The magic of Chinese characters The written word, the Chinese characters, have had from their very origin, a magical meaning for the Chinese. There is no doubt that for them a character is not only a symbol of the concept it claims to represent but the object itself....

Chinese idioms One of the most difficult aspects of Chinese is to learn is the so-called idioms or chengyu (成语). In general, they refer to short sentences composed of four characters that allude to some historical fact or literary anecdote from ancient times. Its...

The character chai 拆- dismantle One of the most frequent characters in the urban scenery of the China of the development and the transformation is chai 拆- dismantle.  Any walk through the old neighborhoods of most Chinese cities continually led to being confronted...

The Peach, fruit of immortality In my "Manual of Writing Chinese Characters" (1) I hold an opinion contrary to that of most scholars of Chinese characters, and that is that the formation of the so-called picto-phonetic characters responds not only to the composition...

Discovering the tiger and the shaman in Chinese characters. In Chinese skin is pifu (皮肤). In the character pi 皮, which means skin, one can still discover a hand flaying a skin. The character fu 肤, however, is a simplified character, showing us the radical of the...

Chinese character for "snake” The Chinese character to represent the snake has undergone over the centuries a curious evolution that, although seen from the cultural perspective of the XXI century may seem strange, it will not be so much if we remember the symbolism...