📖 Meaning
Describes indulging in uninhibited singing and dancing while wallowing in sensual pleasures and dissipation. It carries a strongly critical tone, depicting someone who abandons themselves to revelry and carousing instead of attending to serious matters. The idiom is synonymous with 酣歌恒舞.
📜 Origin Story
The core of the idiom derives from the Book of Documents (《尚书·伊训》), where the Shang-dynasty minister Yi Yin admonishes against constant dancing in the palace and carousing songs in the chambers, calling such behavior 'witchcraft winds' (巫风) that lead a ruler astray and ruin the state. The modern phrasing 酣歌醉舞 was popularized by the writer Mao Dun in his 1938 essay 《血战后一周年》(One Year After the Bloody War), where he bitterly asks whether the people had not seen others indulging in song and dance every day even as the nation faced its gravest crisis. Thus the idiom combines an ancient warning against decadence with modern wartime condemnation of heedless revelry.
💡 Example Usage
值此危难之际，他们却终日酣歌醉舞，毫无忧患之心。
At this time of national peril, they nevertheless spend their days in carousing song and drunken dance, without a shred of concern.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 酣歌醉舞
- Pinyin: hān gē zuì wǔ
- Literal Translation: merrily singing, drunkenly dancing
- Category: Lifestyle
- Characters: 4