The Calligrapher — Yán Zhēnqīng 颜真卿

Tang master of robust regular script; co-creator of the enduring 'Yan style'.

Tang calligrapher (709–784), master of regular script/running script — the Tang moral paragon whose upright, muscular regular script became the model of Chinese integrity in writing. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

嘴 began life as 觜, the sharp beak of a bird and the name of a star in the Hyades, only later shifting under the brush to 嘴 with the mouth radical to mean any mouth or spout. In the classics one more often met 口, yet the image behind 嘴 was always the pointed bill — the part that bites, feeds, and sings. Folk speech loved 嘴 for its concreteness, and it crept from the farmyard into the house, naming the lips, the spout, and the talkative opening of a person.

Common words & phrases

• 嘴巴 mouth
• 嘴唇 lips
• 嘴角 corner of mouth
• 嘴脸 countenance · features · look
• 张嘴 open mouth

Read the story behind the character

A toddler's 嘴巴 (mouth) is smeared with ice cream; a kiss lands on 嘴唇 (lips), and a smile curls the 嘴角 (corner of mouth). People judge a 嘴臉 (countenance, look) in a debate, and a doctor says 張嘴 (open mouth) to check the throat. 嘴 is the everyday word for the mouth and the face it sits in — eating, kissing, grinning, or talking, the feature that shows most of who we are.

Why this character belongs on skin

The character 嘴 names the mouth, but its radical is not speech—it is 口, and around it clusters everything a mouth does besides talk: taste, kiss, whistle, the corner-of-the-lip smile that gives you away before you say a word. Chinese usage extends it outward, the way English does: the mouth of a river, the mouth of a bottle, the beak of a bird—all the places where the inside of a thing meets the world. Think what passes through this small gate in one lifetime: every meal, every confession, every lie you regret, every sentence that changed everything. The mouth is where desire becomes audible. It deserves a character of its own on the skin, close to the pulse of the jaw. Let it be a seal on the promises you mean, and a warning to the ones you don't.