Chinese idiom · 成语
扑朔迷离
Meaning
Fluttering and bewildering; unclear and mysterious.
Character by character
Origin and story
Poetic imageThe image comes from the ending of the Ballad of Mulan, preserved in Guo Maoqian's Song anthology of Music Bureau poetry. After years of serving together, Mulan's comrades discover she is a woman when she changes out of her military clothes. The poem then turns to rabbits: it contrasts the male's feet and the female's eyes, but asks how anyone can distinguish them when both run side by side.
The comparison explains the comrades' mistaken assumption. Later the paired images became a description of things whose truth is hard to discern. The poem's precise date is uncertain; its rabbit imagery is poetry, not a dependable biological identification rule.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
两人的说法完全不同，让事情变得更加扑朔迷离。
Their accounts were completely different, making the situation even harder to unravel.
Describes a confusing situation with an elusive truth.