Break Woks, Sink Boats. (Burning One's Boat)

Characters:

Pronunciation: po(4) fu(3) chen(2) zhou(1)

Explanation: A figure of speech to describe adding something that does not exist or to do something redundant.

Tone: Negative

The Story: Long long ago, in the Chu Kingdom, a family held a sacrifice. After the ceremony, the host offered a bottle of wine to the servants. There were quite a few servants but only one bottle of wine. Then one man proposed: "Every one draw a snake on the ground". The first one who completed it would get the wine as a prize. After discussion, they all agreed.

One man finished his drawing very quickly, he looked at others and saw they were still drawing, then he said: "You are too slow, let me add several feet to my snake." But when he drew feet on the snake, another man finished his drawing, he strode to the wine and said: "snakes do not have feet, how can you draw it that way?" After saying this, he drank the wine.

Usage Example (Pinyin): Bie(2) hua(4) she(2) tian(1) zu(2), wo(3) xiang(3) xin(4) zhong(1) de hua(4) dui(4) ta(1) lai(2) shuo(1) yi(3) jing(1) hen(3) qing(1) chu(3) le.

Usage Example (English translation): Don't draw a snake with feet. I think the letter is clear enough for her.

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.