Meaning:
May you experience much disorder and trouble in your life.
Background:
While purporting to be a blessing, this is in fact a curse. The expression is
always used ironically, with the clear implication that `uninteresting
times', of peace and tranquillity, are more life-enhancing than interesting
ones.
`May you live in interesting times' is widely reported as being of ancient
Chinese origin but is neither Chinese nor ancient, being recent and western.
It certainly seems to have been intended to sound oriental, in the
faux-Chinese `Confucius he say` style, but that's as near to China as it
actually gets. Confucius's actual sayings are as elusive as those of his
western counterpart Aesop - we have no written records from either of them.
...
As to the currently used `interesting times' version, we can only date that
to post WWII. No one is sure who introduced the term but the person who did
most to bring it to the public's attention was Robert Kennedy. In a speech in
Cape Town in June 1966, Kennedy said:
There is a Chinese curse which says `May he live in interesting times.'
Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and
uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men
than any other time in history.
As those who lived through the 1960s (and can remember) will recall, they
were nothing if not interesting.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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Kennedy's interesting times would've bored to death a Chinese citizen in the
60s. On Confucian land, after WWII, the civil war, the great famine, non-stop
political campaigns climaxed into the decade-long cultrual revolution when
everything was turned upside down. From what I heard, disorder and trouble were
but the theme of life and no one was even personally safe. By extrapolation,
life must have rarely been dull over there.
