The Same Road to Ruin 重蹈覆辙

The Chinese idiom 重蹈覆辙 (chong2 dao3 fu4 zhe2) advises us (especially if we are young) to be careful to draw lessons from the failure of others in the past and avoid repeating the same mistakes today. It is based on a story about a group of eunuchs during the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220).

It was a common occurrence during Chinese history for eunuchs in the imperial court to form groups to manipulate and gain undue influence over a ruler. In the court of Emperor Han, the eunuchs were particularly powerful and their actions led to hundreds of officials and ordinary people being imprisoned on the basis of trumped up charges. On hearing this news, the father of the Empress petitioned the Emperor to release those imprisoned. He publicly denounced the eunuchs behaviour and referred to previous occasions wher failure to oppose the eunuchs had led to grievous wrongs to innocent people. He warned the Emperor that failure to learn from these past experiences was likely to result in him following the track of the overturned cart. The Emperor was convinced and released all the prisoners and imprisoned the eunuchs.

The English idiom follow the same road to ruin encapsulates a similar moral.

Some say that we actually never learn from the past and are destined to make the same mistakes again and again. In support of this, one may, for example, point to the repeated genocides during the last century (Germany, then Cambodia, then Serbia and so on). However, I am more optimistic and see improvements in the way the global community responds to these scenarios - improvements that explicitly acknowledge the mistakes of the past.