The Calligrapher — Wáng Duó 王铎

Late-Ming cursive master of monumental, turbulent brushwork.

明末清初 calligrapher (1592–1652), master of cursive script/running script — late-Ming master of wet-ink, falling-and-rising running cursive. late Ming–early Qing

Cultural Story

乃 is a curved stroke the 說文 reads as thus, thereupon, the word a historian used to turn a page: and so it happened. The 史記 loves it, 乃下令, and then he gave the order. 乃父 addressed a son's dead father with formal respect. It is the connective sigh of old prose, the hinge between event and consequence, rarely heard now except in tombs and edicts.

Common words & phrases

• 乃是 is · turns out to be
• 乃至 and even · down to
• 乃尔 like this · to such an extent
• 乃父 your late father (classical)

Read the story behind the character

乃是 shows up in written explanations, 其本质乃是, its nature is in fact. 乃至 stretches a list to its extreme, 全村乃至全县. The lone 乃 is a literary fossil, the kind of word a news commentator reaches for to sound weighty. You will not hear it at a noodle stand. It survives in print as a slightly solemn thus, the punctuation of serious Chinese.