A poem in Mandarin Chinese sounds like the same word being repeated 92 times. It's actually about a man eating stone lions.



The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (“The Story of Shi Eating Lions”) is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982), in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. It is a famous example of constrained writing. The sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is an example of this type of writing in English.

The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree ofhomophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken in Modern Standard Chinese or when written in romanization.

The following is the text in Hanyu Pinyin, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, and Chinese traditional/simplified characters. Pinyin orthography recommends writing Chinese numbers in Arabic numerals, so the number shí would be written as 10. To preserve the homophony in this case, the number 10 has also been spelled out in Pinyin.

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