Metaphor is the way we live by and the basis for human cognition,thinking,experience,language and even acts.It is the basic mechanism with which we construct cognitive domains and understand abstract concepts.Death,as one of the basic dimensions of our life,is also fundamentally metaphorical because people are likely to represent it metaphorically.The article is tentative to test the universal nature of metaphorical thinking by carrying out a cross-cultural study of the metaphorical representation of death in Chinese and English.