📖 Meaning
To be impoverished, distressed, and thoroughly dejected in spirit. It originally described scholars of meager means who had fallen into hardship and lost their ambition. The idiom conveys both material destitution and the emotional collapse that accompanies it.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase comes from a Qing dynasty anonymous work, 'Dumen Bamboo Branch Lyrics: Ten Poems for Instructors' (《都门竹枝词·教官十首》), which satirized the plight of minor education officials. One poem describes an instructor so broke he has no travel money to return home, stuck lingering in the capital in utter destitution. The line '盘费全无怎去家，穷愁潦倒驻京华' gave the idiom its enduring form. The novelist Zeng Pu later used it memorably in 'Flowers in a Sea of Sin' (《孽海花》).
💡 Example Usage
他晚年穷愁潦倒，连买药的钱都凑不齐。
In his later years he fell into poverty and despair, unable even to scrape together money for medicine.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 穷愁潦倒
- Pinyin: qióng chóu liáo dǎo
- Literal Translation: poor, worried, dejected, fallen
- Category: Condition
- Characters: 4