May you live in interesting times.
At first glance it seems like a hopeful toast, the kind of thing you might say to a young person getting ready to head off to life. May you live in interesting times! After all, who wants to live in boring times, just going through the motions, the same old same old every day of your life.
May you live in interesting times!
But if you trace the history of that phrase back, you find that it was mentioned in the western world in a speech by the son of Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Great Britain. In a 1939 speech, Austen Chamberlain said, “It is not so long ago that a member of the Diplomatic Body in London, who had spent some years of his service in China, told me that there was a Chinese curse which took the form of saying, ‘May you live in interesting times.
A Chinese curse? “May you live in interesting times.”
Is it a wish, or a curse?
Or is it just reality?