Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese proverbs, at a glance

• Drawing water with a bamboo basket: all for nothing.

  竹篮打水一场空

  Zhú lán dǎ shuǐ yī chǎng kōng

  Literally: Bamboo basket draws water — one scene, empty

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Telugu — futility from the other side: the water never even enters, running off a hide it cannot soak
  • Latin (Erasmus, via Plato's Danaids) — the same leaking vessel, but as eternal punishment rather than a fool's errand
  • Persian (Saadi) — the deliberate inverse: water gathered in a vessel that holds becomes a sea

• A fall into a ditch makes you wiser.

  吃一塹，長一智

  Chī yī qiàn, zhǎng yī zhì

  Literally: Eat one moat, grow one wit

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Ancient Greek — πάθει μάθος; the tragic, theological register — suffering as cosmic law, not practical lesson
  • Persian — the burned hand teaches best; the body remembers what the mind forgets

• The frog at the bottom of the well

  井底之蛙

  Jǐng dǐ zhī wā

  Literally: Well-bottom 's frog

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Sanskrit — the same animal, the same well, in a Sanskrit text written across a continent and possibly the same century
  • Greek — the well becomes a cave, the frog becomes a chained man, the claim survives the change of stage
  • Russian — the well shrinks down to the body itself, the horizon collapsing onto a single feature

• A great undertaking starts wherever you happen to be standing.

  千里之行，始於足下。

  Qiān lǐ zhī xíng, shǐ yú zú xià

  Literally: A thousand-li journey begins beneath the foot.

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Japanese — the same line, borrowed nearly intact into the Japanese reading of Chinese classics
  • English — the popular form that almost says what Laozi said, with one revealing substitution
  • Persian (Saadi) — the same incremental claim, made about water reaching the sea

• If you don't enter the tiger's den, how will you get the tiger's cubs?

  不入虎穴，焉得虎子

  Bù rù hǔ xué, yān dé hǔ zǐ

  Literally: Not enter tiger den, how get tiger cub

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Latin — *audentis fortuna iuvat*, the same claim made on a Roman battlefield with a god behind it instead of a tiger inside it
  • Russian — the same claim flipped into a peasant's negative imperative: if the wolves frighten you, don't go to the forest at all
  • Italian — *who doesn't risk doesn't nibble*, the same claim shrunk to a merchant's wager on the next meal

• In the same boat, we get across together.

  同舟共济

  Tóng zhōu gòng jì

  Literally: Same boat together cross

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Te Reo Māori — the same boat-image, but read as constitutive identity rather than as strategic cooperation; the canoe is always there, not only in the storm
  • English — same nautical figure, but lightened into shared difficulty rather than tactical alliance; the boat appears in crisis and disappears with the sun
  • Swahili — same observation about collective action, but no vessel at all; *unity is strength* makes the claim directly without borrowing a metaphor
  • Mandarin — explicit counter-figure within the same language; *tóng chuáng yì mèng* describes the failure-mode that *tóng zhōu gòng jì* assumes can be overcome

• It's the old ginger that burns

  姜还是老的辣

  Jiāng háishì lǎo de là

  Literally: Ginger, still it is the old one that is hot

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Japanese — years of merit against a turtle's shell; age as something accumulated rather than something concentrated
  • Spanish — even the devil's expertise turns out to be mostly seniority
  • Mongolian — the tested object over the new one; age as proof rather than as heat

• Kill the chicken to frighten the monkey

  殺雞儆猴

  Shā jī jǐng hóu

  Literally: Kill the chicken to warn the monkey

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • French (Voltaire, Candide) — the execution of Admiral Byng, publicly performed to encourage the others
  • Latin/Roman — killing one in ten soldiers to discipline the other nine; Polybius Histories VI.38
  • Italian (Machiavelli, The Prince ch.7) — Cesare Borgia's public execution of Remirro de Orco; ferocious spectacle satisfying and stupefying the people

• A man who has read just enough to show off

  半瓶醋

  bàn píng cù

  Literally: Half a bottle of vinegar

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Korean — the same acoustics moved from a bottle to a vehicle: what rattles is what is carrying nothing
  • Latin (Horace) — the disproportion staged as an event: enormous groaning labor, one mouse
  • Japanese — the claim inverted: the hawk that can actually do it keeps the talons out of sight

• No matter how far you travel, you are pulled back to where you began.

  落叶归根

  luò yè guī gēn

  Literally: Falling leaves return to the roots.

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Russian — where you were born, there you are of use; belonging-to-origin as a claim about fitness, not just feeling
  • Welsh — one's country is but a mother; the homeland as kinship, the leaf and the root recast as child and mother
  • Hebrew (Genesis 3:19) — for dust you are, and to dust you shall return; the same return, made cosmic and absolute

• The seasoned one finds the way back when the young have lost it.

  老馬識途

  Lǎo mǎ shí tú

  Literally: Old horse knows the road.

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Mongolian — the same animal, the same wisdom, but the road is the steppe and the stakes are survival rather than strategy
  • Spanish — the same age-as-knowledge claim with a wry twist: not a horse but a devil, and what age gives is cunning rather than route-finding
  • Japanese — same claim again, with the turtle's shell taking the horse's place; the years' merit outranks any inherited armor

• Showing off your axe-work at Lu Ban's door

  班门弄斧

  Bān mén nòng fǔ

  Literally: At Ban's gate, wield the axe

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Thai — the mastery on display is instinct, not craft; the fool tries to improve on something already finished at birth
  • Latin — no gate, no guild, just a category violation: an animal correcting a goddess
  • English — the same presumption shrunk to a kitchen; no deity, no craft lineage, just an exasperated elder

• Spilled water is hard to take back.

  覆水难收

  Fù shuǐ nán shōu

  Literally: Overturned water — hard to gather

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Japanese — the same image, traveled east, slightly more literal in its basin
  • Russian — irreversibility of speech, with a sparrow instead of water
  • English — the identical image, used for the opposite advice

• Strike while the iron is hot.

  趁热打铁

  chèn rè dǎ tiě

  Literally: Take advantage of the heat; strike the iron

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Czech — the same forge, kept as a command rather than a calculation
  • English — the same closing window, but the condition is the weather, not the cooling metal: act before the sky breaks
  • Latin (Horace) — the timing without the forge: pluck the day, not the bar

• When the old man at the frontier lost his horse — how could anyone know it wasn't a blessing?

  塞翁失馬，焉知非福

  Sài wēng shī mǎ, yān zhī fēi fú

  Literally: Frontier old-man loses horse, how know not blessing

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Russian — the same observation reduced to a peasant's two-word shrug, with the parable boiled out
  • Spanish — the Chinese suspended judgment refigured as Catholic providence: God permits no evil without a good in tow
  • English — Milton's pastoral image, the good not arriving after the bad but already glowing through it

• The world makes no trouble. Small men manufacture their own.

  天下本无事，庸人自扰之

  Tiānxià běn wúshì, yōngrén zì rǎo zhī

  Literally: Under heaven there is fundamentally no matter; the mediocre man disturbs himself over it

  Mandarin Chinese · China

  Set beside

  • Japanese — the same claim offered as evidence rather than verdict: the most feared ordeal available, placed on the easy side of the scale
  • Latin (Tacitus) — the mechanism instead of the culprit; emptiness is what reads as vastness, and anyone is subject to it
  • Russian — the terror is a picture, badly daubed, and somebody else made it