一泻千里

Origin and story

Li Bai's poem to his younger kinsman serving at Xuanzhou pictures a great river pouring onward for a thousand li, then compares that breadth with the recipient's generous mind. The poem supplies the image, but not the idiom in its exact later order. The full expression is documented in a letter from the Song thinker Chen Liang to Xin Qiji. Later literary critics adopted the rushing river to describe prose that flows with sustained force and freedom. Its physical sense remains a powerful, unobstructed current; by another extension it can describe something falling rapidly and continuously, such as confidence or a market index.