Travel by crane, avoid death. It contains the meaning of respect and blessing for the deceased. According to historical records, when Wang Xizhi boarded the crane, the crane flapped its wings and flew into the blue sky. Wang Xianzhi chased him to the lake and watched his father ride a crane to heaven. Later, people often referred to the death of a respected person as "whale wandering", which has been in use ever since.
A similar idiom is to ride a whale to the west. Riding a whale has two meanings, one is riding a big fish (whale) to live in seclusion or become immortal, which comes from Selected Works of Yang Xiong: "Riding a giant scale, riding a Beijing fish". Secondly, Du Fu used the allusion of the legend that Li Bai drowned by riding a whale drunk.
The elegiac couplet mostly uses the first meaning, which is the same as the saying that driving a crane to the west to die. Are all subtle expressions of death, generally used for people who have high respect for life.
He said that the reason why the Yellow Crane Tower was destroyed and built repeatedly in history was because of its special cultural connotation, including the legend of "riding a crane in a fairy" and the poems left by poets such as Cui Hao and Li Bai, which appealed to both refined and popular tastes.
Make sentences:
1. It's a pity that I fell off a cliff when I went up the mountain to collect herbs and drove a crane to Xianyou.
2. According to legend, the piper and Qin Mugong's daughter Nong Yu, who practiced in Huashan in history, lit candles and got married in the Lotus Cave in Xifeng before they both drove cranes to Xianyou, hence the "first wedding room in the world".
3. Zheng Xian, a pre-Qin alchemist in Zheng 'an period, once practiced medicine and sold medicines in Baiyun Mountain, Guangzhou. It is said that there was a plague one year. In order to save the people, Zheng fell off a cliff and rode a crane around the mountain.