The Calligrapher — Zhèng Fú 郑簠

Qing clerical-script pioneer who revived Han steles, hailed 'first in clerical of all ages'.

Qing calligrapher (), master of clerical script — known for 清隶复兴先驱. Qing dynasty

Cultural Story

Hong Hao, a Song envoy held in the north, smuggled watermelon seeds home and so planted the xi gua that spread across the southern farms, the fruit named for the western road it travelled. The melon is a small monument to one man's pocketful of seeds. The character is the direction the fruit came from.

Common words & phrases

• 西方 west · the West · occident
• 东西 thing · stuff · goods · east and west
• 西瓜 watermelon · water melon · watermelon fruit
• 广西 Guangxi · Guangxi region · Guangxi region
• 西药 Western medicine · allopathic medicine · Western drug
• 西边 western side · the west · western part

Read the story behind the character

A market stacks xi gua, watermelons, by the ton in summer, and a shopper says the xi fang, the West, makes the phone she holds. She buys xi yao, Western medicine, at the counter, lives in Guang xi, and points xi bian, to the western side, of the square. The character is west, the fruit, and the foreign alike.

Why this character belongs on skin

The sun always ends in the west. 西 is the west — the direction of dusk, of homecoming, of the land beyond the mountains where the light goes to rest. The old pictograph shows a bird in a nest, settled for the night; the journey's close. For Americans the West was once the frontier, the wild edge of promise; for the Chinese it was the far country of strangers and silk. To wear 西 is to carry a direction in the body, a quiet pull toward the place the day surrenders. It is a mark for the wanderer, the one who measures life by horizons. On the skin it sits like a final window — a reminder that every road, however long, bends toward the evening, and that resting, too, is a kind of arrival.