The Calligrapher — Cài Xiāng 蔡襄

One of the Four Song masters, known for graceful regular and running script.

Song calligrapher (1012–1067), master of regular script/running script — Song master of warm, disciplined regular script, the most 'proper' of the Song Four. Song dynasty

Cultural Story

In the Han histories, convicts wore 赭衣, reddish-brown garments, so many after harsh laws that the chronicler said their ochre filled the roads. 赭石, the mineral pigment, gave both the prison cloth and the painter's earth tone its color. A single muddy red marked the criminal and the cliff. The same mineral that marked a convict tints a painter's quiet earth.

Common words & phrases

• 赭石 ochre · a mineral pigment
• 赭色 reddish brown
• 赭红 reddish brown · russet

Read the story behind the character

At an artist's studio, a painter squeezes 赭石, ochre, onto a palette to ground a landscape in 赭色, reddish brown, earth. A hiker notes the 赭红, russet, of canyon walls at dusk. The pigment that dyed a prisoner's robe now tints canvases and the stone of the desert. The canyon and the palette share the prisoner's stubborn, muddy red.

Why this character belongs on skin

Ochre is the oldest human color. Before there was writing, there was this red-brown dust, ground and mixed, pressed into cave walls at Lascaux, dusted over the bones of the dead so they would not leave the world unadorned. The character names that earth, and the earth surrenders its name gladly. Buddhism found ochre in the robes of monks, the faded red of things that renounce show. Yet it is a sensual color too, the shade of sunburnt shoulders, of terracotta warm at midnight, of clay that has held water and people for a thousand years. To wear it is to claim descent from the first artists, the ones who touched pigment to stone and made time stop pretending. Earth tone, earth truth: you are dust, and you are the one painting. Put it low, near the hip, where the body itself goes red-gold in summer.