APAD: May you live in interesting times.

Meaning:

    May you experience much disorder and trouble in your life.

 

Background:

   While purporting to be a blessing, this is in fact a curse. The expression is

   always used ironically, with the clear implication that `uninteresting

   times', of peace and tranquillity, are more life-enhancing than interesting

   ones.

 

   `May you live in interesting times' is widely reported as being of ancient

   Chinese origin but is neither Chinese nor ancient, being recent and western.

   It certainly seems to have been intended to sound oriental, in the

   faux-Chinese `Confucius he say` style, but that's as near to China as it

   actually gets. Confucius's actual sayings are as elusive as those of his

   western counterpart Aesop - we have no written records from either of them.

 

   ...

 

   As to the currently used `interesting times' version, we can only date that

   to post WWII. No one is sure who introduced the term but the person who did

   most to bring it to the public's attention was Robert Kennedy. In a speech in

   Cape Town in June 1966, Kennedy said:

 

       There is a Chinese curse which says `May he live in interesting times.'

       Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and

       uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men

       than any other time in history.

 

   As those who lived through the 1960s (and can remember) will recall, they

   were nothing if not interesting.

 

- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]

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Kennedy's interesting times would've bored to death a Chinese citizen in the

60s. On Confucian land, after WWII, the civil war, the great famine, non-stop

political campaigns climaxed into the decade-long cultrual revolution when

everything was turned upside down. From what I heard, disorder and trouble were

but the theme of life and no one was even personally safe. By extrapolation,

life must have rarely been dull over there.