Category Chinese Sayings
The handiest Chinese image for wasted effort isn’t carrying water in a sieve — it’s a bamboo basket. Here’s how the two-part xiehouyu works, why bamboo was doomed to leak, and its moonlit cousin idiom about scooping the moon from the water.
Horse horse tiger tiger sounds like a riddle, but it is the most useful shrug in the Chinese language. This piece unpacks the phrase’s two meanings, the careless-painter legend behind it, and exactly when saying it will get you in trouble.