The Calligrapher — Mǐ Wànzhōng 米万钟

Ming calligrapher of vigorous running script, paired as 'North Mi'.

Ming calligrapher (), master of running script — known for 与董其昌并称. Ming dynasty

Cultural Story

Zhuangzi calls his own writings 卮言 — “wine-cup words” — poured out as freely as a 卮 fills and empties, never the same twice. The 酒卮 was the round lacquer cup at the feast; a 玉卮 the prince's, cool in the hand. The word is the vessel that gives and takes in one motion.

Common words & phrases

• 酒卮 wine cup
• 卮言 random talk · discursive words
• 玉卮 jade cup

Read the story behind the character

A museum cases a 玉卮 from a tomb; 酒卮 is the prop a costume drama lifts at the banquet. 卮言 survives only in a scholar's note on Zhuangzi, a phrase no one speaks. The character meets most readers as a museum label or a classical quote — the cup that taught a philosopher to keep pouring.

Why this character belongs on skin

In Zhuangzi's parables, the 卮 is a wine cup with a cunning property: full, it tilts and spills; empty, it rights itself; half full, it stands balanced. A vessel that punishes excess and rewards measure—the Daoist ethics lesson disguised as drinkware. The character itself is graceful, a seal radical wrapped around an ancient vessel form, redolent of bronze wine cups in lamplit halls where poets traded couplets for refills. Li Bai would have known his 卮 well. To wear this character is to wear a philosophy of appetite: pleasure is not the enemy, extremity is. Fill to the half-line and hold. There is sensuality in that restraint—the connoisseur's slow sip against the drunkard's gulp, the lover's patience against the graze. Ink 卮 where the wrist bends, that natural hinge of reaching and lifting, so every glass raised reminds you of the balance it asks. A small cup, a full life. The ancients drank to that, and so might you.