10 Chinese Idioms About Overcoming Adversity

Repeated by enough people, a falsehood passes for truth

Literal: Many mouths melt gold

This is from the Discourses of the States, paired there with another line: many hearts make a city wall, and many mouths (众口) melt (铄) metal (金). Gold does not melt from talk, which is the point — enough voices saying the same thing achieve what should be impossible. The original is a warning about ...

Overcome all obstacles

Literal: Cut thorns break brambles

The History of the Later Han records Emperor Guangwu presenting Feng Yi to his court as the man who had been his registrar when he first raised troops: 为吾披荆棘，定关中 — he cut through the thorns for me and settled the land within the passes. The four-character idiom grew out of that sentence, adding 斩, t...

Utterly impossible to escape

Literal: Add wings difficult fly

Even fitting (插) wings (翅) on would not make escape possible (难飞). It belongs to vernacular fiction, where it describes a surrounded fugitive rather than a legal or architectural fact. The hyperbole is the point: the situation is not merely difficult to escape but closed against a power the subject ...

Spread widely and rapidly on its own

Literal: Without shins yet runs

Kong Rong, urging a friend's release, wrote that pearls and jade come to a man without having legs (无胫) because people want them. The four-character form keeps the paradox: to travel (走) without (不) shins (胫). What it describes is movement that needs no mechanism because the thing is being carried b...

Quitting before completion

Literal: Abandon halfway through journey

In the Doctrine of the Mean, Confucius says that the noble person walks the way and gives up (废) half (半) way along the road (途) — and that he himself could not stop. The illustration usually told with it is Yue Yangzi's wife, who cut her half-woven cloth from the loom when he came home early from h...

Unable to hide amusement

Literal: Cannot suppress a smile

忍俊 is holding back a smile — 俊 here has the sense of amusement rising in the face rather than its usual meaning of handsome — and 不禁 is being unable to. So the phrase names a specific moment: the composure was attempted and it failed. That is why it is not simply a word for laughing. The setting has...

True nature eventually revealed

Literal: Fox's tail

In Chinese fox lore the fox that takes human form is betrayed by the one part of the disguise it cannot manage: the tail (尾巴). The phrase is used of the detail that gives someone away rather than of deception in general, and it usually appears in the construction 露出狐狸尾巴, to let the fox's tail show. ...

Sophisticated work appreciated by few

Literal: Tune high harmony few

Song Yu, asked by the King of Chu why so many people spoke ill of him, answered with a singer who came to Ying, the Chu capital. He began with common songs and thousands joined in; as the pieces grew more refined the number who could sing along fell to a few dozen, and then to a handful. The loftier...

Maintain high vigilance awaiting challenge

Literal: Pillow spear await dawn

This comes from the Book of Jin, on Liu Kun, who wrote that he slept with his spear (枕戈) for a pillow waiting for dawn (待旦), determined that a rival should not strike at the invaders before he did. The competitive edge is in the original and usually lost: he was racing a colleague, not only the enem...

Self-reliance without external dependence

Literal: Self-strength regenerate life

By one's own strength (自力), renewed life (更生). The vocabulary is Buddhist in origin, where 更生 is rebirth, and the phrase acquired its modern weight entirely from twentieth-century politics: it was the standing formula for building without foreign assistance, and it belongs to that era in the way tha...