8 Chinese Idioms About Freedom & Liberation

Work harder to compensate

Literal: The clumsy bird flies first

The clumsy (笨) bird (鸟) sets off first (先飞). The phrase belongs to vernacular drama and is most often said by the person about themselves, which is where its charm is: it concedes the disadvantage and then treats it as a scheduling problem rather than a verdict. That makes it a genuinely useful thin...

Two goals with one action

Literal: One stone two birds

A calque rather than a classical idiom: one (一) stone (石), two (二) birds (鸟), taken into Chinese from the English 'kill two birds with one stone' by way of the Japanese 一石二鳥, during the decades of heavy borrowing around the turn of the twentieth century. It is worth knowing precisely because it feel...

Overly fearful and suspicious

Literal: Wind sound crane call

After the rout at the Fei River, Fu Jian's enormous army broke and ran, and the History of the Jin says that the sound (声) of the wind (风) and the cry (唳) of a crane (鹤) were enough to convince the fleeing men that the Jin army was on them. They slept in the open and starved on the road, and most of...

Extremely rare

Literal: Phoenix feather unicorn horn

A phoenix's (凤) feather (毛) and a qilin's (麟) horn (角). Neither animal is ordinarily to be met with at all, so the phrase names not scarcity but the parts of something that does not exist — a stronger claim than any comparison with rare real things. Both creatures were held to appear only under a sa...

Craftsmanship beyond natural limits

Literal: Skill surpasses nature's work

This descends from a line by Zhao Mengfu of the Yuan dynasty on human artifice seizing the work of heaven — 人间巧艺夺天工. Skill (巧) so fine that it wrests away (夺) what nature (天) made (工) is praise of an unusual kind, since it sets craft in competition with creation rather than in imitation of it. Workm...

Judge with limited perspective

Literal: Sit in well view sky

This descends from Han Yu's Essentials of the Moral Way: 坐井而观天，曰天小者，非天小也 — sitting (坐) in a well (井) and looking (观) at the sky (天), one calls the sky small; the sky is not small. Han Yu's addition is the second clause, which places the fault squarely in the viewer rather than the view. A narrow out...

A hidden paradise; unexpected inner beauty

Literal: Having another cave heaven

洞天 is a Daoist term of art: the grotto-heavens, a set of worlds held to exist inside particular mountains, with their own light and seasons, reached through a cave mouth. To find another (别) such heaven (有洞天) is therefore not to find a pretty view but to find that a second world has been sitting ins...

For the first time ever; unprecedented

Literal: Breaking heaven's wasteland

This idiom describes breaking (破) through heaven's (天) wasteland (荒). It originates from Tang Dynasty examination history when the Jingzhou region, long considered intellectually barren, finally produced a successful examination candidate, 'breaking' its record of failure. The phrase marks unprecede...