Story Behind the Idiom, Ke Zhou Qiu Jian

Yang over at Learn Mandarin Now is spoiling me with all these guest posts. I’ve been struggling to find something that suitable for beginners lately – everything I stumble across ends up being intermediate. But this is a very good place for beginners to start reading chéngyǔ (成语 idiom) stories, because you’ll get an introduction to a few words that you often see in this kind of “long long ago, far far away” fable.

Learn to Read Mandarin Free: Mandarin Reading EssaysIn the very first sentence, we run across three words of interest. One, 从前 cóngqián, means “a long time ago”, your classic storybook beginning.

The second, 楚国人 chǔguórén, means “a man from the State of Chu“. The State of Chu was a Chinese jurisdictional division during the Zhou Dynasty (1046 – 256 BC). In stories that reference pre-1900 China, you’ll often see references to places that existed in ancient times. Encyclopedia Britannica tells us: “China itself was at the time divided into a series of small duke states, all of which theoretically owed allegiance to the Zhou dynasty, although the Zhou rulers had long since been unable to exercise control over more than their own fiefs.” Anyhoo, the third word is 宝剑 bǎojiàn, which means “a double-edged sword”. How fable-y is that, huh?

I’d also like to draw your attention to the word 移动 yìdòng, meaning “to be moving” or “mobile”. This word is quite common – it’s used to refer to people who move often, and also to “mobile” phones (the cell provider “China Mobile” has this in their Chinese name: 中国移动).

Okay, let’s do this. And thanks again to Yang! Lots of work for some paltry backlinks.

从前有一位楚国人, 他非常爱惜他的宝剑。有一天，他正坐在船上准备过河，一不小心他就把宝剑掉进了河里。他马上在宝剑掉落的地方作了记号。当他到达对岸的时候，他沿着记号跳进河里去找他的宝剑。当然，他已经找不到了。

宝剑已经不在原来掉落的地方因为船和水都在移动。这个故事形容只会刻板地遵守规则，不懂变通的人。
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Long ago, there was a man from the State of Chu who loved his sword very much. One day, he was sitting in his boat preparing to cross a river, when he accidentally dropped his sword into the water. He immediately made a notch on the side of the boat at the place wher his dear sword fell. When he returned close to shore, he re-entered the water just beneath the notch he made, looking for his sword. Naturally, he wasn’t able to find it.

The sword was already gone because the boat and the river were in motion. This idiom is used to describe a person who sticks to rigid rules without considering a changing environment [or describes an action made pointless by changing circumstances].