12 Chinese Horse Idioms (马) — What Horses Symbolize in China

Misfortune might be a blessing

Literal: Old man loses horse

The Huainanzi tells of a man living out by the frontier, known ever since as the Old Man of the Frontier — 塞翁, from 塞, a border pass, and 翁, an old man. His horse (马) was lost (失), simply ran off. His neighbours came to console him and he asked how they knew it was not good fortune; the horse return...

Cannot undo what's done

Literal: Four horses can't catch

A team of four horses (驷) was the fastest thing on a Chinese road, and the saying holds that even it cannot catch (难追) a word once it has been spoken. The Analects puts the same thought more tersely — 驷不及舌, four horses do not overtake the tongue — in a rebuke about speaking carelessly of other peopl...

Stop before too late

Literal: Pull horse at cliff edge

Reining in (勒) the horse (马) at the lip of the cliff (悬崖). No incident lies behind it, and this exact wording is late — the attested examples are Qing, in Ji Yun — while the older form of the image is 临崖勒马, coming up to the edge rather than hanging over it. The force is all in the timing: the rider ...

Experience brings wisdom

Literal: Old horse knows way

Returning from a campaign against Guzhu, the army of Duke Huan of Qi lost the road, and Guan Zhong proposed releasing the old horses (老马) and following them: they had walked the route before and would know the way (识途). They did, and the army got home. The Han Feizi tells it. What makes it a story r...

Deliberately distort truth as power display

Literal: Point deer call horse

Zhao Gao, holding the Qin court after the First Emperor's death, brought a deer (鹿) before the young emperor and, pointing (指) at it, called it (为) a horse (马). The emperor laughed; the officials divided. Those who said deer, Zhao Gao later had killed. The Records of the Grand Historian tells it, an...

Powerful unstoppable momentum

Literal: Ten thousand horses galloping

Ten thousand (万) horses (马) at full gallop (奔腾). Chinese uses 万 as an intensifier rather than a count, and what the image supplies beyond mere numbers is the ground noise — a mass of animals moving as one thing, felt before it is seen. Poets applied it to rivers in flood and to surf. Modern usage is...

Observe hastily and superficially

Literal: View flowers from galloping horse

This descends from Meng Jiao's poem on passing the imperial examination: 春风得意马蹄疾，一日看尽长安花 — with the spring wind at his back and the hooves quick, he sees all the flowers of Chang'an in a single day. The original is pure elation. The later idiom keeps the horse (走马) and the flowers (观花) but reverses ...

Restless, unfocused mind

Literal: Heart monkey mind horse

The heart (心) as a monkey (猿), the mind (意) as a horse (马). The pairing comes out of Buddhist writing on meditation, where the two animals name two different failures: the monkey will not stay on one branch, and the horse will not stay where it is put. Chinese kept both. It describes attention that ...

Childhood sweethearts or friends

Literal: Green plums and bamboo horses

Li Bai's Changgan Ballad has a woman remembering her husband when both were small: he came riding a bamboo horse (竹马), and they circled the well playing with green plums (青梅). The two props are ordinary children's things and the poem is about a marriage that grew out of them. The phrase names that s...

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...

Magnificent military might and valor

Literal: Metal halberds, armoured horses

This descends from Xin Qiji of the Southern Song, recalling a warlord's campaigns in a poem written from a northern lookout: 金戈铁马，气吞万里如虎 — metal (金) halberds (戈) and armoured (铁) horses (马), a spirit that swallowed ten thousand li like a tiger. Xin Qiji wrote it as a man who had fought in the north ...

Just so-so or passable quality

Literal: Horse horse tiger tiger

Horse (马) horse tiger (虎) tiger. The folk story behind it has a careless painter whose animal could be read as either, and who is said to have lost two sons to the ambiguity. Whatever its origin, the doubling is what makes it colloquial: reduplication of this kind belongs to spoken Chinese, not to l...