Beating the Grass and Frightening the Snake

Characters:

Pronunciation: Da(3) Cao(3) Jing(1) She(2)

Explanation: Meaning a careless act that alerts an opponent and similar to the English idiom of "waking a sleeping dog"

Tone: neutral

The Story: Wang Lu was a corrupt official from the Tang Dynasty. He had a great amount of money. His subordinates followed him, taking bribes and doing all kind of bad things. The local people complained about this a lot.

Once, when Wang Lu was going over the files, he discovered a complaint against one of his subordinates. The file accused the subordinate of corruption. Wang Lu realized that he was involved in the case too. While thumbing through the files, he said to himself: "I must be careful in the future. I am lucky this time because the case has been referred to me."

When he finished reading the material, he quickly wrote some words on the file: "You might have just beaten the grass... but I am like the scared snake hiding in the grass."

Usage Example (Pinyin): Wei(4) bi(4) mian(3) da(3) cao(3) jing(1) she(2), wo(3) men(2) zuo(2) wan(3) mei(2) you3) dai(4) bu(3) ta(1).

Usage Example (English translation): To avoid beating the grass and frightening the snake, we did not arrest him last night.

Note: The spoken Chinese Mandarin language has 4 spoken tones. We have attempted to re-create those above where after each syllable we tell you (1), (2), (3), or (4) as they correspond to each of the 4 tones. We encourage you to complement your Xianzai.com Chinese Idioms newsletter with a good offline study program.