Timely Snow
Beijing is having its first snow of the season and I can hear students outside, even though it’s night, making a ruckus and acting like very young children.
The name of this website comes from the Chinese expression in the banner: 瑞雪兆丰年—ruxuě zho fēngnin—or “timely snow predicts an abundant year” (i.e., a good harvest).
I was struck by the word 瑞雪—ruxuě—which is also the name for a plant used in Chinese medicine, because “timely snow” seemed like a strange and ad-hoc word for a language to have. It reminded me somewhat of the Juan Luis Borges essay, The analytical language of John Wilkins , which includes this passage:
These ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies remind us of those which doctor Franz Kuhn attributes to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its remote pages it is written that the animals are divided into
1. belonging to the Emperor
2. embalmed
3. trained
4. pigs
5. sirens
6. fabulous
7. stray dogs
8. included in this classification
9. trembling like crazy
10. innumerable
11. drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
12. et cetera
13. just broke the vase
14. from a distance look like flies
The whole essay (not very long) is more interesting than I remember it being, describing the necessity and futility of any numbering or categorizational scheme.