👍 Did the Thumbs-Up Gesture Exist in Traditional China?

In modern Korean culture, people often say “ddabong!” while raising their thumb to praise someone in casual situations. This article traces the origins of the thumbs-up gesture in East Asian classical literature.

0. The Etymology of “Ddabong” and Some Questions

First, the origin of the word “ddabong” (따봉) itself is clear. “Ddabong” comes from the Portuguese phrase “Está bom!” meaning “That’s good!”, or more precisely its colloquial contraction “Tá bom!” The Portuguese connection stems from Brazil. Last century, a television commercial for Brazilian orange juice became hugely popular in South Korea, and the phrase “Tá bom!” from the ad became embedded in Korean and is still used today.

The origin of the thumbs-up gesture itself also seems clear at first glance. It’s commonly believed that in ancient Roman arenas, spectators raised their thumbs to spare a gladiator’s life and lowered them to condemn him to death. However, this has now been proven false. According to a 2017 TIME article, raising the thumb actually meant killing the gladiator. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of “thumbs-up” to Arthur Guy Empey’s 1917 book Over the Top. Empey, an American who served in the British Army during World War I, recorded that British soldiers used the thumbs-up gesture to indicate that “everything is fine with me.” But was this really the world’s first instance? Moreover, while “thumbs-up” shares a positive connotation with Korean “ddabong,” there’s a semantic difference: “thumbs-up” indicates that one’s own situation is fine, while “ddabong” is used to praise someone else. Therefore, Western—particularly Anglo-American—explanations alone cannot fully account for the meaning of the thumbs-up gesture in East Asian culture.

1. The Thumbs-Up Gesture in 19th-Century Chinese Fiction

To trace the origins of the thumbs-up gesture in East Asia, I searched the Chinese Text Project (CTP). I initially searched for classical Chinese terms for “thumb”: 巨指 (jùzhǐ, “giant finger”) and 大指 (dàzhǐ, “big finger”), as well as the later expression 大拇指 (dàmuzhǐ, “big thumb-finger”), but found no descriptions of the thumbs-up gesture in the formally curated texts on CTP.

I then expanded my search to include texts in the CTP wiki section and finally found something. After reading through sentences mentioning thumbs one by one, I discovered that the thumbs-up gesture appears primarily in late Qing dynasty novels. The earliest instance appears to be in Chen Sen’s 1837 novel Pinhua Baojian (品花寶鑒, Precious Mirror of Ranking Flowers). In chapter 18 of this novel, a character raises his thumb (豎起大拇指, “erected his big thumb”) to praise someone. So the thumbs-up gesture was definitely in use in China by the mid-19th century.

Can we trace it back even further? It’s notable that 18th-century novels The Scholars (Rulin Waishi) and Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou Meng) contain no descriptions of this gesture. Of course, the absence of the gesture in these two novels doesn’t prove it didn’t exist at the time. However, both works are voluminous with rich descriptions, so if the practice of raising one’s thumb to praise someone had been common, it likely would have appeared at least once. Therefore, it seems difficult to argue that the thumbs-up gesture existed as a custom before the 18th century.

2. Jubai (巨擘): Mencius’s Thumb Metaphor

We’ve established that the thumbs-up gesture appears in Chinese novels in the 19th century, during the late Qing dynasty. However, the linguistic practice of comparing an outstanding person to a thumb can be traced back much earlier. Another term for thumb is 巨擘 (jubai, literally “giant thumb”). In the “Teng Wen Gong II” chapter of Mencius, Mencius says, “Among the scholars of Qi, Chen Zhongzi should be called the jubai.” In other words, the metaphor of comparing the most outstanding person to a thumb can be traced all the way back to the Warring States period (4th century BCE).

However, the word jubai never became widespread. Searching the formally curated texts on CTP yields only the instance from Mencius. To find more obscure texts, I turned to Scripta Sinica, where I found that Li Xinchuan (李心傳, 1167–1243), a Song dynasty scholar, used the phrase “the jubai among historians” (史家之巨擘) in his work Jianyan Yilai Chaoye Zaji (建炎以來朝野雜記, Miscellaneous Records of Court and Country Since the Jianyan Era). This is the earliest usage after Mencius.

3. Conclusion

To summarize: before the Anglo-American “thumbs-up,” China had a thumbs-up gesture for praising others in the 19th century during the late Qing dynasty. Whether this gesture existed even earlier is difficult to confirm, but the linguistic practice of comparing outstanding individuals to thumbs dates back to the 4th century BCE. While it’s hard to confirm whether this usage continued consistently, it can be found sporadically in texts from at least the 12th century onward.