Ouyang Xiu, the renowned Northern Song Dynasty writer, lost his father as a child and his family was too poor to send him to school. His mother, unable to afford paper or ink, taught him to write by using a reed stem to trace characters in the sand.
Ouyang Xiu was exceptionally gifted with a remarkable memory. By age ten, he had already learned many characters and finished basic primers like the *Three Character Classic* and *Thousand Character Classic*, then borrowed books from families with collections. Over the next decade, his learning became so vast it filled five carts.
At 22, Ouyang Xiu passed the imperial exams and began his official career, first serving as a judge in Luoyang before being transferred to the capital three years later as an imperial editor.
During the Northern Song Dynasty, the court was sharply divided between reformists led by Vice Grand Councilor Fan Zhongyan and conservatives led by Chief Councilor Lü Yijian. The reformists pushed for political change, while the conservatives resisted fiercely. The writer and official Ouyang Xiu stood firmly with the reformists.
Fan Zhongyan once submitted a memorial to Emperor Renzong of the Song Dynasty, proposing ten measures to reform corrupt governance and accusing the powerful minister Lü Yijian of promoting officials based on personal favoritism and bypassing proper procedures. When Lü Yijian learned of this, he immediately slandered Fan before the emperor. Emperor Renzong, believing these false accusations, demoted Fan Zhongyan to a post in Raozhou, dealing a severe blow to the reformist faction.
During the Song Dynasty, a censor named Gao Ruona was expected to uphold justice and report the truth to the emperor, but instead he curried favor with the conservative faction led by Lü Yijian, falsely accusing the reformer Fan Zhongyan and his allies. Outraged, the scholar Ouyang Xiu wrote a letter titled "To the Censor Gao," in which he directly rebuked Gao Ruona: "You hold the office of censor, yet you flatter the powerful and cannot tell right from wrong—how dare you still walk in and out of the court each day, as if you had no shame at all?" This scathing indictment became a classic example of righteous indignation against sycophancy in Chinese history.
Ouyang Xiu's letter "To Remonstrance Official Gao" enraged the conservative faction led by Gao Ruona and Lyu Yijian, who retaliated by banishing him from the capital and demoting him to a minor county magistrate in Yiling.
It was only several years later, when the court reinstated Fan Zhongyan, that Ouyang Xiu was finally able to return to the capital for his post.
Later, the idiom "knowing no shame in the world" is often used to denounce shameless and brazen individuals.
Source: *Ouyang Wenzhong Collection*
Meaning of the Idiom: Later, the Chinese idiom "不知人间有羞耻事" came to describe knowing no shame in the world is often used to denounce shameless and brazen individuals.