Digging to China

Here in the US, it is common for parents to tell their kids “if you keep digging, you’ll reach china” … someone i was talking to today who was from australia said they have the same expression there too! kinda odd since you wouldnt be anywhere close to china if you dug a striaght hole through the earth from australia to the other side. seems china is just the ‘default’ place to say when hole-digging. So i got to wonder… what do parents in China tell their kids when they’re digging in the backyard? Do they say “if you keep digging you’ll end up in america”? Yeah i know, kinda a stupid question, but i’m sorta curious. Anyone from china??

I believe that traditional Chinese cosmology holds that the Universe is a bisected egg. The upper half (the pointy end) is the heavens, the lower, heavier half (the blunt end)is the Earth. Between the two halves (and by extention also surrounding them) is the firmament.

So, a Chinese parent might tell a curious child that there is no point in digging, for they will eventually come out in the same firmament that one can see by simply looking up.

This might explain the lack of Chinese explorers through history.

(UM signs off, wondering if anybody will buy any of the BS he has just posted.)

Do parent’s really say that in the US? Anyway, I’d say the Chinese parents would just ask their kids if they’re digging their own graves :slight_smile:

It’s generally recognized that hell is below ground in most Chinese folk lore too. A parent might make some vague reference to about how digging would bother the spirits, but that’s a far shot. All in all, the most likely scenario is the parent telling the child to stop, and if he doesn’t, smacking the kid over the head. It’s much more direct and saves you the time to make up an elaborate sstory :slight_smile:

The Chinese would say, “If you keep digging you’ll reach Argentina”. Or you might end up in the South Pacific, but that wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The Americans should say, “If you keep digging you’ll end up in the southern Indian Ocean.” There’s no land around there except for the Iles Kerguelen and Reunion, both of which are French. No, there not close together, but there’s nothing in between them.

The Australians should say, “If you keep digging you’ll end up on Cape Verde” which is close to the other side of the world from Sydney and Melbourne. Western Australians would substitute Guadeloupe or Bermuda.

So the other side from all those examples is really an ocean. The real origin of the expression is probably Britain, and it doesn’t take the North-South axis into account (obviously, since both China and Britain are in the Northern Hemisphere). It doesn’t make much literal sense, but from a cultural (not geographical) sense, China is the other side of the world from Britain, with two oceans and America in the way on one side, and Eurasia between them the other way. (The Southern Hemisphere apparently didn’t matter too much.)


Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.

My mother always said if I didn’t stop digging I’d go blind. Wait. No, that was something else.

Never mind.


“pluto … a seriously demented but oddly addictive presence here.” – TVeblen

No, a Chinese parent would tell their kid, “Stop digging that damn hole and get your ass back to work in the sweat factory making Nike’s”.

It’s true.

I saw it in a cartoon one time.

Sylvester fell all the way thru the earth and ended up in China, where a Chinese Tweety-Bird–calmly sitting in a tree, replete with coolie hat–say, “Oh, I tawt I taw honorable putty-tat.”

I have asked a lot of Chinese people this same question.

They all said no, their parents never told them they could dig to America. A few noted that if it was indeed a common statement, a lot more Chinese would be buying shovels (their words).