Translation: The Donkey's Skill is all Used Up

Here is a translation of the little story behind 黔驴技穷¹, a chéngyǔ². Just for the record, I have never actually heard or seen this chéngyǔ used anywhere, so it may be one of the less common ones.

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The Guizhou Donkey's Exhausted Skills

A long time ago, there were no donkeys in central Guizhou, but one day a meddelsome person brought a donkey into Guizhou by boat. After bringing it in, he realized what a useless creature the donkey was, so he decided to set it free at the foot of a mountain. A nearby tiger caught sight of the donkey, and saw that this was an enormous creature, so the tiger thought that the donkey must be the spirit of the mountain, and hid itself in the forest to watch the donkey.
The tiger slowly approached the donkey, being ever so careful, not knowing exactly what the donkey was. One day, the donkey called out like a bird, and the tiger was extremely frightened. The tiger fled far away, thinking that the donkey was going to bite him. It was very frightening. Still, the tiger came and went, watching the donkey from a distance, and it seemed to him that the donkey had no special or unique skills. The tiger slowly got used to the strange call of the donkey, and he again approached the donkey. But the whole time the tiger dared not start a fight with the donkey. Slowly, the tiger approached the donkey again, this time with a more relaxed attitude. He bumped into it gently, then brushed up against it, finally colliding into the donkey to provoke it. The donkey was very upset, and he kicked out at the tiger with his legs. This made the tiger very happy, and thinking to himself, he figured "the donkey's skill is nothing more than this!" So he jumped up, roared loudly, and ripped out the donkey's throat with his powerful bite. The tiger didn't leave until he has eaten all the meat on the donkey.
Later, everyone took this story of the tiger eating the donkey in Guizhou as the chengyu "the Guizhou donkey's skill is all used up." The meaning of this chengyu is that the little skill that people have is already used up and finished. So people say "the Guizhou donkey's skill is all used up."

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1 Although the term 贵州 (guì zhōu) is not mentioned at all in the original Chinese text from which I translated this story, the term 黔 (qián) is used, which means Guizhou province. Most provinces of China have a shorter name, similar to how states in the United States have abbreviations in addition to their full names (NY, CA, etc.), and are just as common, being used on cars' license plates, for instance. However, one difference is that the abbreviations of the States in the U.S. are often logical and easy to guess, but there is nothing in the nature of the shorter names for Chinese provinces that would allow a clever observer to guess the meaning without having some specialized background information, or without knowing the short name already. During my time of studying Chinese, I found some of these short names (not just for provinces, but for institutions and holidays as well) to be very confusing. Sometimes characters with no other meaning are used as the short names of provinces, but sometimes historical kingdoms located in the same area lend their names for this cause. An example of this is the nickname for Shangong Province, 鲁 (lǔ), which was the name of a vassal state in the Zhou dynasty which existed from 1066-221 BC.

2 Chéngyǔ (成语), often translated as a set expression, proverb, or an idiom, is a phrase which consists of four characters, or of two sets of two characters. Chéngyǔ normally make reference to some story or legend, which serves to explain the meaning of the Chéngyǔ. Chéngyǔ serve a more important role in Chinese than equivalent set expressions do in English or in many other languages, and they are often used in normal communication in Chinese. An interesting side effect of the abundance and importance of chéngyǔ in Chinese is the assumption that such idioms are equally important in other languages, resulting in a large market for idiom dictionaries, collections of English idioms, and other reference material that claim to help language learners understand important English idioms. Similarly, chéngyǔ dictionaries, which list many chéngyǔ and their associated stories, are widely available to the student of Chinese. One of the most common idioms among English learners of Chinese is the phrase 马马虎虎 (mǎ ma hū hū) which literally means “horse horse tiger tiger,” but is used to mean not so bad or so-so. Many Chinese people, when asked how their English is will say that it is “Just so-so.”