📖 Meaning
Literally referring to dry, broken tumbleweed grass that scatters wherever the wind carries it. The idiom is used metaphorically to describe a person whose fate is not their own, wandering helplessly with an unsettled and unpredictable course in life.
📜 Origin Story
This idiom has no single identifiable classical source but draws on a long-standing Chinese poetic convention of comparing human rootlessness to dry peng grass blown by the wind. Imagery of withered, wind-driven grass appears repeatedly in Tang and Song dynasty poetry to evoke exile and impermanence. Over time the phrase became a stock metaphor for a vagrant or displaced person unable to settle.
💡 Example Usage
他一生漂泊，如枯蓬断草般四海为家。
He wandered all his life, drifting like dry tumbleweed and taking shelter wherever the wind left him.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 枯蓬断草
- Pinyin: kū péng duàn cǎo
- Literal Translation: withered, tumbleweed, broken, grass
- Category: Status
- Characters: 4