History
萬人之敵
A Match for Ten Thousand
Korean: 만인지적Japanese: 万人の敵（ばんにんのてき）Pinyin: wàn rén zhī dí
Meaning
Prowess worth ten thousand men — an individual so formidable they count as an army.
Origin story
Guan Yu and Zhang Fei guarded Liu Bei’s side from the days when he was nobody. Guan Yu took the enemy general Yan Liang’s head from the middle of an army; Zhang Fei alone halted Cao Cao’s pursuit at Changban Bridge. The historian Chen Shou judged them "men to match ten thousand, tiger ministers of their age." Even the ministers of rival Wei and Wu, records say, warily called the pair wanren-zhi-di. The phrase became the byword for valor that turns a battle single-handedly.
Source: Records of the Three Kingdoms — Biographies of Guan, Zhang, Ma, Huang, Zhao
People
Modern examples
- That ace is a one-man army, the kind who flips a game single-handedly.
- In an outage, that senior engineer is worth ten thousand — the whole war changes when she logs on.