Su Shi, also known as Zizhan and Dongpo, was a great writer and calligrapher from Meishan in Sichuan during the Northern Song Dynasty. Bold and brilliant, he was exiled to Huangzhou in Hubei, where he twice visited the Red Cliffs outside the city and wrote two masterpieces: *The First Ode to the Red Cliffs* and *The Second Ode to the Red Cliffs*. The phrase "the water receded, revealing the rocks beneath" comes from his description of the river and cliffs in the latter work.
On a crisp October night, the moonlight was exceptionally bright and clear. Su Shi and two friends, enjoying the gentle autumn breeze, strolled outside the city walls in high spirits. The beautiful scene of bright moon and clear wind stirred their poetic inspiration. Gathering with friends and freely sharing their feelings made them forget all worries. They sang poems in harmony, spoke their minds without restraint, and their joy was beyond description.
Su Shi suddenly thought of wine. A lover of fine drink, he believed that a night as beautiful as this deserved a cup of wine and a small dish to truly capture its elegance and charm. His friend mentioned that he had caught a fish that evening, one that looked just like the famed perch from Songjiang, but lamented that they had no wine to complete the feast.
Su Shi rushed home and asked his wife, 'Do we have any wine?' She smiled, brought out a jar she had long kept hidden, and said, 'This is for your unexpected needs.' Overjoyed, Su Shi thanked her repeatedly, took the wine, hurried back to his friends, and went to the Yangtze River shore below Red Cliff, where they boarded a small boat and set off for a leisurely cruise.
In the dead silence of night, the eastward river murmured with a crisp clarity, while thousand-foot cliffs stood sheer as if carved by a blade. Towering peaks loomed, making the moon suspended between them seem small; the receding waters revealed stones that had long lain hidden beneath the surface.
It was this spontaneous excursion that inspired Su Shi to later write his celebrated masterpiece, *The Second Ode to the Red Cliff*.
Later, the idiom "When the Water Recedes, the Rocks Appear" came to be used to describe how the truth will eventually come to light after investigation and verification.
Source: Su Shi (Song Dynasty), *Later Red Cliff Rhapsody*
Meaning of the Idiom: Later, the Chinese idiom "水落石出" came to describe how the truth will eventually come to light after investigation and verification.