8 Spirited Chinese Idioms for Dragon Boat Festival

Commit with no retreat

Literal: Break pots sink boats

In 207 BCE Xiang Yu took his army across the river to relieve Julu, and then had the boats (舟) sunk (沉) and the cooking pots (釜) smashed (破), keeping three days' rations and nothing else. The Records of the Grand Historian is explicit that this was done to show the troops they would die rather than ...

Add crucial finishing touch

Literal: Dot dragon's eyes

Zhang Sengyou painted four dragons on a temple wall in Jinling and left them without pupils, saying that if he dotted the eyes they would fly away. Pressed, he dotted two. Thunder split the wall and those two went up into the cloud; the two he had left blind were still there. The account is in Zhang...

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...

Face challenges together

Literal: Cross river in same boat

This idiom shares deep connections with China's river-centric civilization, where crossing (济) together (共) in the same boat (同舟) was often a matter of life and death. Ancient texts tell of strangers becoming allies when facing treacherous waters, especially along the mighty Yangtze. During the Thre...

Share hardships together

Literal: Share boat in wind and rain

Sharing a boat (同舟) through wind (风) and rain (雨). The Sunzi supplies the underlying observation: the men of Wu and the men of Yue hate one another, but caught in the same boat in a gale they will help each other like the left hand and the right. That is the argument the phrase carries — not that th...

Using outdated methods foolishly

Literal: Mark boat to find sword

The Lüshi Chunqiu, compiled around 239 BCE at the close of the Warring States period, tells of a man of Chu who dropped his sword (剑) from a boat (舟) into the river and, instead of diving after it, cut a notch (刻) in the boat's side to mark the spot, meaning to search (求) there once the boat docked....

Youthful vigor despite old age

Literal: Dragon-horse spirit

The 龙马 is a single creature, not two: the dragon-horse that rose from the Yellow River bearing the diagram on its back, in the legend of how the trigrams were devised. So the phrase claims the vitality (精神) of a mythical beast rather than combining a dragon and a horse. It is used almost exclusively...

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...