8 Chinese Horse Idioms You Need to Know (马成语大全) - Year of the Horse 2026

Childhood sweethearts or friends

Literal: Green plums and bamboo horses

Li Bai's Changgan Ballad has a woman remembering her husband when both were small: he came riding a bamboo horse (竹马), and they circled the well playing with green plums (青梅). The two props are ordinary children's things and the poem is about a marriage that grew out of them. The phrase names that s...

Deliberately distort truth as power display

Literal: Point deer call horse

Zhao Gao, holding the Qin court after the First Emperor's death, brought a deer (鹿) before the young emperor and, pointing (指) at it, called it (为) a horse (马). The emperor laughed; the officials divided. Those who said deer, Zhao Gao later had killed. The Records of the Grand Historian tells it, an...

Stop before too late

Literal: Pull horse at cliff edge

Reining in (勒) the horse (马) at the lip of the cliff (悬崖). No incident lies behind it, and this exact wording is late — the attested examples are Qing, in Ji Yun — while the older form of the image is 临崖勒马, coming up to the edge rather than hanging over it. The force is all in the timing: the rider ...

Observe hastily and superficially

Literal: View flowers from galloping horse

This descends from Meng Jiao's poem on passing the imperial examination: 春风得意马蹄疾，一日看尽长安花 — with the spring wind at his back and the hooves quick, he sees all the flowers of Chang'an in a single day. The original is pure elation. The later idiom keeps the horse (走马) and the flowers (观花) but reverses ...

Restless, unfocused mind

Literal: Heart monkey mind horse

The heart (心) as a monkey (猿), the mind (意) as a horse (马). The pairing comes out of Buddhist writing on meditation, where the two animals name two different failures: the monkey will not stay on one branch, and the horse will not stay where it is put. Chinese kept both. It describes attention that ...

Just so-so or passable quality

Literal: Horse horse tiger tiger

Horse (马) horse tiger (虎) tiger. The folk story behind it has a careless painter whose animal could be read as either, and who is said to have lost two sons to the ambiguity. Whatever its origin, the doubling is what makes it colloquial: reduplication of this kind belongs to spoken Chinese, not to l...

Individual whose behavior harms entire group

Literal: The horse that harms the herd

In the Zhuangzi the Yellow Emperor, lost and asking a boy herding horses how to govern the empire, is told it is no different from tending horses: 去其害马者而已矣, remove whatever is harming (害) the horses (马), and nothing more. The 群 of the modern idiom is a later addition that reads the herd into it. The...

Superficial observation without depth

Literal: Galloping horse views flowers

This descends from Meng Jiao's poem on passing the imperial examination: 春风得意马蹄疾，一日看尽长安花 — with the spring wind at his back and the hooves quick, he sees all the flowers of Chang'an in a single day. The original is pure elation. The later idiom keeps the horse (走马) and the flowers (看花) but reverses ...