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Wiktionary
powder keg

n. 1 A barrel containing gunpowder. 2 (context figuratively English) An explosive or otherwise volatile situation.

WordNet
powder keg
  1. n. a potentially explosive state

  2. keg (usually made of metal) for gunpowder or blasting powder

Wikipedia
Powder keg

A powder keg is a barrel of gunpowder. The powder keg was the primary method for storing and transporting large quantities of black powder until the 1870s and the adoption of the modern cased bullet. However, the barrels had to be handled with care, since a spark or other source of heat could cause the contents to deflagrate.

Usage examples of "powder keg".

Though most of the grislier reminders of that retreat had rotted away over the years, still did odd artifacts crop up now and thena skull of horse or man here, part of a rusty, broken blade there, a scattering of round stone balls for an old-fashioned perrier-cannon scattered among roadside weeds, a verdigrised copper hoop still encircling the smashed and rotten staves of a powder keg in the mud of a watery ditch.

Perhaps the other end of the fuse had been plucked from the bung-hole of the powder keg.

A hundred odd feet of hose, carefully coiled, lay on the deck, and one end disappeared into a powder keg covered over with canvas which the gunner was smearing thickly with pitch.

From its appearance it might have been a powder keg, but the merry twinkle in the Colonel's eyes showed that the cask contained something as precious, perhaps, as powder, but not quite so dangerous.

They're as dangerous as a pissed priest with a candle in his arse sitting on a half-full powder keg.

He made sure that both were loaded and primed, and that the powder keg was full and the powder dry.

The smell of roast flesh hung in the air, like the stench of the burning bodies after Talavera, but that, Sharpe remembered, had been a mistake, an accident of wind and flame, while this chaos, this glimpse of damnation, had been caused by a powder keg that Sharpe had caused to be pierced and trailed to the cathedral's door.

Though most of the grislier reminders of that retreat had rotted away over the years, still did odd artifacts crop up now and then-a skull of horse or man here, part of a rusty, broken blade there, a scattering of round stone balls for an old-fashioned perrier-cannon scattered among roadside weeds, a verdigrised copper hoop still encircling the smashed and rotten staves of a powder keg in the mud of a watery ditch.

China is a powder keg, ready for some unscrupulous rogue to set it off.