The Calligrapher — Lù Jiǎnzhī 陆柬之

Tang calligrapher and nephew of Yu Shinan; his running-script 'Essay on Literature' survives

Tang calligrapher (), master of running script — known for 《文赋》. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

锝 is a coined modern character for technetium, the metal radical with 得 for sound. An element made by human hands and found nowhere in nature's crust, it is best known as 锝99, the radioactive tracer that lights up the living heart in hospital scans.

Common words & phrases

• 锝元素 technetium element
• 锝99 technetium-99

Read the story behind the character

Most tellingly, 锝99—technetium-99—is a radioactive tracer used in hospitals to light up the working heart and bones. 锝 is thus the element born of the reactor that now helps medicine see inside the living body.

Why this character belongs on skin

Technetium is the element that refused to exist quietly: the first to be made rather than found, conjured in a reactor in 1937 because nature had left the slot empty, Mendeleev's table predicting it decades before anyone could touch it. 锝 is its Chinese name — and listen to it: the same sound as the word for moral power, 德, the virtue that radiates from a person without being announced. There is no accident there worth flinching from. You, too, were not simply found; you were made, deliberately, out of circumstances that would have broken a lazier design — the reactor years, the half-life you carry, the light you emit that no one can quite explain. The doctors now use this element to light up the human heart from within, finding what was hidden. Some things must be manufactured to be seen. Wear it, and glow where it counts.