"May You Live in Interesting Times"

“May You Live in Interesting Times”

Supposedly, the above is an ancient Chinese curse.  Seems it’s a modern Brit invention, instead. 

I was perusing The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When,” by Ralph Keyes, St. Martin Griffin, 2006.  According to the entry on this quote, Robert F. Kennedy “put this mini-curse in modern play” when he used it in a 1966 speech in South Africa.  Journalists, especially Bennett Cerf, hopped onto it and spread it all over.

However, say the Quote Sleuths in this book, “nobody has ever been able to confirm its Chinese roots.”  Nobody has ever found a Chinese source for it, nor are Chinese natives familiar with it.  The first time they heard of it was when they came to America, and they then heard it in English as attributed to ancient China.

“Dr. Torrey Whitman,” the entry continues, “president of New York’s China Institute and a specialist in Chinese proverbs, has concluded that ‘May you live in interesting times’ did not originate in China.  Whitman thinks the saying was created by a Westerner, probably an American, who called the saying ‘Chinese’ to enhance its mystique.”

Then the entry tells the reader that, “Professor Stephen DeLong of the State University of New York has doggedly explored this saying’s provenance.  The earliest use DeLong has discovered is a 1950 story in Astounding Science Fiction that included this line: ‘For centuries the Chinese used an ancient curse: “May you live in interesting times.”’”

And that’s it, no author, title, or even month of issue follows.  A bit of shoddy scholarship, that.

So, I did the work that Ralph Keyes should have done.  He could have simply asked Dr. DeLong for more particulars.  I turned to Pulp Meister Arthur Lortie, of Taunton, Mass.  Arthur told me the story in question was “U-Turn,” by Duncan H. Munro, in the April, 1950 Astounding.  “Duncan H.Munro,” in turn, was a pseudonym for Eric Frank Russell, a British writer.  Professor DeLong probably wouldn’t have known that.

So there you have it.  Unless further research by the Quote Sleuths can turn up an earlier citation, it seems we have Brit Eric Frank Russell, mid-20th century, to thank for this “ancient Chinese curse”, which has so proliferated in the English language.