Written Discourse

Chinese Culture（中华文化） was a compulsary course in my secondary school, hence I have had some experience with Chinese literature text. I still remember how I completely failed to grasp some of the analogies back then, sometimes even after my teacher has explained them. The Zhou Dun Yi prose was one which we were taught. The original prose （原文）was a total mystery to me with its ancient sentence structures. Even after we were shown the 译文, I thought he was just simply talking about flowers, until my teacher explained to us what he truly meant.

One of my favourite piece of Chinese writing encountered during the class then was a simple poem by 曹植 (Cao Zhi) who composed the poem under duress in 7 steps when his brother threatened to kill him if he failed to do so, hence it's known as 《七步诗》(Seven Steps Poem).

煮豆燃豆萁，
豆在釜中泣。
本是同根生，
相煎何太急。

To translate the poem, it simply means :
When cooking beans, one would burn the beanstalks. The beans are wailing in the pot. Since they grow from the same roots, why is it that they are so eager to kill each other?

I love this poem because of the simple analogy it used to convey the deeper message that as brothers, they should not be out to kill each other. And it worked brilliantly, because his ruthless brother actually spared his life, moved upon hearing the poem.

If I'm not mistaken, this piece of writing follows the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure talked about during the lesson.

曹植 was indeed a brilliant man of his time.