10 Romantic Chinese Idioms for Valentine's Day

Treat others as yourself

Literal: Exchange heart for heart

To exchange (换) one heart (心) for another, using (以) your own as the thing you give. The image is of trust as a swap rather than a demand: you put your own candour in first and take the other person's in return. This is a common set phrase rather than a classical idiom — it has no locus classicus an...

Love extends to all connections

Literal: Love house and its crow

Loving (爱) a house (屋) and extending that (及) even to the crows (乌) on its roof. The formulation comes from an early gloss on the Zhou conquest — he who loves a man loves even the crows on his roof — and the crow is chosen because it is the least lovable bird available, which is the entire force of ...

Instant friendship

Literal: Canopies tilt, like old friends

倾盖 is what happens when two carriages stop alongside on the road and their canopies tilt toward one another — the drivers have paused to talk. Zou Yang, writing from prison, set it against its opposite: 白头如新，倾盖如故, some go grey together and remain strangers, others tilt their canopies once and are ol...

Lower one's guard

Literal: Handle it with a careless heart

Liu Zongyuan of the Tang, writing to a younger man, says of his own composition: 故吾每为文章，未尝敢以轻心掉之，惧其剽而不留也 — I have never dared toss a piece off (掉) with a light (轻) heart (心), fearing it would come out glib and leave nothing behind. The letter's larger subject is whether he will accept the role of te...

Words differ from thoughts

Literal: Mouth yes heart no

The mouth (口) says yes (是), the heart (心) says no (非). 是 and 非 are the standard classical pair for right and wrong as well as for assent and denial, so the phrase carries a moral charge that the English 'two-faced' does not quite have — the split is between what is affirmed and what is believed true...

Invest utmost effort and emotion

Literal: Vomit heart drip blood

Li He wrote by riding out with a bag, dropping lines into it as they came, and working them up at night; his mother, looking at the bag, said this boy would not stop until he had vomited out (呕) his heart (心). Han Yu, in a related image, wrote of cutting out his liver for paper and dripping (沥) his ...

Deeply and permanently affected

Literal: Carve bone inscribe heart

Cut (刻) into the bone (骨) and inscribed (铭) on the heart (心). 铭 is specifically the verb for casting an inscription into bronze, so both halves name permanent media, and what the phrase claims is that the impression cannot be worn away. Tang usage attaches it to gratitude — a debt too deep ever to b...

Courage balanced with careful attention

Literal: Bold gallbladder, careful heart

The physician Sun Simiao set out the pairing in his writing on medical practice: the gall (胆) should be large (大) and the heart (心) small (细), the intelligence rounded and the conduct square. He was describing the qualities of a good doctor — the nerve to act and the care to attend to detail, each u...

Using completely wrong method for a task

Literal: Climb tree seek fish

Mencius said it to King Xuan of Qi, who wanted to extend his territory by force and expected contentment to follow. To pursue what you want by those means, Mencius told him, is to climb a tree (缘木) to look for fish (求鱼) — and worse, because climbing a tree and finding no fish does you no harm, where...

Inseparable; always together

Literal: Body and shadow never separate

Form (形) and shadow (影) not (不) parting (离). The image is of company as unbreakable as the one thing that genuinely cannot leave you — and Chinese poetry had long used the shadow the other way about, as the only companion a solitary person has. That older and bleaker sense sits underneath the modern...