📖 Meaning
Describes an extremely fierce and bloody battle in which entrails and corpses lie scattered across the fields. It is used to convey the cruelty, intensity, and heavy casualties of war, evoking a scene of carnage so violent that the battlefield itself is soaked with human viscera.
📜 Origin Story
The idiom comes from the Old Book of Tang (《旧唐书》), in the biography of the Tang dynasty chancellor Xiao Yu (萧瑀). In that passage, Xiao Yu recalls a period when the emperor had been displaced and on the run for six years. During those years, the people of the Central Plains fought the rebels so fiercely that 'liver and marrow flowed across the fields' (肝髓流野). When the ancestral temples were finally restored, the surviving elders wept with joy at the sound of the emperor's returning carriages. The graphic image of entrails spilling across the battlefield later became a fixed idiom for describing the brutality and heavy casualties of war.
💡 Example Usage
城墙之下肝髓流野，足见当时战况惨烈。
Beneath the city walls, livers and marrow spilled across the fields, a stark testament to how brutal the fighting was.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 肝髓流野
- Pinyin: gān suǐ liú yě
- Literal Translation: liver, marrow, flowing, field
- Category: Condition
- Characters: 4