6 Powerful Chinese Idioms With Dragon (龙)

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...

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...

Strike directly at the heart of enemy territory

Literal: Drive straight to Huanglong

The History of Song records Yue Fei telling his officers 直抵黄龙府，与诸君痛饮尔 — we will reach Huanglong Prefecture (黄龙) and drink together there. The modern form swaps 抵, to arrive at, for 捣, to smash into, and comes from the later Yue Fei fiction rather than from the history. Huanglong lay far to the north...

Commanding imposing strategic position

Literal: Tiger crouch dragon coil

Zhuge Liang is said to have described the terrain at present-day Nanjing as a coiling dragon (龙盘) and a crouching tiger (虎踞) — the ridge line curling round and the rock outcrop hunched above the river. Both animals are shown gathered rather than in motion, which is the sense being conveyed: not aggr...

The whole story; causes and effects

Literal: Ridge it comes from, stream it runs to

Both halves are technical terms from geomancy, and they are not the same kind of thing: 龙 is the rise and fall of a mountain range, and the 来龙 is its main peak, the height a site's energy is held to come down from; 脉 is the stream in the valley, and the 去脉 is its main channel, where the water goes. ...