开门见山
- Literal
- to open the door and see the mountain
- Figurative
- To get straight to the point, with no preamble or throat-clearing: to say the important thing in the very first sentence.
Where does 开门见山 come from?
The phrase starts out as literary criticism. Yan Yu, a poet and critic of the Song dynasty, writes in his 《沧浪诗话》, weighing up Li Bai's verse, that his opening lines are a matter of "opening the door and seeing the mountain": the poem is into its subject by the first line, with no throat-clearing. The image is a house with no courtyard and no hallway, the mountain standing right there the moment the door swings open. From praise for a poetic manner it passed into ordinary speech, and today it is heard mostly about how an article, an email or a meeting opens, and about people who put a matter on the table without circling it.
Source (出处): 严羽《沧浪诗话》
How is 开门见山 used? Two examples
- 时间不多，我就开门见山地说吧。
We don't have much time, so let me get straight to the point.
- 他这封邮件开门见山，第一句就把问题说清楚了。
His email gets right to it — the first sentence already spells out the problem.
In Wanyu, all 400 chengyu have audio on every sentence, and you can save them to your decks and review them with spaced repetition. Free.
