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Ts'ao Sung Quotes

Ts'ao Sung was a Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty.

✵ 830 – 901
Ts'ao Sung: 2   quotes 0   likes

Ts'ao Sung Quotes

“The hills and rivers of the lowland country
You have made your battle ground.
How do you suppose the people who live there
Will procure firewood and hay?
Do not let me hear you talking together
About titles and promotions;
For a single general’s reputation
Is made out of ten thousand corpses.”

Ts'ao Sung

As translated by Arthur Waley in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42290/42290-h/42290-h.htm (London: Constable & Co., Ltd., 1918)
Variant translations:
Rich hills and fields that war despoiled.
Their people how could they live?
Sing me no more of epics—some Man gained
Eternal fame on skeletons.
Shi ci yi xuan: Poems from China (1950), p. 35
A Protest in the Sixth Year of Qianfu (A.D. 879)

People , Country

“For already I have learned, that a general's fame
stands on a pile of dry bones
Of what were once the people.”

Ts'ao Sung

Tsao Sung, War. In: Yu Kuan-ying (1954) "Book Review Peace Throwgh the Ages" in People's China, (1954) nr 14. July 16, 1954.-->

People , Learning