The Calligrapher — Zhì Yǒng 智永

Sui monk who spread Wang Xizhi's art via his 'Thousand Characters'.

Sui calligrapher (生卒年不详（陈/隋）), master of regular script/cursive script — monk and seventh-generation descendant of Wang Xizhi who wrote a thousand copies of the Thousand Character Classic to pass the family hand down. Sui dynasty

Cultural Story

腾 pictures a horse surging upward, mane flying. Classical prose lets armies' ten thousand horses 奔腾, gallop and thunder, lets dragons 腾空, rise into the air, and lets a boiling kettle 沸腾, seethe and roll. Courts celebrated a dragon 腾飞, soaring — an image later borrowed for economies and careers taking off. Its humbler cousin 折腾 captures ordinary life's endless fussing back and forth.

Common words & phrases

• 腾飞 to soar · to take off · leap forward
• 奔腾 to gallop · to surge · to run
• 沸腾 to boil · to seethe · boiling
• 欢腾 to rejoice · jubilation
• 腾空 to rise into the air · to soar
• 折腾 to toss · to do back and forth · to mess about

Read the story behind the character

The kettle 沸腾, boiling and seething, while you 折腾 — mess about, going back and forth — trying to fix the printer before your call. Outside, the city feels like it's 腾飞, taking off in a leap forward, cranes everywhere. Your nephew 欢腾, jubilant, charges around the room after school, arms out like a jet 腾空, soaring into the sky.

Why this character belongs on skin

腾 is motion with heat in it: horses galloping, steam climbing, the dragon rising off the water. 沸腾, boiling; 奔腾, thundering onward; 飞黄腾达, the sudden ascent that old fortune-tellers promised. But the character's oldest duty is its coupling with the dragon—龙腾, and every New Year's dragon dance is the word made visible, a whole river of silk rising on poles. There is nothing calm about 腾, and that is its honesty. Some lives are for simmering; this one is for the boil. The character is a body in mid-launch, mane back, hooves barely touching earth. The dictionaries file it with thunder and with sweat—腾骧, the warhorse rearing; 蒸腾, mist lifting off a river at dawn. Everything in it is leaving the ground; everything in it is vapor and muscle. Ink it on someone who has never once been mistaken for still water—and never wants to be.