退避三舍

Origin and story

Zuo Zhuan (左傳), in the account for Duke Xi’s twenty-third year, describes Chong’er receiving hospitality from the king of Chu during his exile. Asked how he would repay it, he promised that if he returned to rule Jin and their armies met, he would withdraw three she before fighting. A she was conventionally thirty li, so the pledge meant ninety li, not three individual camps.

In the twenty-eighth-year account, Jin’s army carries out the withdrawal when confronted by Chu’s commander Ziyu. The explanation combines repayment of kindness with putting the moral responsibility for further aggression on Chu. The idiom later came to mean yielding or keeping clear of a confrontation.