This term describes the act of painting on a multicolored feather. Metaphorically, it means a love of ostentatious adornment in writing. Zhuangzi (369?-286 BC), by referring to the imaginary act of putting a pictorial pattern on a colored feather, contended that Confucius (551-479 BC) placed too much emphasis on education, thus killing the natural goodness of human beings and impairing the simple yet beautiful state of human society, confounding his original aspiration. Liu Xie (465?-520? or 532?) of the Southern Dynasties used this same example to hint at the harmful convention of excessively pursuing formal beauty in writing and other art forms at the price of natural beauty. He adopted the Confucian position of “matching form with substance,” and set forth the principle of unity between rhetoric and meaning, thus forming the classic aesthetic of “balanced harmony.”

Confucius overestimates the value of adornment in writing and makes much of flowery wording. He mistakes insignificant details for the main message and shows off his skill at adding art to a natural flow of writing, not knowing that all this would lead to the opposite instead of winning trust. Zhuangzi

The literati love to pursue novelty; they are obsessed with pomposity and grotesqueness. But this deviates so far from the essence of writing as to be appallingly erroneous, like painting a pictorial pattern on a multihued feather or performing embroidery on an already decorated waist strap or hand towel. Liu Xie: The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons