Tik-Tok of Oz
part 1

Tititi-hoochoo

Tititi-hoochoo the great jinjin is a Chinese riddle pun.

The best reference I know of for this is chapter 7 of "Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese" by Arthur Smith. It was originally published in the 1800s sometime after 1885. It was republished in 1914 with 50 pages added. Dover reprinted it in 1965 in a paperback version. It can be found in Bookfinder for about $10 or so. I thoroughly recommend it if you're at all interested in some of the weirdest word play in the world. That said..

Chinese characters are formed in various ways. One way is by reduplication. The character formed of one tree means wood. The character formed of two trees means grove. The character formed of three trees means forest. As a sort of rebus type thing, three of any character means a humungous of whatever the character is.

In this case, tititi would be a "vast ti". The word for vast is "huang". Thus this reads as "huang ti" which puns with "huang ti" which means emperor.

Hoochoo is a cleverer pun yet. Hoo means tiger. The tiger is noted for having the character for "king" on its forehead. That is, three horizontal stripes stacked vertically, crossed through the middle by one vertical stripe. Choo means pearl. Besides being known as "jade of the sea" it also means "dot" because of its dot-like shape. Put the two together and you have the character for king combined with a dot, and that makes the character for jade.

Reading from right to left, that makes "Jade emperor" which is the title of the ruler of the fairies. Who is also known as the "Private person" and "the Lonely One".

Jin means fairy spirit and reduplicated means "Ruler of the fairies".

The description of the fairy kings and queens of the various natural functions of the world is extremely reminiscent of the fairy court as described in chapter 5 of "Journey to the West", especially the varicolored skin, as perhaps you know that jade comes in about as many colors as there are, though green is the most common. If you've never read that, I thoroughly recommend the abbreviated translation by Waley called "Monkey". It's a hoot. The book called "Deification of the Gods" is not as much fun, but it recounts the events leading to the establishment of the fairy court at the end of the Shang Dynasty. Numerous dead people were promoted to fairy-hood and put in charge of the world's natural functions which up to that time were acting in a chaotic, unregulated and well, natural fashion.

And what about the fairy court in China? When the missionaries poured into China in the mid 1800s they were under the impression that the Chinese had a zillion gods and goddesses. They tried teaching the notion that there was one god who was responsible for everything. They made very few converts. What they didn't know is that the Chinese had no gods at all. Jin, or Shen in Mandarin doesn't mean god. It means fairy spirit. What the Chinese were hearing was that there was one super fairy who did everything and they just weren't buying it. By the mid 1880s the missionaries finally spoke Chinese well enough to figure out what was going on and they were gobsmacked. They had to drop back, retrench and figure out how to communicate the concept of transcendental deity to people who understood transcendence well enough but had little concept of deity. About the time they were making some headway everything fell apart anyhow, so it all came to nothing. However it did produce quite a number of books about actual Chinese religion that came out in the late 1800s, a lot of which have "Chinese Fairy Mythology" or some variant on that in the title. You'll meet the cloud weavers and the cloud pushers, the cloud sweepers, the flower warders and all. Totally interchangeable with Baum.
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Copyright 2007 by Boq Aru