The Calligrapher — Lǐ Yōng 李邕

Tang running-script master famed for his stele inscriptions.

Tang calligrapher (678–747), master of running script — known for 《麓山寺碑》（李北海）. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

萋 doubles itself — 萋萋 — to render grass at summer's peak, dense, lush, unstoppable. The Book of Songs used it for a parting wife's kitchen-garden leaves; Cui Hao fixed it in the Yellow Crane Tower poem's most-quoted line, '芳草萋萋鹦鹉洲', fragrant grass growing thick on Parrot Isle while the poet fails to see his hometown. Since then 萋萋 has meant greenness with homesickness folded inside.

Common words & phrases

• 萋萋 luxuriant · lush
• 芳草萋萋 luxuriant fragrant grass

Read the story behind the character

Back from a month away, she finds the lawn 萋萋 to the knees — the mower's first pull sounds like an apology. A school essay on the Yellow Crane Tower quotes 芳草萋萋 and confesses the class visited Parrot Isle last spring, grass still winning. A nature documentary's narrator, describing an abandoned village swallowed by 萋萋 growth, borrows the whole classical register without citing anyone.

Why this character belongs on skin

Lush, lush the green—it is one of the oldest sighs in Chinese poetry. Qi describes grasses so thick and tender they seem to breathe, and the poems always reach for it at the edge of parting. In the Book of Songs it is the fern shoots gathered by hands that ache with missing someone. A thousand years later Cui Hao stood on the Yellow Crane Tower and watched 'the grasses on Parrot Isle, lush and lush'—qi qi—and felt his home, unfetchable, rise like a mist. So this character is greenness braided with longing: the world at its most alive when you most feel the distance of what you love. That is not a contradiction; it is the human condition, and this single syllable holds it. To wear qi is to admit that abundance and ache arrive together, that the meadow of June is also the meadow of farewell. It suits someone who has loved across a distance—of sea, of death, of years. Wear the dense grass. Let it grow over the places that hurt, green and relentless.