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

Wang Bo's Preface to the Tengwang Pavilion declares the pavilion girds the three rivers and belts the five lakes, jin san jiang er dai wu hu, the jin here the front of the garment thrown open to embrace a landscape. The lapel became the poet's image for a mind that could gather a whole region to its breast.

Common words & phrases

• 衣襟 lapel · front of a garment
• 胸襟 breadth of mind · heart
• 襟懷 heart · feelings · tolerance

Read the story behind the character

Beneath the tie the shirt's yi jin, the lapel, sits at the throat, and a eulogy praises the dead man's xiong jin, the breadth of his heart, and his jin huai, his tolerant feelings. The character is the front fold of the clothes and, by extension, the chest that opens to the world or closes against it.

Why this character belongs on skin

襟 is the lapel of a robe—the crossing cloth over the chest, the part of a garment nearest the heart. From that intimate strip of silk, the language grew its finest figures: 胸襟, the breast's breadth, meaning the largeness of a soul; open-hearted, honest, bared. Confucians judged character by what a person kept close to the chest and what they let lie open. To loosen one's lapel in classical verse is to be undone by wine, moonlight, or love—to be, briefly, unguarded. There is an old, quiet eroticism in the image: the V of cloth, the warmth beneath, the few fingers' width where a person allows the world near their heartbeat. This character asks a flattering question—how wide is your 襟? Can it hold strangers, griefs, other people's weather? Ink it over the sternum, at the exact place a robe crosses, and let it keep that crossing open: an unbuttoned gate at the center of you, through which everything worth feeling will enter.