During the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.) in the kingdom of Yueh, there lived a beautiful maiden named Hsi Shih. Every day she would wash cloth by the river, and such was her beauty that it embarrassed the fish, who would dive to the river bottom in her presence.
On another occasion, in order to avoid war, the emperor Han Yuan sent Wang Chao-chun to be the wife of a foreign king. On her way to the foreign kingdom, Wang was spotted by two wild geese in flight, who, stunned by Wang's beauty, promptly fell out of the sky into a forest.
Later, when people wished to describe the looks of a wondrous beauty, they would use the expression, "Sinking fish and falling geese."
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