10 Essential Chinese Idioms for the Workplace

Find value among worthless

Literal: Sift sand pick gold

The Grades of the Poets quotes Xie Hun comparing two writers: Pan Yue's verse is brilliant as unrolled brocade, fine everywhere, while Lu Ji's is like parting (披) the sand (沙) to pick out (拣) gold (金) — treasure turns up, and you go through a great deal to reach it. Liu Zhiji later used the four-cha...

Plan far ahead

Literal: Deep plan far thought

Jia Yi uses it in his essay on the faults of Qin, contrasting the rebel Chen She with the men of the earlier age: he had not their deep (深) planning (谋) or their far (远) reckoning (虑), and yet the empire fell to him. The pairing sets two dimensions against each other, depth and distance, and Chinese...

Penetrating deeply to the essence

Literal: Whip strikes into core

This descends from Cheng Hao of the Song, whose 鞭辟近里 urges driving study inward toward what is essential rather than accumulating surfaces. The image is of a whip (鞭) driving (辟) something in (入) to the interior (里), and the violence in it is deliberate: getting to the centre of a matter takes force...

Come to an abrupt halt

Literal: A sharp sound, then silence

戛然 is a sound-word — a hard, clean noise, used of a bird's cry — and 而止 is what follows it: and then it stopped. The parsing matters, because the pairing 斗然而来，戛然而止 sets an abrupt arrival against an abrupt ending. It comes from Zhang Xuecheng, and not as praise: the sentence appears in an essay catal...

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...

Creativity permanently dried up

Literal: Jiang Yan's talent exhausted

Jiang Yan was the outstanding writer of his generation and then, in middle age, simply stopped producing anything good. The History of the Southern Dynasties explains it with a dream: the poet Guo Pu appeared to him and asked for his brush back, saying Jiang had had it for years — and after Jiang ha...

Forced to act against will

Literal: Body not self-controlled

The body (身) not (不) governed (由) by oneself (己). The phrase is about compulsion rather than weakness, and 身 is doing careful work: it is the physical person, so what is being described is someone whose actions have been separated from their will while remaining their actions. That is why it functio...

Extraordinary popularity of intellectual work

Literal: Luoyang paper expensive

In the Jin dynasty, Zuo Si's Rhapsody on the Three Capitals became so admired that everyone in Luoyang (洛阳) copied it out by hand, and the price of paper (纸贵) rose across the city. Zuo Si had spent ten years writing it and was initially ignored; the surge came only after a leading critic endorsed it...

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...

Decisively and firmly without hesitation

Literal: Chop nail cut iron

Yunju Daoying, in the Jingde Records, tells his assembly that a person who studies the Buddha-dharma must be like one cutting through a nail (斩钉) and severing iron (截铁) — nothing tentative, nothing left half-done. Both objects resist cutting, so the force is in the decisiveness rather than in any ea...