The Calligrapher — Xiè Língyùn 谢灵运

Liu Song poet-calligrapher of cursive script whose works were imperial 'two treasures'.

南朝宋 calligrapher (), master of cursive script/running script — known for 诗书兼擅. Liu Song dynasty (Southern Dynasties)

Cultural Story

Sima Qian's wealth-makers, the Huo Zhi Lie Zhuan, honor the merchants who move goods and gather cai, holding that profit is the wind a man sails, not a shame to hide. The character cai is that store, the cai fu risked on the road and the cai chan a lineage keeps. The grand historian gave the traders a chapter among the lords, and cai its plain due.

Common words & phrases

• 财产 property
• 财富 wealth
• 财务 finance · financial
• 发财 get rich
• 理财 manage finances

Read the story behind the character

A bank screens the cai wu of a loan, and a client asks how to li cai the year's surplus. The will divides the cai chan among the children, and a lottery ad promises fa cai by spring. The character cai still names the money moved, managed, and dreamed of, from the ledger to the wish.

Why this character belongs on skin

There is a kind of wealth that does not clink. It arrives as a letter, a harvest, a door left open by someone who trusted you. The character is shelly old — built from the sign for cowrie shells, the first money, rounded and sea-born, carried in the palm before coin or kingdom. To be rich, in the oldest sense, was to hold the ocean's small currency and know it passed through you, not from you. Confucius warned that the gentleman seeks the Way, not the wage; yet he never said the wage was shameful, only that it must move. A man who wears this mark does not worship gold. He remembers that fortune is a current, not a shore — and that the hand which opens is the one that stays full. Wear it near the pulse, where money and blood both run, and let it ask the only honest question: what will you let flow through you before the shells are spent?