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

Wu Zetian's poem of longing, the Ruyi Niang, asks her lover to open the case and check the pomegranate skirt, shi liu qun, she wore weeping, the red skirt become the token of her abandoned body. The qun, the skirt, carried a woman's scent and sorrow alike. The character is the lower garment that women made their own.

Common words & phrases

• 裙子 skirt
• 围裙 apron
• 连衣裙 dress
• 裙带 skirt band · nepotism

Read the story behind the character

At the mirror a girl twirls in a qun zi skirt, a cook ties a wei qun apron against the grease, and a bride wears a lian yi qun dress for the photos. The word qun dai names both the skirt's band and the nepotism that rides it. The character is the garment that swings from the waist, domestic or ceremonial.

Why this character belongs on skin

裙 is the skirt, and it is older and more radical than its lace suggests. The character sets the garment radical beside 君 — lord, ruler, the gentleman-king of the Analects — so that in its very bones the word joins cloth to sovereignty. For most of Chinese history the 裙 was not merely women's dress; scholars and officials wore long skirts over their robes, and a beautiful skirt was called 罗裙 when it was silk gauze light enough to move with breath. Poems tracked it: hems sweeping wine from a table, the whisper of pleats on marble stairs, a skirt left behind as the only evidence of someone gone. A skirt is architecture for motion — it turns walking into drift, sitting into pool and spill. To wear 裙 as ink is to claim that grace and command are one garment: that softness, cut correctly, does not ask permission of anyone.