如花似玉

Origin and story

The paired comparisons have an ancient poetic antecedent in Fen Ju Ru, a poem in the Wei section of the Shijing. By the Fen River, the admired person is praised first as beautiful like a blossom and then like jade. These are separate lines, not the later four-character idiom, and the dictionary identifies the person praised there as a man.

Later vernacular literature brings the images together. Yuan plays such as Hong Li Hua use 如花似玉 to describe a beautiful young woman. The phrase thus inherits familiar imagery of freshness, brightness, and preciousness, while its usual later application shifts toward feminine beauty.