10 Chinese Idioms About Deception & Trickery

Borrow authority to intimidate

Literal: Fox uses tiger's power

A tiger caught a fox, and the fox said heaven had made it lord of the beasts, so eating it would be defying heaven — walk behind me and see whether anything dares stand its ground. The tiger followed, the animals fled, and the tiger concluded the fox had been telling the truth. The Strategies of the...

Open threats easier than hidden

Literal: An open spear is easy to dodge

The saying is a matched pair and only works whole: 明枪易躲，暗箭难防 — an open (明) spear (枪) is easy (易) to dodge (躲), a hidden arrow hard to guard against. It belongs to Yuan drama and later vernacular. The visible threat is named in order to be dismissed, so that the concealed one can be the point, and Ch...

Deceive by substitution

Literal: Steal beam swap pillar

This is the twenty-fifth of the Thirty-Six Stratagems: stealing (偷) the beams (梁) and swapping (换) the pillars (柱) while the building still stands. The substitution is made inside a structure that keeps its outward form, so that nothing appears to have changed until weight is put on it. A quiet swap...

Miss big picture

Literal: Leaf blocks eye

This descends from the Heguanzi, which observes that a single leaf before the eyes hides the mountain, and two beans in the ears hide the thunder — 一叶蔽目，不见泰山. One (一) leaf (叶) blocks (障) the eye (目) not because it is large but because it is close. The obstruction is trivial and the loss of view is t...

Make a gift of something that isn't yours

Literal: Borrow flower offer Buddha

The Buddhist life of the Buddha's former births has the young Sumedha, wanting to make an offering to the buddha Dipankara and owning nothing, buy flowers from a girl who gives them on condition that she share the merit. Borrowing flowers (借花) to offer to the Buddha (献佛) is therefore not condemned i...

Repeated lie becomes truth

Literal: Three people make tiger real

Pang Cong, about to leave Wei escorting a hostage prince to Handan, asked his king whether he would believe a man who reported a tiger (虎) in the marketplace. No. Two men? He would wonder. Three (三) men (人)? The king said he would believe it. There is no tiger in the marketplace, Pang Cong said, and...

Needlessly suspicious

Literal: Bow in cup snake shadow

Ying Shao's Comprehensive Meaning of Customs tells of a guest who saw a snake (蛇) in the wine he had been handed, drank it out of politeness, and went home ill for months. His host, working out where the man had been sitting, found a painted bow (弓) on the wall and its reflection (影) lying in the cu...

Professed love hiding actual fear

Literal: Lord Ye loves dragons

Lord Ye (叶公) loved (好) dragons (龙): they were on his belt-hooks, on his chisels, carved through the rooms of his house. The real dragon heard of it and came, put its head in at the window and its tail into the hall, and Lord Ye ran with his wits gone. Liu Xiang tells it against a ruler who said he w...

Unable to understand despite much thought

Literal: Think a hundred times still not understand

To have turned it over a hundred (百) times in thought (思) and still not (不) got it undone (解). 解 is loosening a knot, which is the right image: this is not ignorance but a problem that has been worked at and has not come apart. The hundred counts attempts rather than anything real. Other people's be...

Extremely arrogant; look down on everyone

Literal: No person in one's eyes

No (无) person (人) in (中) the eye (目). The construction is precise and unkind: other people are not being looked down on, they are not registering at all, which is a stage beyond contempt. That is what makes it a strong accusation in Chinese — it denies the person any relationship with those around t...