10 Chinese Idioms About Honesty & Integrity (With Stories)

Keep integrity without compromise

Literal: Keep right no flattery

To keep to (守) what is upright (正) and not (不) bend (阿). 阿 is the load-bearing character: it means to lean toward, to curry favour, to give someone the benefit they have not earned, and the whole phrase turns on refusing that particular motion rather than on virtue in the abstract. It belongs to the...

Return something perfect

Literal: Return jade to Zhao complete

Qin offered fifteen cities for Zhao's famous jade disc, and everyone understood the cities would never be handed over. Lin Xiangru carried the jade (璧) to Qin, watched the king pass it round his court without a word about payment, and said there was a flaw he would point out — got it back into his o...

Keep promises faithfully

Literal: One promise thousand gold

Ji Bu of the early Han was reliable enough that a saying circulated in Chu: a hundred catties of gold are worth less than one promise (一诺) from Ji Bu — hence a promise worth a thousand (千) in gold (金). The Records of the Grand Historian preserves it. He is not Ji Zha of Wu, whose story about keeping...

Maintain perfect integrity despite temptation

Literal: Sit in lap not disorderly

Liuxia Hui, caught outside the city gate on a freezing night, is said to have sheltered a woman who would otherwise have died, holding her (坐怀) inside his robe until morning without the slightest impropriety (不乱). The story is told about him rather than by him, and it became the standard Chinese dem...

Create effortlessly from mastery

Literal: Casually pluck it up

Reaching out casually (信手) and plucking up (拈来) exactly the right thing, without hunting for it. The phrase itself is Chan Buddhist — a monk's verse in the Jingde Records has 信手拈来草, taking up whatever grass comes to hand — and Song and Jin critics borrowed it for Su Shi, whose allusions seemed never...

Maintain perfect dignified composure

Literal: Neither humble nor proud

Neither (不) cringing (卑) nor (不) overbearing (亢). Both halves name a failure of bearing under a difference in rank, and the phrase describes holding the line exactly between them. That is why it belongs to situations with a power gradient — meeting a superior, negotiating from weakness, representing...

To be true to one's word

Literal: Words with trustworthiness

The line is Zixia's, not Confucius's: in the Analects he sets out what he would call a learned man, ending with one who, in dealings with friends, speaks (言) and is (而有) as good as his word (信). The list is deliberately made of ordinary conduct rather than of study, which is his argument. Chinese st...

Half believing, half doubting; unable to tell true from false

Literal: Half believing half doubting

Half (半) believing (信), half (半) doubting (疑). The symmetry is exact and that is what the phrase is for: it does not describe leaning one way while entertaining the other, but a genuine deadlock in which neither acceptance nor rejection has won. Ming vernacular fiction uses it of characters who have...

Talk irresponsibly; make things up

Literal: Let the mouth run free

信 here is giving free rein rather than trusting — the same use as in 信手拈来 — so the mouth (口) is doing whatever it likes. The second half is a pun that stuck: the Yuan original is 信口开合, letting the mouth simply open (开) and close, and 合 was later replaced by its homophone 河, which turned an image of ...

Be candid and fair

Literal: Open sincerity, spread fairness

The Records of the Three Kingdoms assesses Zhuge Liang's administration in the words this phrase compresses: 开诚心，布公道 — he opened (开) his sincerity (诚) and spread out (布) impartial (公) dealing. Both verbs are physical and both concern display, which is the argument: the honesty and the fairness were ...