4 Abundant Chinese Idioms With Fish (鱼)

In perfect element

Literal: Fish finds water

In the Records of the Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei answers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, who were unhappy at how close he had grown to the newly recruited Zhuge Liang: 孤之有孔明，犹鱼之有水也 — my having Kongming is like a fish (鱼) having (得) water (水) — and asks them to say no more about it. The history puts the three of...

Passing fakes as genuine

Literal: Fish eyes as pearls

Fish eyes (鱼目) mixed in with (混) pearls (珠). A dried fish eye is round, pale and superficially convincing, which is the entire basis of the comparison — the fraud works on inspection at a distance and fails on any closer test. What the phrase adds beyond simple counterfeiting is the mixing: the fake...

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...

Beauty so stunning it affects natural world

Literal: Sink fish fall geese

The Zhuangzi is the source, and it means the opposite of what the phrase now does: Mao Qiang and Lady Li are what people call beautiful, but fish seeing them dive (沉鱼) deep and birds seeing them fly high — so who, it asks, knows what beauty actually is? The animals are fleeing. Later tradition reass...