"Ascending Stork Tower" Classical Chinese Poem | Learn Chinese Now

We teach you the Classical Chinese Poem "Ascending Stork Tower."

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hi everyone and welcome to learn chinese
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today we're going to look at another
famous classical Chinese poem "ascending

stork Tower. this is a Tang dynasty
poem written by the poet Wang Zhihuan

in the early 8th century in the regulated
verse style, that is the type of poetry

that was popular in the Tang dynasty
where every line has the same number of

characters, most commonly five, the poems
are written in couplets and the length

is set to 4 8 or unlimited lines if it
goes beyond 8. there were also some

poems of six but less common. the
arrangement of the characters with

certain tones is also regulated to a
specific pattern although a lot of this

has been lost when the poems are read in
modern Mandarin Chinese, since the tones

have changed since the Tang dynasty.
Cantonese pronunciation is closer to the

original but not exactly the same. so
first let's read the poem: Deng guan que

lou
Bai ri yi shan jin
Huang he ru hai liu
Yu qiong qian li mu

Geng shang yi ceng lou
So let's take a look at the
first line: Bai ri yi shan jin. So the first

line reads: "bai ri" the white Sun, "yi" to
rest on, "shan" mountain, "jin" to reach the

end of or to be used up. So this
can be thought of as the white Sun reaches

its end resting on the mountains. the
sunsets resting on the mountains. the

character jin is used a lot in classical
Chinese and takes some getting used to.

in this context since it is related to
the Sun it means the Sun sets. "Huang he

ru hai liu": "huang he" means the
Yellow River - one of the two major rivers

in China together with the Yangtze River.
the Yellow River got its name because of

the yellow sediment that gives it its
color

"Ru" means to enter, "hai" is the sea and
"liu" means to flow, so we can translate

this as the yellow river flows into the
sea. so the first two lines are kind of

describing what the author can see. the
last two lines are more connected together:

in order to achieve this, I will do that.
Yu qiong qian li mu. "Yu" means to

desire, "qiong" is another character that
is similar to "jin", in this context it

means to go to the limits of.

"Qian li" is 1000 li - a chinese unit of
measurement, equal to about half a

kilometer in modern terms

although its length has changed
throughout history and in the Tang

dynasty is equal to maybe a bit over 300
meters. "Mu" means eye or eyes, so the whole

line reads to go to the limit of 1000
li eyes. this line doesn't translate so

well into English but you can think of
it as the poet desires to see as far as

he can. so, "geng shang

yi ceng lou", "geng" means further, pretty much
the same meaning as in modern Chinese

"shang"- to ascend, to go up

"yi" is one, "ceng" means level or storey, "lou" is
pagoda. so i ascend one more level of the

Pagoda and that pagoda is stork tower,
that is in the title: ascending stork

tower. Stork tower is a pagoda built in
Shanxi province in the northern and

southern dynasties period by a northern Zhou
dynasty general called Yu Wenhu. it

served as a lookout post for the
military and because of storks nesting

in the structure it end up being called
Stork tower, the tower overlooked to the

Yellow river and was three stories high

The original tower was destroyed by a
fire during a battle in the Yuan dynasty

and because the Yellow River changed its
course in the Ming Dynasty the original

position of the tower is hard to
determine. but in shaanxi province they

have now built a new stork tower as a
tourist attraction

the building was opened in 2002
I hope you guys enjoyed that classical

Chinese poem. would you like more of these?
let us know in the comments below. this

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I had been punched in the stomach

you remember after that, right? to
put this in a little sentence to say

you're hungry you can say