草船借箭
Borrowing Arrows with Straw Boats
Meaning
Borrowing the enemy’s arrows with straw-covered boats — turning an opponent’s own attack and resources to your advantage.
Origin story
Jealous of Zhuge Liang’s genius, Zhou Yu assigned him an impossible task: produce a hundred thousand arrows within ten days. Zhuge Liang calmly promised three, signing a military pledge on his life. He lined twenty boats with dense bundles of straw under blue canopies. Before dawn on the third day, thick fog blanketed the river; he sailed the boats up to Cao Cao’s naval camp with drums pounding and war cries roaring. Fearing an ambush in the mist, Cao Cao answered only with volleys of arrows — over a hundred thousand of which lodged in the straw. "Thank you for the arrows, Chancellor!" the crews shouted as they slipped away. One of the novel’s greatest scenes (the histories tell a similar tale of Sun Quan).
Source: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ch. 46 (the historical version involves Sun Quan)
People
Modern examples
- They turned the flood of hate comments into free publicity — borrowing arrows with straw boats.
- Building the new product on a rival’s published patents was a straw-boat raid for arrows.