The Calligrapher — Sū Shì 苏轼

Song literatus whose spontaneous running script shaped the literati ideal.

Song calligrapher (1037–1101), master of running script/regular script — Song poet-statesman and polymath whose expressive running script made personality, not rules, the point. Song dynasty

Cultural Story

Mencius urged King Hui of Liang to let the people raise ji tun, fowls and pigs, so that the old might eat meat and not be cast aside. The character tun is that small pork, the suckling the farmer fattens against the festival. From the ruler's duty to the hearth the same stroke named the he tun, the pufferfish Su Shi risked his life to praise at the table.

Common words & phrases

• 海豚 dolphin
• 河豚 pufferfish · globefish
• 豚肉 pork
• 豚鼠 guinea pig

Read the story behind the character

A sushi bar serves he tun sliced thin by a licensed hand, and a nature film follows hai tun leaping the bow wave. The market weighs tun rou for the pot, and a lab names the tun shu in a test. The character tun still runs from the delicacy to the dolphin, the little pig of the sea and the farm both.

Why this character belongs on skin

Before the altar, the 豚 was the humble gift—the small pig offered when there was nothing greater to give, and that was enough. In the Classic of Poetry a man feeds his pig and his neighbors, and the warmth of the hearth is the beginning of all civilization. The character wears the pig radical like a crown of stubborn, earthly life: unpretentious, fertile, content in the mud that the poets would call holy. To ink 豚 is to claim the ordinary abundance of being alive—the full belly, the small pleasures, the refusal to apologize for wanting more than survival. Christianity has its loaves and fishes; the farmer has his pig. Both are miracles of enough. There is a warrior's courage in simply thriving where you were planted. Let this little beast curl at your wrist or your side as a blessing on the modest, mighty art of staying fed and glad.