Chinese idiom · 成语
人面桃花
Meaning
A beautiful face remembered among peach blossoms; wistfulness when a familiar place remains but the person is gone.
Character by character
Origin and story
Poem and traditional romantic taleCui Hu's poem Ti Du Cheng Nan Zhuang remembers a face and peach blossoms glowing together at a doorway the previous year. On returning, the speaker finds the blossoms still there but cannot find the person. The contrast gives the idiom both its beauty and its sense of loss.
Meng Qi's Ben Shi Shi adds a romantic tale: Cui once received water from a young woman, returned a year later, and left the poem on her closed door. In the tale she dies after reading it; Cui returns, mourns beside her, and she revives. Her father then agrees to their marriage. That miraculous ending belongs to the literary tradition surrounding the poem, not established biography.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
再去那家旧书店时，熟悉的店员已经离开，竟有几分人面桃花的惆怅。
Returning to that secondhand bookshop and finding the familiar assistant gone gave me a wistful sense of the place remaining while the person had vanished.
Literary: beauty associated with a remembered encounter, or sadness that people have changed while a place remains.