The Calligrapher — Yán Zhēnqīng 颜真卿

Tang master of robust regular script; co-creator of the enduring 'Yan style'.

Tang calligrapher (709–784), master of regular script/running script — the Tang moral paragon whose upright, muscular regular script became the model of Chinese integrity in writing. Tang dynasty

Cultural Story

Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Spring" hides a village "in a remote and quiet place" — 僻 — cut off from the world by a cave and a river. The fisherman stumbles on it by accident and cannot find it again. The word 僻 named the withdrawn spot where a different life might persist, unvisited and ungoverned.

Common words & phrases

• 偏僻 remote · out-of-the-way
• 僻静 secluded · quiet
• 孤僻 unsociable · eccentric
• 僻陋 remote and crude

Read the story behind the character

A family buys a 偏僻 cabin with no signal; the lane is 僻静 after dark. A neighbour is 孤僻 and keeps his gate locked, and the hamlet is 僻陋 but cheap. The word still means the far and the lone — a back road, a shy temper — the remove where a person or a place escapes the press of everyone else.

Why this character belongs on skin

The person radical beside the word for turn away, and the meaning is the far place, the road that branches off the main road and keeps going, the hermitage up the mountain where the pines have never heard traffic. Chinese poetry is full of these retreats, the recluse's hut, the temple past the last village, chosen remoteness as a form of freedom. There is a difference between lonely and apart, and you learned it somewhere, in some place with bad reception and good silence. This character is for your far corner, the one you return to in your head during meetings. The map does not show it. Thoreau built his cabin two miles from town; the Chinese recluses pitched theirs a day's walk from the market—close enough for rice and wine, far enough to hear themselves think. Distance, the hermits insist, is mostly an act of attention. That is the point of the map.