Chen Yu Luo Yan, Bi Yue Xiu Hua

The expression “The fish drown, the birds descend, the moon hides, and flowers are outdone” is a chain of extravagant images used to describe the beauty of the two Qiao sisters. In Kong Ming’s speech to Zhou Yu, it turns their appearance into a persuasive device: he claims that Cao Cao wants them so intensely that his vast military campaign is merely a pretext for possessing them.

The Expression in Context

Kong Ming presents the sisters as women whose beauty can unsettle the natural world: birds descend to look at them, fish drown from shame, the moon hides, and flowers seem surpassed. The images escalate from animals to the moon and flowers, making the praise sound less like measured description than a deliberately sweeping claim.

The formula belongs to a calculated argument. Kong Ming says Cao Cao is building the Bronze Bird Tower to house the most beautiful women in the land, and alleges that Cao Cao particularly desires the Qiao sisters. He frames the campaign as a scheme to seize them, then urges Zhou Yu to ask their father to give them to Cao Cao. The extravagant praise thus supports a provocative political inference rather than standing alone as a portrait.

Persuasion and Effect

Zhou Yu asks how Cao Cao’s supposed desire can be proved. Kong Ming answers that Cao Cao’s son Zhi was commissioned to write the Bronze Bird Tower Poem, and begins reciting it from memory. The beauty formula prepares the ground for that appeal: it gives the sisters a legendary scale of attractiveness before Kong Ming invokes the poem as evidence for Cao Cao’s intentions.

The passage’s rhetoric depends on contrast. Sending two women, Kong Ming has argued, would be like losing a leaf from a great tree or a few grains from a storehouse; yet he claims Cao Cao would then leave satisfied. The images of impossible beauty make that claim vivid, while the proposed exchange reduces the stakes of Zhou Yu’s resistance to a personal concession. The expression therefore helps turn praise into political pressure.