The final line of Mao Zedong's 1949
七律 poem 《
七律·
人民解放军占领南京》 (Seven-Character Regulated Verse: The PLA Occupies Nanjing), written the day after Communist forces took the Nationalist capital:
天若有情天亦老，
人间正道是沧桑 — 'Were Heaven sentient, it too would grow old; the true path of the human world is cataclysmic change.'
沧桑 is short for
沧海桑田 ('blue seas become mulberry fields') — monumental transformation.
