A Useful Chengyu - Hébù Shí Ròumí 何不食肉糜

The China History Podcast

Laszlo Montgomery

Places & Travel, Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This morning, in between recording sessions, I checked out what was headlining on Drudge. And right there was the leading story, "Let Them Eat Steak." You can imagine what the piece was about. This made me think, what a perfect time to post this Chinese Saying podcast episode. I released this one on Patreon and CHP Premium a while back. It's more or less the Chinese version of this Drudge headline.

I know, I know, a lot of you, because you don't speak Chinese, despite how you feel about me, never give this Chinese Sayings Podcast a chance. The thing about these "chengyu" Chinese idioms or proverbs, whether you remember them or not, is that they all have interesting and amusing stories that are all rooted in ancient or classical Chinese history. It's true that if you are a Mandarin speaker, you might appreciate these idioms more. But give it a chance and see if you like it.

This one here, 何不食肉糜 Hébù Shí Ròumí, is regretfully a Chinese Saying that never goes out of style. This one is kind of China's version of Marie Antoinette's famous words never spoken, "Let them eat cake." This is a good one from the late 2nd to early 3rd century. And you can still use it in 2025. And being a betting man, it will most likely work well in 2026 too! Enjoy!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello again, all Chung Yu lovers all over the world.
0:03.1	Laslo Montgomery here with another worthy addition to the ever-expanding Chinese Sangs podcast.
0:10.4	This is the second one I've done since I started to revive the CSP and, you know, just record them as the inspiration ebbs and flows.
0:19.4	I was in Sviring Cambodia last week. Well, last week as I record this,
0:24.7	consulting to a China factory boss who was a nice size footprint there, manufacturing and exporting
0:31.3	to the U.S. market. Now, in the course of our chit-chatting during one evening at this Cambodian
0:36.7	version of a Korean barbecue,
0:39.0	he used this Chung Yu in response to something I said about how governments often ignore the poor and the working poor.
0:46.3	So he replied with this chung Yu that we're going to look at today.
0:49.5	And it goes,
0:51.3	Hebushur-Romi. Five characters, five syllables.
0:56.0	Well, one more than we normally see, but sometimes you have to be flexible and allow for that extra-syllable to drive the point home.
1:03.0	So let's do the usual, and break this chung you down, character by character.
1:08.0	He-bu-sh shir ro-me,
1:16.0	well, aside from being one heck of a common surname, in its literary form,
1:20.0	combined with the character, bu, means why not?
1:21.7	He-bu, why not?
1:25.6	And the character, shir, is a verb, means to eat.
1:28.5	And the last two characters, ro meat.
1:32.0	That's a kind of a minced meat porridge.
1:39.8	That's quite a delicacy compared to, you know, the normal rice porridge or si fan that would be consumed by the masses.
1:45.4	And we paste it all together and we get, why not eat meat porridge?
	...

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