The Calligrapher — Zhāng Cóngshēn 张从申

Tang running-script master who followed Wang Xizhi, likened to Li Yong in brushwork.

Tang calligrapher (), master of running script — known for 《玄静先生碑》. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

Take the hoof, and the character 蹄 is the hard casing at the end of a horse's leg, written with the foot radical and the sound of 帝. From it comes 马蹄, the horse's hoof, and 猪蹄, the pig's trotter braised in southern markets. There is even 蹄筋, the tendon prized for its chew. In Cantonese cooking 马蹄 names the water chestnut, crisp and white, made into 马蹄糕, a clear steamed cake.

Common words & phrases

• 马蹄 horse hoof
• 猪蹄 pig's trotter
• 蹄筋 tendon

Read the story behind the character

At the night market a stall sells 猪蹄 glazed in soy, the trotters stacked in a steam tray beside sticks of 蹄筋. A tourist mistakes the label and is told, laughing, that 马蹄 is not meat at all but the water chestnut, the same word with different hooves. He buys a square of 马蹄糕 anyway, cool and sweet, and eats it standing under the fluorescent lamps.

Why this character belongs on skin

The character 蹄 is the foot radical joined to an emperor: hoof, the hard hoofbeat drum of a horse in full flight. Its classical life is vigorous and slightly sly—the idiom for a horse galloping so fast its hooves never seem to touch the dust, and an old fable of a north-country man whose lost horse ran off, then returned leading better horses, so that fortune and misfortune turned out to be the same hoofprint. That is the wisdom folded into this word: the sound that once meant disaster can turn out to be rescue arriving at speed. There is wildness in it too, the animal part of us that wants open ground and wind in the face. You have some of that still, whoever told you otherwise. This ink is for the part of you that does not trot. It gallops.