The Calligrapher — Wáng Dǎo 王导

Eastern Jin statesman and calligrapher of running script, uncle of Wang Xizhi.

Eastern Jin calligrapher (), master of running script — known for 琅琊王氏之祖. Eastern Jin dynasty

Cultural Story

A spoken character, 搬 is the carry from one place to another, the chest 搬ed across the threshold at the wedding, the stone 搬ed to build the wall. The books said 移 or 運; 搬 is the plainer haul, the one the removal man owns, and the chest across the threshold was the bride's whole childhood, re-hauled by strangers who would not be invited to the dinner.

Common words & phrases

• 搬家 move house
• 搬运 carry · transport
• 搬动 move · shift
• 搬迁 relocate · move
• 搬弄 fiddle with · gossip

Read the story behind the character

You 搬家 across the city; a porter 搬運s the crates; a firm 搬遷s; a gossip 搬弄s the tale. The threshold is an office now. The haul from place to place is the same, whether it shifts a home, a cargo, or merely a rumour from one ear to the next, and the tale is only the chest, lighter and far more often opened.

Why this character belongs on skin

Every life has a day when everything you own is in boxes and the door stands open. 搬 is that day: to move house, to carry off, the whole blunt labor of uprooting — hands under furniture, boxes down stairs, a life disassembled and reassembled in rooms that smell of someone else's cooking. The hand radical works again; this is physical character, honest as sweat. But the Chinese also say 搬弄 and mean meddling, words moved like furniture into the wrong rooms — and 搬起石头砸自己的脚, lifting a rock only to drop it on your own foot, their version of the boomerang. So the character knows both migration and consequence, the leaving and the lesson. Nomads, immigrants, the twice-divorced, the twenty-year-old with two suitcases and one address book: all of them are 搬. It is one of the bravest verbs there is. Wear it if you have ever started over. The ink says what the U-Haul could not: you left, and you became.