Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Qianlong Emperor and the Widow - Sequel

In my blog - Qianlong Emperor and the Widow, 8 December, 2009, Qianlong Emperor was not able to complete a couplet as set out by the widow when he tried to ask for an overnight stay in the widow's house. He had to reluctantly leave and seek accommodation elsewhere.
That night, Qianlong Emperor felt extremely unsatisfied with his inability to complete the couplet and could not get into sleep. He was still thinking about the upper half of the couplet:

寂寞守寒窗 寡室寧容賓客寓

No matter how hard he tried, he was nowhere near success to complete it. Instead, he thought he managed to produce a perfect couplet based on this upper half.
So early next morning, Qianlong Emperor went back to the widow's house again, and presented to the widow the following couplet:

寂寞寒窗空守寡

俊俏佳人伴伶仃

The couplet is considered as perfect as, apart from the sentence matching, it has a same but different radical in each word in the upper and lower halves. The couplet can be translated as follows:

'In this lonely and tiny unit as a widow,
a beautiful fair has companies little.'

My story stops here as I don't know how the widow would react, nor whether Qianlong Emperor would take the widow back to his palace as one of his queens. Readers, you may use your own imagination to provide an ending to this story as you desire.

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