Welcome back again, everyone, to another season of the Chinese sings podcast.

L'Ozile Montgomery here with the season 8 opener, and did I ever pick out a good one for you?

You know, back in 1979, when I began studying Chinese, the teacher told us about these

Suitsichungu, four character Chungu, or idioms. How could I have known back then what she was talking

about? She explained it like slang expressions that only had four characters.

I took one or two years of Chinese study before I started to learn more about these Chungu phrases,

and while most of them were four characters, some were five, six, or more characters,

depending on the story. When I first got started with my self-study of these Chinese sayings,

I did so with a book I purchased in Taipei, probably at Caves Books, during the summer of 1980.

When I bought this book called Mei Ritsu, which means the word of the day,

and the very first story in this book that I studied, character by character, is the Chungu for today.

And the story behind this saying is one of the most repeated tales from all of ancient Chinese history,

and it comes to us straight from the records of the grand historian and concerns the story of

Master Lu Buwei. And when you hear that name, it's a given that the story behind today's Chinese

saying, Yi Zichin-jin, concerns the life of China's first emperor, Qin Shuhuang, or as he was

known before then, Ying Zheng. Before we retell this great story from the chapter of the record of

the grand historian called Lu Buwei Lie Chuan, the biography of Lu Buwei, let's first review the

four characters behind Yi Zichin-jin. Yi means the number one, and eight zi is a Chinese character.

Qian means a thousand, and Jin means gold. Real simple, this one is one character, a thousand gold.

And for the backstory behind these four syllables that don't appear to mean anything,

let's get right into the story. At the end of the warring states period and a relatively

insignificant state called Wei, they lived a wealthy merchant named Lu Buwei. Now this is the

...