The Calligrapher — Liǔ Gōngquán 柳公权

Tang regular-script master famed for 'bones' of strength; rival to Yan Zhenqing.

Tang calligrapher (778–865), master of regular script — Tang master of bone-strength regular script, paired forever with Yan Zhenqing as 'Yan sinew, Liu bone'. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

欤 was a gentle sentence-final particle, the classical oh that turned a statement into a musing or a question. The Analects and other texts used it to lift the voice in wonder or doubt, as if saying 'is it not so?' The Shuowen treats it as a tone-marking word, never a thing but a breath at the end of thought, the punctuation of antique speech.

Common words & phrases

• 猗欤 oh! · alas

Read the story behind the character

Modern readers meet 欤 almost only in old texts and solemn writing: a scholar intones 猗欤 oh! in praise of a hero, a student parses 欤 in a Confucian passage, and a calligrapher copies a line ending in the particle. Though we no longer speak it aloud, the character survives in classical quotations and the rare literary flourish, a faint sigh from two thousand years of Chinese prose.