开天辟地
- Literal
- opening heaven and splitting earth
- Figurative
- To do something for the first time ever, to open a new era; jokingly, something so rare it has never happened before (开天辟地头一回).
Where does 开天辟地 come from?
It goes back to the myth of Pangu as told in the Sanwu liji by Xu Zheng, of the Three Kingdoms period, a lost work that survives in fragments quoted by later anthologies such as the Yiwen leiju. In the beginning, heaven and earth were a chaos shaped like an egg, and Pangu was born inside it. After eighteen thousand years they came apart: the clear, the yang, became heaven; the murky, the yin, became earth. Each day heaven rose, earth grew thicker, and Pangu grew between them. Today it describes anything without precedent: a historic first or, jokingly, a domestic one.
Source (出处): 徐整《三五历纪》
How is 开天辟地 used? Two examples
- 我爸居然主动下厨做饭，这可是开天辟地头一回。
My dad actually volunteered to cook dinner; that's a first since the dawn of time.
- 村里通了公路，对老人们来说是开天辟地的大事。
For the old folks, the road finally reaching the village was an event unlike anything before it.
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