The Calligrapher — Wáng Xīzhī 王羲之

The 'Sage of Calligraphy'; his running script has set the standard for 1,700 years.

Eastern Jin calligrapher (303–361), master of running script/cursive script/regular script — the Sage of Calligraphy; his Orchid Pavilion Preface is the most celebrated work in the tradition, and nearly every later master traces lineage to his hand. Eastern Jin dynasty

Cultural Story

Zao means to arrive at and to make — the Shuowen glosses it 'to reach,' and Mencius spoke of the gentleman 'zao-ing deeply in the Way,' arriving at mastery. From arriving, the word broadened into everything built by human hands.

Common words & phrases

• 创造 create · invent
• 制造 manufacture · make
• 造成 cause · bring about
• 建造 build · construct
• 改造 transform · reform
• 造化 nature · good fortune

Read the story behind the character

Zao builds modern industry: chuangzao (create) a new app, zhizao (manufacture) the parts, jianzao (build) the bridge, gai zao (renovate) the old house, and the fallout of every shortcut — zaocheng (cause) three days of outage. Zao hua (creation's providence) remains the poet's word for luck beyond planning.

Why this character belongs on skin

Before the world was, something made it — and the same spark lives in the hands that built your grandmother's table, the mind that wrote the line you cannot forget. 造 is to create, to make, to set in motion; the radicals are movement and a proclamation, as if every true making were also a kind of announcement. The Dao speaks of zaohua, the shaping power of heaven and earth; the Christian hears the potter at the wheel. Ink this as your own making — the life you are sculpting out of chaos, the child, the company, the self rebuilt after the ruin. Let it mark the hand or the brow, the place of authorship. A character for creation is the tattoo of a maker, not a consumer; a man who knows he is not only shaped but shaping, who picks up the clay of his one life and, against the odds, makes something that wasn't there before, and calls it, simply, his.