📖 Meaning
To beat gongs and drums, making a loud, clamorous noise. It describes a boisterous uproar or commotion, and is also used metaphorically to mean exaggerating something or making a great public show of it.
📜 Origin Story
The idiom first appears in Journey to the West (《西游记》), a novel by the Ming dynasty author Wu Cheng'en, in chapter 28. In this chapter, the Monkey King Sun Wukong returns to Flower Fruit Mountain and learns from the surviving monkeys that human hunters had captured many of his kin and forced them to perform tricks for entertainment, such as jumping through hoops, doing somersaults, standing on their heads, and 'beating gongs and drums in the street'. The phrase was thus coined to describe making a loud commotion or staging a noisy spectacle.
💡 Example Usage
他在村里筛锣擂鼓地宣扬自己中了头奖。
He beat gongs and drums in the village, noisily publicizing that he had won the first prize.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 筛锣擂鼓
- Pinyin: shāi luó léi gǔ
- Literal Translation: strike gong, beat drum
- Category: Communication
- Characters: 4