The Calligrapher — Kāng Yǒuwéi 康有为

Qing reformer and theorist who championed stele-based calligraphy.

Qing calligrapher (), master of regular script — Qing reformer-scholar who championed the rugged stele-school aesthetic. Qing dynasty

Cultural Story

Zhuangzi tells of two tiny kingdoms, chu and man, that warred forever on the horns of a single snail, a parable that shrinks human ambition to the size of a nuisance. The character chu, to touch or strike, here names the pettiest of contacts become violent. Built from a horn and an insect's feeler, chu always carries that charge of something met at the surfaces, whether a body, a law, or a foolish quarrel.

Common words & phrases

• 接触 to contact · to touch
• 触摸 to touch · to feel
• 触动 to touch · to move · to stir
• 触角 antenna · feeler
• 触犯 to offend · to violate

Read the story behind the character

You jie chu, make contact with, a colleague's hand; a child chu mo, touches, a tablet screen; a post chu dong, moves, a reader to tears. An insect's chu jiao, antennae, probe the air, and a driver who chu fan, violates, a red light faces a fine. The character runs from the literal fingertip to the legal boundary to the sudden pang of feeling, every kind of meeting that happens at the edge of something, where one thing first knows another.

Why this character belongs on skin

触 is the character of contact — the instant one thing meets another and both are changed. Its horn radical recalls its oldest work: an ox touching with its horn, a gentle nudge that could gore if careless. From that animal caution the word grew to mean all touching, and then, remarkably, all feeling — 触动, to be touched and moved; 触觉, the sense of touch itself; 触景生情, to meet a scene and have feeling rise in answer. The Buddhists placed touch first among the senses that knot the world to the mind, and the physicians of the heart agreed: nothing heals, nothing wounds, except by contact. Skin is the body's largest scripture, written on constantly and rarely read. To wear 触 is to vow against the armor — to keep arriving at the world barehanded, letting people and weather and music actually land, and trusting that what touches you honestly will move you rightly.