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

粕 is the dregs left after brewing — grain lees fit for pigs, never for guests. Critics reached for it when dismissing derivative verse and idle commentary, and the modern formula 取其精华、去其糟粕 — keep the essence, discard the dregs — turned the brewer's waste into a standing test for judging any tradition or text.

Common words & phrases

• 糟粕 dregs · refuse · dross

Read the story behind the character

The phrase 取其精华、去其糟粕 is how teachers and netizens approach tradition, foreign culture and old TV shows alike: keep the good, dump the rest. Forum debates write off outdated customs as 糟粕, and health bloggers dismiss instant noodles as empty residue — brewing lees now a metaphor for everything worthless.

Why this character belongs on skin

Every wine remembers its lees. Po, the dregs, is what remains in the vat after the good has been drawn off—the sediment, the chaff, the part even the hungry decline. Its radical is rice; its fate is to be left behind. The classic phrase pairs it with what is fine: take the essence, discard the dregs, an instruction every student of anything eventually must follow. But stay with the dregs a moment. Fermentation, the ancient texts knew, happens down there in the sediment; flavor lives in the lees; winemakers speak of time on the lees as time of deepening. What is discarded is not always worthless—sometimes it is merely finished, or merely unfashionable, or merely true in a way comfort cannot drink. As ink, po is a sly, humble crest: a mark for those who have been someone's leftover and know the sediment holds its own vintage. It says the vat does not define the wine. Even dregs have their season, and the tide that churns the sea of desire has carried stranger things ashore.