四面楚歌 - To Hear the Songs of Chu from Four Sides
Yesterday I came across this chengyu in an anime about a calligrapher finding himself (don't know, only watched one episode) and I instantly got curious, because from my studies I could recognise all the characters, I could even translate them literally, but I had no idea how they all add-up into what the translation the translator decided to give, which was "surrounded by enemies on all sides". After a quick search on zdic I found out why this was, and with a bit of work I realised that indeed it was yet another one of the thousands of chengyus any student of Chinese (be it classical or modern) will encounter. The expression itself is used when describing an utterly hopeless and/or hostile situation. The story takes place in 202 BC during the Chu-Han Contention (楚漢相爭), where the Tyrant/Hegemon-King (霸王) Xiang Yu's army was besieged at Gaixia (in what is today Anhui province). Below is my attempted translation of the story behind the expression, from Sima Qian's...