10 Chinese Idioms About Poverty & Hardship

Unshakeable despite adversity

Literal: Broken a hundred times, never bending

Cai Yong wrote it on Qiao Xuan's memorial stele: his nature was grave, he disliked show and held to the plain, and he had the bearing of a man who could be broken (折) a hundred (百) times and would not (不) bend (挠), who faced a crisis and could not be moved from his ground. 折 is setbacks rather than ...

Persistence achieves anything

Literal: Water drops pierce stone

The Song collection Helin Yulu attaches this to the magistrate Zhang Guaiya, who had a clerk flogged for a single copper coin, was told he would not dare behead him for it, and wrote the judgment before doing exactly that: a coin a day is a thousand coins in a thousand days, and 绳锯木断，水滴石穿 — a rope u...

Effort is eventually repaid

Literal: Heaven's way rewards diligence

Heaven's way (天道) repays (酬) diligence (勤). 酬 is the word for requiting a debt or returning a toast, so the claim is transactional: the effort is owed something, and the universe is the party that settles. That is a stronger position than simply hoping hard work pays off, and it is close to the argu...

Progress needs constant effort

Literal: Boat moving against current

A boat (舟) worked (行) against (逆) the current (水). The phrase is nearly always completed by its second half — 不进则退, if you do not advance you fall back — and that clause is the whole argument. What makes the image exact is that holding position is not a rest state: the river is doing work on the hul...

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 ...

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. ...