卧虎藏龙

Origin and story

Tigers and dragons provide an image of impressive power that is present but not immediately visible. Yu Xin's sixth-century poem about a newly made landscape garden compares shadowed rocks to concealed tigers and twisted roots to a reclining dragon. These separate comparisons are often associated with the idiom, but the poem neither contains its exact wording nor explicitly describes undiscovered human talent.

The modern expression, also ordered 藏龙卧虎, means that remarkable people are hidden among apparently ordinary surroundings. The garden poem is a useful parallel image, not secure evidence for a single moment when that later figurative meaning was invented.