In this Thai folktale, a poor man has only plain rice to eat during a trip to visit a sick relative. Along the way, he smells some delicious curry being cooked for a rich man’s lunch. He stops nearby to eat his own lunch, and enjoys the plain rice more than ever because he imagines eating it with the curry. The rich man finds out about this and tries to make him pay for the smell of his curry. Thanks to a village chief who is cleverer than the rich man, things don’t go as he had planned.
Original Text / PDF (619 words)
General Comments
Our source for the story was the book Fascinating Folktales of Thailand by Thanapol Chadchaidee. This is the first of two folktales we have published with this name. The other, from India, has a very different plot. At first sight the title appears to have little to do with either story as the word “diamond” does not appear anywhere. However, “Diamond cuts Diamond”, which is an English proverb, is an appropriate title in both cases. The first written record of the proverb was in the 1604 John Marston play The Malcontent:
Take Maquerelle with thee; for ’tis found none cuts a diamond but a diamond.
In 1693 it also appeared in the William Congreve play The Double Dealer:
And wit must be foiled by wit; cut a diamond with a diamond.
Smells and Jingles: A Possible Japanese Connection
There are thousands of folktales around the world that have similar plots to those of other cultures. In many cases there are enough differences to show that this has probably happened by chance. However, sometimes parts of stories are so similar as to make it appear as if either one is taken from the other, or they both developed from a common earlier story. This is the case with this version of Diamond Cuts Diamond and a very short folktale from Japan called Smells and Jingles. Here a greedy merchant saves money every day by eating his boiled rice while enjoying the smell of broiled eels coming from a neighbor’s shop.
Smells and Jingles Original Text / PDF (313 words)