鲤跃龙门 · lǐ yuè lóng mén
鲤跃龙门 · lǐ yuè lóng mén
Idiom · Ambition
What it means
The carp leaping the Dragon Gate — the classical rise, and the one Chinese idiom where the whole sentence is the metaphor rather than a description of it.
鲤跃龙门：古典的上升典故，也是汉语里少数「整句即隐喻」而非「描述」的成语。
Where the character comes from
The Yellow River has a gate-shaped cataract. Carp that swim upstream spend years beating against it; the ones that jump clear become dragons. It is the most quoted idiom for someone who has just made the jump, and the least appropriate for someone who has not.
From the Zuo Commentary tradition; the gate itself is a cataract in the Yellow River near present-day Hejin, Shanxi.
- Official historyZuo Commentary
- Folk practiceSite tradition
How it gets misread
Just koi → 鲤跃龙门 · the leap
A koi on its own is decorative. The idiom is specifically about clearing an obstacle that most of the population fails at.
Before you ink
Four characters read as a phrase only as a phrase. Isolated as a single glyph the meaning is lost — take the whole string.
It is about the leap, not the carp. The most common misreading is to take it as a general luck symbol with no achievement attached.