The Calligrapher — Wáng Xīzhī 王羲之

The 'Sage of Calligraphy'; his running script has set the standard for 1,700 years.

Eastern Jin calligrapher (303–361), master of running script/cursive script/regular script — the Sage of Calligraphy; his Orchid Pavilion Preface is the most celebrated work in the tradition, and nearly every later master traces lineage to his hand. Eastern Jin dynasty

Cultural Story

棠 is the crabapple, and the 甘棠 — the sweet crabapple — is the tree a beloved official planted, which the people spared out of affection for him, so 棠荫 became a metaphor for good rule remembered. 棠棣 names brothers, from a poem of sibling love. The character is governance and kinship in blossom.

Common words & phrases

• 海棠 crabapple · begonia · Chinese flowering apple
• 棠梨 birchleaf pear · wild pear
• 棠树 crabapple tree · begonia tree
• 甘棠 sweet crabapple · cherished memory
• 棠荫 shade of the tree · benevolent rule
• 棠棣 cherry-apple · brothers

Read the story behind the character

棠 is the flowering tree and the kin: 海棠 the crabapple whose pink the poets keep quoting, 棠棣 the literary word for brothers, 甘棠 the phrase for a benefactor's legacy. You meet it in a garden or a classical allusion, rarely at a market. The character is the blossom that stands for rule well-loved.

Why this character belongs on skin

In the old gardens, the crabapple was the aristocrat of spring—棠, the tree that blooms in such pale fire that poets went quiet trying to describe it. The Book of Songs already loved it; Duke Shao held court beneath one, and after he died the people refused to cut the tree, because his goodness lived in its shade. That is a strange and beautiful kind of monument: a man remembered as a tree. Li Qingzhao, half-waking after a night of wine, asked whether the crabapples survived the storm—绿肥红瘦, the green grows plump, the red grows thin—and three words became immortal. This is the flower of tender, slightly tipsy devotion, of things loved enough to be mourned. Spring is brief; that is the whole lesson. To ink 棠 is to carry the blossom out of season, a private April on your skin for every month of the year, and to promise you will love things while they last.