"Turning the smile upside down brings success to the Year of the Horse" — Phrase of the Week
A new twist on an old idiom
Our phrase of the week is: “Turning the smile upside down brings success to the Year of the Horse” (马倒成功 mǎ dào chéng gōng)
Context
“Crying Horse” (哭哭马) is a red toy horse with a downturned, sad-looking mouth. It should have been a “Happy Horse” (笑笑马), but a worker in a Yiwu factory that made the festive toys sewed it on the wrong way up — so it looks like it’s about to burst into tears.
Unaware of the mistake, the factory distributed a small number of the faulty toys, which made their way into shops. A shopper in Hangzhou posted an image online, comparing the horse’s mournful expression to how he feels on his way to work on a Monday morning.
The post went viral, and Crying Horse sold out instantly. The Yiwu factory saw sales surge 300% in just three days, had to open 12 new production lines to cope with demand, and now has orders backed up until March.
And Crying Horse is now one of this year’s defining Horse Year memes. So internet users got to work on the wordplay, with a fresh take on a traditional Horse Year idiom:
“Some netizens said that regular toy horses all look the same, while this Crying Horse with its unintended frown is the limited handmade edition carries a symbolic meaning:
‘Turning the smile upside down brings success to the Year of the Horse’.
Some people even projected onto it the image of a stubborn, downtrodden office worker.”
有网友说正常小马千篇一律，“手工限量版”的哭哭马恰恰寓意着“马倒成功”，还有人把它代入了倔强打工人。
And with that, we have our Sinica Phrase of the Week.
What it means
“Turning the smile upside down brings success to the Year of the Horse” is a playful twist on the classical Chinese idiom, “the arrival of horses brings instant success” (马到成功).
The original is used to wish someone swift success. The kind that comes the moment you show up, before you’ve even broken a sweat. Think of it as the Chinese equivalent of “you’ve got this.”
It’s also a staple of festive greetings at the start of the Year of the Horse, for the obvious horse-related pun.
The idiom’s origins are debated, but the most likely source is a folk legend about Emperor Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇). In 220 BC, the year after unifying China, the emperor travelled to the Mountain of Rongcheng (荣成山), a promontory on the eastern tip of Shandong province, traditionally believed to be where the sun rises first in China. He travelled there to pay homage to the sun and bring good fortune to his new empire.
Along the way, he heard that a colourful mottled stone had been left behind by the goddess Nüwa (女娲) when she patched the sky. So he led his vast army along the specially constructed royal road to pay his respects to the stone.
After returning, things did go smoothly and the realm was at peace. To celebrate, the emperor ordered his officials to compose poems. The court alchemist Xu Fu (徐福) wrote:
“Ten thousand horses and soldiers rode the royal road; Upon Emperor Qin’s prayer to the stone, great victory was bestowed.”
万马千军御驰道，始皇拜石得成功。
But his effort failed to win the emperor’s favour.
It wasn’t until the Yuan Dynasty, roughly 1,500 years later, that the playwright Guan Hanqing (关汉卿) recognised the gem hidden in this story. Drawing on the legend of “the Qin Emperor worshipping the stone” (秦皇拜石), he coined the idiom “the arrival of horses brings instant success” (马到成功).
Over the centuries this idiom became an everyday blessing — the equivalent of wishing someone “all the best” as they start something new. Today it’s one of the most common New Year wishes, especially at the start of the Year of the Horse.
This Horse Year, the idiom has taken on a new meaning thanks to Crying Horse. Netizens swapped one character — "arrive" (到 dào) — for "invert" (倒 dào). Both sound identical, but the swap changes everything, giving the four-character phrase a meaning perfectly suited to this moment: viral success for a sad-looking toy horse whose popularity came about precisely because of its defect.
Which is why we translate the new idiom as: “Turning the smile upside down brings success to the Year of the Horse” (马倒成功).
Andrew Methven is the author of RealTime Mandarin, a resource which helps you bridge the gap to real-world fluency in Mandarin, stay informed about China, and communicate with confidence—all through weekly immersion in real news. Subscribe for free here.
