The origin of "I wonder if the East is white"?

It comes from the last paragraph of a poem "Qian Chi Bi Fu" by Su Shi, a writer in the Northern Song Dynasty. The whole paragraph is as follows: guests are happy and it is more appropriate to wash the lights. All the vegetables and fruits have been eaten, leaving only the cups on the table in a mess. Sleeping on the boat, hugging each other, I know the horizon has turned white.

Interpretation of vernacular Chinese: So the companion smiled happily, wiped the cup clean and filled it with wine. All the vegetables and fruits have been eaten, except the cups and plates on the table. Perilla and her companions slept on each other's pillows on the boat, and before they knew it, it was already white.

After listening to the author's dialogue, the writer turned grief into joy and drank heartily. "Pillow in the boat, I don't know Oriental White." After reading the beginning, I wrote about the happiness of traveling and enjoying. As for forgetting my gains and losses, it is a realm of detachment.

Extended data

Creation background: The Red Wall Fu was created during Su Shi's relegation to Huangzhou, which was one of the most difficult periods in his life. In the fifth year of Yuanfeng (1082), Su Shi visited Chibi twice on July 16 and 10/5, and wrote two poems in Chibi. Later generations called the first poem "Pre-Chibi Fu" and the second poem "Post-Chibi Fu".

This poem describes what the author and his friends saw and felt when they went boating in Chibi on a moonlit night. Taking the author's subjective feelings as a clue, through the form of subject-object question and answer, it reflects the author's liberation from boating on a moonlit night to drawing lessons from a painful experience and then to philosophy. Quan Fu embodies its unique artistic conception in layout and structural arrangement, with profound emotions and profound implications, and has a high literary status in China literature.

In the first paragraph of Fu, it is written about a night trip to Chibi. The author, a boater under the Red Cliff, plunged into the embrace of nature and enjoyed the beauty of cool breeze, dew, mountains, running water, moonlight and skylight.

In the second paragraph, the writer's drinking and singing joy and the guest's sad flute sound. The author is extremely happy to drink and sing to express his disappointment and frustration in thinking about "beauty". The "beauty" mentioned here is actually the embodiment of the author's ideal and all the beautiful things.

In the third paragraph, write the guest's sigh about the impermanence of life. This part is endowed with historical sites, not the natural scenery of Chibi. The host asked "what is nature", and the guests answered with the monuments of Chibi, and the arts and sciences turned to nature. In the fourth paragraph, Su Shi stated his views on the impermanence of the guest students in order to understand each other.

Whether lyrical or argumentative, the full text never leaves the scenery on the river and the story of Chibi, forming a fusion of emotion, scenery and reason. From beginning to end, the scenery runs through, with romantic scenery as the main factor, supplemented by mountains and rivers. The author describes and discusses the wind and the moon.

The article is divided into three layers to express the author's complex and contradictory inner world: first, writing about boating on the river on a moonlit night, drinking wine and writing poems, so that people are immersed in the beautiful scenery and forget the secular happy mood; From the rise and fall of historical figures, I feel that life is short, so I fall into the depression of reality; Finally, the philosophy of change and invariance is expounded, which shows that human beings and everything exist forever and show an optimistic attitude towards life.