Because of the rush to copy Zuo Si’s “Sandu Fu”, the price of paper in Luoyang rose so high. It describes the writing of articles and writings that are valuable, widely circulated and popular for a while.
Idiom Pronunciation:
洛阳纸贵
luò yáng zhǐ guì
Origin:
唐·房玄龄等《晋书·左思传》：及赋成，时人未之重。司空张华见而叹曰：“班、张之流也。使读之者尽而有余，久而更新。”于是豪贵之家竞相传写，洛阳为之纸贵。
Story:
Zuo Si, a famous literary scholar of the Jin Dynasty, was naughty and unreadable as a child, and with his short stature, ugly appearance and stammering speech, his father Zuo Yong looked down on him and often said to outsiders, “I regret having such a son.”
One day, Zuo Yong and his friends chatted about Zuo Si, Zuo Yong sighed and said, “Don’t mention him, although my son Zuo Si is almost an adult, but the knowledge he has is not as good as I had when I was a child. It seems that ah, he really does not have a lot of future. Hey!” After saying that, his face showed a disappointed expression. When Zuo Si knew this, he was very sad and was not willing to be despised. So, he began to study furiously.
As a result of Zuo Si’s persistent and indignant study, he finally became a learned man and a very good writer. When he read the “Two Capital Fugue” written by Ban Gu of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the “Two Capital Fugue” written by Zhang Heng, although he admired the grand ambition and magnificent words in the articles, which also wrote about the capital city of Tokyo Luoyang and the western capital Chang’an, he felt that the articles were a bit vague but not real. So he decided to write a “Three Capitals Fugue” based on the facts and historical development, including Yecheng, the capital of Wei, Chengdu, the capital of Shu, and Nanjing, the capital of Wu during the Three Kingdoms.
In order to write the “Three Capitals Fugue”, Zuo Si visited experts and collected a lot of information on history, geography, products, customs and people, and also went to Shu, Wu and Wei capitals to do field investigation, which is really called “reading ten thousand volumes of books and traveling ten thousand miles”. He shut himself up in a room covered with books and papers, and often took a long time to come up with a satisfactory sentence. It took ten years of hard work, but Zuo Si’s “Sandu Fu” was finally written!
However, when Zuo Si showed his essay to others, he was ridiculed. A famous literary scholar at that time, Lu Ji, also had the idea of writing “Sandu Fu”. When he heard that the unknown Zuo Si had written “Sandu Fu”, he sarcastically said, “A kid who doesn’t know the sky is high, how dare he try to surpass Ban Gu and Zhang Heng, he is too insolent!” He also wrote to his younger brother, Lu Yun, “There is an arrogant guy in the capital who wrote the Sandu Fu.
However, Zuo Si was not willing to have his heart and soul buried, so he found the famous literary scholar Zhang Hua. Zhang Hua first read the “Sandu Fu” sentence by sentence, then asked Zuo Si about his creation, and when he came back to read it again, the more he read it, the more he loved it and praised it again and again: “The article is very good! Those worldly literati only value fame, not articles, don’t take their words to heart.”
Huangfu Jing, who was very famous at that time, read the “Sandu Fu” and wrote the preface with his own pen. Soon, “Sandu Fu” became popular in Kyoto, and even Lu Ji, who had previously ridiculed Zuo Si, heard about it and read it carefully, adding that he would definitely not surpass Zuo Si in writing “Sandu Fu” and stopped writing it.
Later, people who love “Sandu Fu” copied down by hand to read, copying people are too many, the capital city of Luoyang paper supply can not meet the needs of people, a time the city paper prices rose sharply, this is the story of “Luoyang paper expensive”.
