📖 Meaning
Literally 'eating fur and drinking blood.' It depicts the primitive lifestyle of early humans who had not yet mastered fire and ate raw birds and beasts, fur and blood together. Used metaphorically to describe uncivilized, barbaric, or extremely harsh living conditions.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase originates from the 'Li Yun' chapter of the Book of Rites (礼记·礼运), a Zhou dynasty ritual text compiled and transmitted by Confucian scholars. The passage describes the distant past before fire was used for cooking, when people ate the flesh of plants, birds, and beasts, drank their blood, and ate their fur, wearing feathers and skins because silk and hemp were not yet known. It contrasts this brutish pre-civilized state with the refined rites and norms of later civilized society. The idiom thus crystallizes the Confucian contrast between savagery and civilization.
💡 Example Usage
茹毛饮血的时代已经一去不复返了。
The era of eating raw meat and drinking blood is gone forever.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 茹毛饮血
- Pinyin: rú máo yǐn xuè
- Literal Translation: eat hair, drink blood
- Category: Lifestyle
- Characters: 4