The Calligrapher — Huáng Tíngjiān 黄庭坚
Song master of elongated, radical running and cursive script.
Song calligrapher (1045–1105), master of running script/cursive script — Song master of long, sweeping, deliberately stretched running strokes. Song dynasty
Cultural Story
Pi is fired brick, the builder's word. Its great story is Tao Kan, exiled to a quiet border post, who hauled a hundred bricks 陶甓 from courtyard to doorstep each dawn and back each dusk — keeping his body hard and his ambitions from softening in idle ease.
Common words & phrases
- 瓴甓 tile · brick
- 甓瓦 bricks and tiles
- 陶甓 earthen brick
Read the story behind the character
The character itself went rare, surviving in compounds like 瓴甓 and 甓瓦, brick and tile, found in classical-building vocabulary and old texts. But the discipline it memorialized never expired; schoolteachers still tell the brick-hauling general's story as a lesson against laziness.
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