10 Chinese Idioms from Famous Fables & Stories You Should Know

Wait passively for luck

Literal: Guard the stump, wait for a rabbit

This Warring States period parable tells of a farmer who, after seeing a rabbit die by running into a tree stump (株), waited (待) endlessly for more rabbits (兔) at the same spot. His guard (守) of the stump became a classic example of misguided persistence and inflexible thinking. The story appeared i...

Borrow authority to intimidate

Literal: Fox uses tiger's power

A tiger caught a fox, and the fox said heaven had made it lord of the beasts, so eating it would be defying heaven — walk behind me and see whether anything dares stand its ground. The tiger followed, the animals fled, and the tiger concluded the fox had been telling the truth. The Strategies of the...

Narrow-minded from limited experience

Literal: Frog at well bottom

In the Zhuangzi, a frog (蛙) at the bottom (底) of a broken well (井) boasts to a turtle of the Eastern Sea about the water reaching its armpits, the mud covering its feet, and how nothing else in the well can match it. The turtle tries to get in: its left foot is not yet inside before its right knee i...

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...

Present to wrong audience

Literal: Play zither to cow

Gongming Yi played a refined melody to an ox, which went on grazing. He then played something imitating a gadfly and a lost calf, and the ox raised its tail and pricked its ears — the fault, the account observes, was not in the ox's hearing but in the mismatch. The story survives in a Han Buddhist a...

Ruin by adding extras

Literal: Draw snake add feet

The Strategies of the Warring States tells of retainers given a single flagon of wine and agreeing that whoever finished drawing a snake first should drink it. The quickest man, seeing the others still working, began adding feet (添足) to his snake (画蛇) — at which the second man finished, took the fla...

Needlessly suspicious

Literal: Bow in cup snake shadow

Ying Shao's Comprehensive Meaning of Customs tells of a guest who saw a snake (蛇) in the wine he had been handed, drank it out of politeness, and went home ill for months. His host, working out where the man had been sitting, found a painted bow (弓) on the wall and its reflection (影) lying in the cu...

Using outdated methods foolishly

Literal: Mark boat to find sword

The Lüshi Chunqiu, compiled around 239 BCE at the close of the Warring States period, tells of a man of Chu who dropped his sword (剑) from a boat (舟) into the river and, instead of diving after it, cut a notch (刻) in the boat's side to mark the spot, meaning to search (求) there once the boat docked....

Showing amateur skills to masters

Literal: Wield an axe at Lu Ban's gate

Brandishing (弄) an axe (斧) at the gate (门) of Lu Ban (班), the legendary carpenter and patron of Chinese craftsmen. The image was already proverbial when a Ming poet, finding graffiti scrawled on Li Bai's grave, wrote that writing verse there was like wielding a great axe at Lu Ban's door. It is most...

Persistence overcomes huge obstacles

Literal: Foolish old man moves mountains

The Liezi tells of an old man of ninety whose way out was blocked by two mountains, and who began shifting (移) them (山) away a basket at a time. A widowed neighbour's small son ran over to help. The Wise Old Man of Hequ laughed at him and told him to stop, and he answered that when he died his sons ...