says a lot about Western sensibilities.
And the follow up: The cause of absurdity.