10 Chinese Sayings About Change & New Beginnings

Fortune finally turns your way

Literal: Time comes and fortune turns

The hour arrives (时来) and the luck turns (运转). Both halves assume a wheel: fortune in this vocabulary is not distributed but cyclical, so a bad stretch is a position on the turn rather than a settled condition. That is the consolation being offered. It belongs to ordinary speech and to fortune-telli...

Sudden dramatic change

Literal: Wind cloud sudden change

Wind (风) and cloud (云) changing (变) abruptly (突). The pairing is the Chinese shorthand for the state of the sky, and by extension for the state of affairs, which is why 风云 turns up in so many phrases about the political weather. What this one specifies is the speed. It describes a situation that has...

Create new from old

Literal: Push old produce new

Pushing out (推) the stale (陈) so that the new (新) can come forth (出). The early sense is physical, used of the body and of stored grain long before it meant anything about art or policy: clearing what has gone old to make room. That history settles what the phrase does not mean. The old is displaced...

Linking tradition with innovation

Literal: Receive past, initiate future

To carry on (承) what came before (前) and open the way for (启) what follows (后). Both verbs are transitive and the phrase names a position rather than an achievement — the person or work is the joint between two periods, and its value lies in belonging fully to neither. Chinese literary and intellect...

Profound transformations over time

Literal: Blue sea mulberry field

This comes from the account of the immortal Magu, who remarks that she has three times seen the eastern sea turn to mulberry fields — the blue sea (沧海) becoming farmland (桑田). The measure is deliberately inhuman: what she reports as a recurring observation is beyond any mortal lifetime. Change so co...

Make a comeback after setback or retirement

Literal: East mountain again rise

Xie An spent his early manhood in the hills at Kuaiji, declining office and keeping company with writers, until his family's position collapsed and he took a post at forty — old for a first appointment. He ended as the minister who directed the defence at the Fei River, where a vastly larger norther...

A refreshing new experience

Literal: Ears and eyes completely renewed

Ears (耳) and eyes (目) made new (一新) all at once. The claim is about the apparatus rather than the object: what has changed is the freshness of the perception brought to a thing, which is why the phrase fits a redesign, a first visit and a change of management equally well. It works as unambiguous pr...

Emerging rapidly in great numbers

Literal: Bamboo shoots after spring rain

Bamboo shoots (春笋) after (后) rain (雨). The observation is accurate rather than poetic: moso bamboo shoots can put on a great deal of height in a day once the spring rain arrives, and a grove that was bare will be full of them within a week. So the phrase claims speed and number together, and specifi...

Ever-changing; constantly varying

Literal: Thousand changes ten thousand transformations

A thousand (千) changes (变) and ten thousand (万) transformations (化). The numbers are conventional rather than counted, and the two verbs are not synonyms: 变 is change in state or appearance, 化 is change into something else entirely, so the pair covers alteration and transmutation together. That is w...

Changing rapidly; improving daily

Literal: Day new month different

New (新) by the day (日), different (异) by the month (月). The phrasing echoes the basin inscription quoted in the Great Learning — 苟日新，日日新，又日新, if you can renew yourself one day then do it daily, and again — where the subject is moral cultivation and the renewal is deliberate. The idiom kept the rhyth...