During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the renowned poet Wang Ji of the Liang Dynasty wrote a five-character poem titled "Entering Ruoye Creek." The poem contained the exquisite lines, "Cicadas chirp, making the forest seem quieter; birds sing, making the mountains feel more secluded," which caused a sensation at the time and was hailed as an unmatched masterpiece.
These two lines reached the Song Dynasty, where the great writer Wang Anshi greatly admired them but felt they were not quite perfect. So in his own poem "Zhongshan Quatrain," he borrowed Wang Ji's line "Birdsong makes the mountain more still," but changed it to "No bird sings, the mountain is more still."
One day, his poet friend Huang Tingjian came to visit. As they drank tea and discussed poetry, the conversation flowed smoothly. In high spirits, Wang Anshi brought out his new work, "Zhongshan Quatrain," for Huang Tingjian to appreciate, and proudly explained his idea of adapting Wang Ji's quatrain.
The poet Huang Tingjian carefully compared the revised lines with the original, realizing that the original brilliantly captured the paradoxical unity of "noise" and "stillness," "song" and "solitude" in a summer mountain forest. When cicadas fill the air, the wind and trees are at their calmest; when birds sing undisturbed, no human stirs. At such a moment, the forest feels most profoundly quiet and deep—truly, this is a case where sound speaks louder than silence.
Huang Tingjian couldn't help but applaud Wang Ji's technique of using sound to accentuate silence. He then said to Wang Anshi with a smile, "This is the hand that turns gold into iron," meaning, "Wang Anshi, your revision is like turning gold into iron."
Later, people often used the idiom "turning gold into iron" to describe ruining someone else's good writing.
Source: *Gujin Tan Gai*, Chapter "Sea of Suffering"
Meaning of the Idiom: Later, the Chinese idiom "点金成铁" came to describe ruining someone else's good writing.