Chinese idiom · 成语
一筹莫展
Meaning
Not one plan can unfold; utterly helpless.
Character by character
Origin and story
literary allusionThe History of Song's biography of Cai Youxue preserves an earlier complaint that a court full of officials could not produce a single plan. Its wording is 'not uttering one strategy,' rather than the exact modern idiom. The familiar form appears in Kong Shangren's play The Peach Blossom Fan, where the character Shi Kefa laments that his efforts to plan operations in the Central Plains have come to nothing. These uses share the image of being unable to put even one workable measure into action. Today the phrase describes someone completely at a loss when facing a difficult problem.
Sources and further reading
In everyday life
电脑里的文件全打不开，我一筹莫展，只好请同事帮忙。
None of the files on my computer would open; completely at a loss, I had to ask a colleague for help.
Describes having no workable solution, whether from confusion or an especially difficult situation.