"Water is hard to harvest" is an idiom derived from a historical story, which compares the irreparable work done to the water that has fallen on the ground and is difficult to take back into the basin. When many people mention it, they think of the famous opera story "Zhu Maichen Divorces Wife", also known as "Splashing Water before the Horse". In this story, the impoverished Zhu Maichen coincidentally became the hui taishou, and Cui Shi, who had abandoned him to remarry because he was poor and rich, begged in front of the horse to break the mirror and reunite, but Zhu Maichen threw a basin of water on the ground, allowing Cui to take the spilled water back into the basin. Humiliated, Cui committed suicide and died. However, as the archetypal character of the story, the historical Zhu Maichen is actually not so ruthless, he was born poor, but from a woodcutter to a nine-secretary, and finally was killed by Emperor Wu of Han for framing the cool official Zhang Tang.
In the early years of the Western Han Dynasty, Zhu Maichen was born in Wu County, Huiji County, which is the area around today's Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. According to the Book of Han, although he was born poor, he liked to read very much, and as a result, in his forties, his family did not have a decent industry, and he could only make a living by cutting down trees and selling them. On weekdays, when carrying firewood, Zhu Maichen liked to recite poems aloud, and his wife, Cui Shi in later operas, blocked it several times, but not only failed to succeed, but caused him to recite more hard.
Feeling very ashamed and embarrassed, Cui Shi asked to leave, but Zhu Maichen smiled and said, "I am fifty years old and rich, and now I am more than forty years old." Women suffer for a long time, and treat me rich and noble to repay female merits. Cui Shi did not believe her husband's words at all, so in a fit of rage, she married someone else. Later, when Zhu Maichen was passing through the grave once with firewood, he happened to meet Cui Shi and her new husband who were on the grave, and when he saw that Zhu Maichen was hungry and cold, Cui Shi could not bear it, so he invited him to eat a meal.
A few years later, Zhu Maichen, as a squire, followed the county's official in charge of reporting the situation to chang'an in a car transporting heavy weights, and waited for the edict at the bus office. As a result, Emperor Wu of Han did not issue an edict for a long time, and after the grain brought by Zhu Maichen was eaten, it was only by relying on the handouts of other servants that he was able to save his life. Fortunately, at that time, his fellow villager Yan Zhu was favored, and Zhu Maichen was given the opportunity to meet Emperor Wu of Han with his help.
Before coming to the imperial palace, Zhu Maichen put all his life's learning to use, and his research on "Spring and Autumn" and "Chu Ci" was quite profound, which attracted the great joy of Emperor Long Yan of the Han Wu Emperor, and immediately made him a Zhongdafu. In the third year of Yuan Shuo (128 BC), Emperor Wu of Han intended to build Shuofang Commandery in the northwestern part of present-day Hetao, Inner Mongolia, after defeating the Xiongnu at Weiqing and recovering a large area of land south of the Yellow River. In this regard, Gongsun Hong, the imperial master, thought that it was worthless, so he wrote to advise him many times, and Emperor Wu of Han sent Zhu Maichen to debate with him.
Against Gongsun Hong, Zhu Maichen raised ten questions about the construction of Shuofang, but the former could not answer them, and had to say with shame: "Shandong despises people, I don't know if it will be." Soon after, Yu Shan, the king of Dongyue, repeatedly disobeyed the orders of the Han Dynasty, which caused the dissatisfaction of Emperor Wu of Han, and Zhu Maichen proposed to send troops to cross the sea and directly attack Quanshan, which was easy to defend and difficult to attack. After this plan was adopted, Emperor Wu of Han made Zhu Maichen the Prince of Huijian and instructed him: "The rich and noble do not return to their hometown, such as clothes embroidered at night." ”
On the verge of leaving, Emperor Wu of Han had Zhu Maichen build warships, prepare grain, and weapons in Huiji, so that the Han Dynasty army could fight together when it conquered Eastern Vietnam. In this way, Zhu Maichen, who was still a woodcutter when he left, returned to the meeting and was already an official. However, he did not take office directly with great fanfare, but dressed in civilian clothes and walked to the official residence of the sheriff.
When Zhu Maichen was down, he once lived in the home of the guards of the Taishou Mansion, and this time he entered the Taishou Mansion again, and the rest of the officials ignored him, and the guards still ate with him as before. During the banquet, the guards accidentally caught a glimpse of Zhu Maichen's ribbon with the official seal around his waist, and went forward to carefully examine it, and found that it was the words "Huiji Taishou" engraved on the seal. In a panic, the guards hurriedly called the officials of the palace, and after some identification, everyone was shocked and panicked, and rushed to the courtyard to line up to pay respects to Zhu Maichen.
Not long after, the small official who followed Zhu Maichen from Chang'an to here arrived in a carriage, and Zhu Maichen got on the carriage and left in a dashing manner, so that the officials who had once looked down on him were severely punched in the face. When he came to the street, Zhu Maichen found that the people in the county heard that the new Taishou was coming, and they were spontaneously taking to the streets to clean the road, and the county officials greeted them on the side of the road, and there were more than a hundred cars parked just by the car. Arriving in his hometown of Wu County, Zhu Maichen soon saw his former wife Cui Shi building a road with her husband.
Thinking of all the past events, Zhu Maichen immediately ordered that the Cui couple be carried to the Taishou Mansion for good treatment. More than a month later, Cui died of hanging himself, and Zhu Maichen gave her husband a large sum of money to arrange the funeral. On the other hand, Zhu Maichen successively found people who had helped him in the past and repaid them one by one. More than a year later, Zhu Maichen led an army against the King of Dongyue and made a military achievement, and was made a lieutenant by Emperor Wu of Han, ranking among the nine secretaries.
A few years later, Zhu Maichen was dismissed from office for breaking the law, and was subsequently used as a chancellor. At that time, the cool official Zhang Tang was favored by Emperor Wu of Han, and Yan Shu, who had helped Zhu Maichen meet Emperor Wu of Han, was accused of being close to Liu An, the king of Huainan, who was plotting rebellion, and eventually not only was he killed, but his body was also abandoned.
After this incident, Zhu Maichen has been secretly resentful of Zhang Tang, and later Zhang Tang deliberately treated him with an arrogant attitude, resulting in further intensification of the contradiction between the two. In the second year of Yuan Ding (115 BC), Zhu Maichen joined forces with two other Changshi dynasties and Bian Tong of the Xiang Dynasty to frame Zhang Tang, and Zhang Tang committed suicide after writing the sentence "Those who plot to trap Tang, three long histories also" in his suicide note, and Emperor Wu of Han was deeply distressed and executed Zhu Maichen and three others in anger.
At this point, Zhu Maichen's story was announced, and his real fame had to wait for future generations to use it as a template to create a story of "water cover and difficult to harvest". Obviously, there is a big discrepancy between the story adapted by this descendant and the historical records, after all, in fact, even if Cui and Zhu Maichen divorced, they still helped him later, and Zhu Maichen also treated the Cui couple kindly after becoming a taishou. In contrast, the version in the history books is not inferior to the script, and it is also worth reading carefully.