This is such beautiful ballad by Jay Chou from his new album 我很忙 (literally “I’m very busy”, but I heard it’s called “On the Run”). The song is called 蒲公英的约定 which means “the dandelion’s promise”. I really love it^_^ So here are the Chinese lyrics:
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成语：画龙点睛
发音：huà lóng diǎn jīng
解释：原形容梁代画家张僧繇作画的神妙。后多比喻写文章或讲话时，在关键处用几句话点明实质，使内容生动有力。
翻译：to add the crowning touch
Here we have another Chengyu just like 千里送鹅毛 which has to do with an animal and which is easy to understand from the first sight. Watch out for the structure, it is verb-noun-verb-noun, which we encounter often. 画龙 means painting a dragon. And 点睛 means adding eyes to it. So in this case 点 does not mean “point” but is a verb instead. Literally translated 画龙点睛 means “painting a dragon and adding the eyes”.
The Chengyu originates from a great painter named zhāng sēng yāo (张僧繇) whom many people were watching while he was painting dragons at a temple. The dragons were very beautiful, only were they missing eyes. So the surrounding people curiously asked: “Why don’t they have eyes?” He mysteriously answered, that if they have eyes, they will fly away! Since everyone just regarded him in disbelief, he lifted his hands again and added a pair of eyes. In this moment that dragon… whuushhh…. indeed became alive, and flew away!! (Magic….) and all the people were stupefied.
This is the origin of the idiom 画龙点睛. It is used to describe that by adding only a tiny little detail, the whole work becomes much better and lively. Just like the dragon who became alive. In German you would see “das Sahnehäubchen” or “das gewisse Etwas”. In English there is a similar saying: “do add the crowning touch”. Often this Chengyu is used to describe, of course painting, but also essays and literature work, speeches, decoration and more and more.
For example:
Another beautiful old song by Jay Chou from his album from 2005: November’s Chopin (11月的萧邦) The song 发如雪 (fā rú xuě) means “hair like snow” and reminds me a bit of his new song 青花瓷. Hm, it’s a bit hard to imagine for me how black hair can be like snow… but well, the music video is really awesome. It was of course directed by Jay himself and it has many historic scenes with a very beautiful girl in a red dress ;-) And for all Chinese learners, have fun pronouncing the 啦儿啦 啦儿啦 啦儿啦儿啦 (Lar lar lar lar…)
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成语：千里送鹅毛
拼音：qiān lǐ sòng é máo
解释：比喻礼物虽轻，但情意深厚
A not so known, but still very straightforward Chengyu where it helps to know the story behind it. Literally translated it means to bring a swan feather over 1000 miles as a present. 里 (Li) is an old Chinese unit of length that corresponds to 500 m.
The Chengyu story behind it is that during the Tang dynasty many people bought valuable presents from far away to the emperor. So there happened to be one man from a very remote region who wanted to present a very beautiful white swan to the emperor. During the long trip the swan got quite dirty, so when he arrived at a lake, he took the swan out of the cage so that it could…eh… take a bath. But to his big anger the swan flew away!!! (What a surprise…) So after a phase of despair he picked up a few left feathers and decided to see the emperor anyway. At the palace he felt quite uncomfortable among all the other visitors with big presents. When it was his turn he said 礼轻情意重，千里送鹅毛 which means that my present is little but my sympathy is grand, this is why I am bring you this feather from so far away. To his fortune the emperor forgave him and even had to laugh at his cleverness.
So this Chinese idiom is used to describe that even though a present looks small, the effort and the sentiments behind it where big.
Related or not so related posts:A friend just showed me this song by 张震岳 (zhāng zhèn yuè) named 再见 (Goodbye). It talks about saying goodbye and the whole procedure, not wanting to go, all the memories, the tears, and stuff like that :) By the way it was also this singer who sang the original version of 爱我别走 (Love me, don’t leave me). Now here are the Chinese lyrics for Goooodbye:
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When I was in Hongkong, it gave me the feel of being in a completely different country. They have a different language, different character set, different currency, different TV channels, different outlets, and they drive on the left! After 1997 Hongkong became a special administrative region of the PRC. With a population of “only” over 6 million inhabitants it still feels very very crowded due to an extreme density of over 6000/km².
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Guilin is a very beautiful medium sized city (population ~1 million) situated in Southern China in Guangxi, the Zhuang Autonomous Region. The Li River (漓江) passes Guilin and a very beautiful natural landscape surrounds it. No wonder there is the proverb 桂林山水甲天下 (guì lín shān shuǐ jiǎ tiān xià) which means that the mountains and the water, read the landscape, of Guilin are the best on earth. Thus it is a very popular destination for foreign tourists and you will easily see many foreigners in the city, which is not so common for medium sized cities in China. From the city you can already see the beautiful surrounding mountains which remind you of those ancient Chinese paintings with mountains and rivers. Furthermore Guilin has many ethnic groups, especially the Zhuang (壮族).
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The biggest city in China with more than 31 million people! It is one of the four municipalities that don’t belong to a province, apart from Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. It is also one of the hottest cities in China. With its location in the center of China far away from the seaside it can get as hot as 40°C in summer.
The Chongqing dialect is similar to Sichuan dialect. It is also quite hard to understand, mostly because their intonation of the words is very different from mandarin. That is also why Sichuan dialect sounds a bit like singing to me (but that’s just me) and it is very nice to listen too…
The people in Sichuan are known for their spicy food. Famous for Chongqing is its Chongqing Hotpot (重庆火锅, zhòng qìng huǒ guō). A hot pot is where you have a pot with usually red spicy boiling water in the middle of the table, and then you cook all kinds of meat, sea food and vegetables in there. But pay attention, it is extremely spicy!
As I mentioned Chongqing is the biggest city in China. So this is what buying a train ticket would look like over there…
Let’s better not have to stand in line there…
