I am always amused by Chinese signs that mix traditional and simplified characters together. Obviously, in modern China they should never be mixed, writing should be standardized. There is even a committee to watch out for character irregularities in public spaces. Nevertheless, there are plenty of such examples, I am listing a few of them below.


This is a street sign in Dali, Yunnan province, advertising a family business which is a hotel, a barbershop and a bath. There are number of interesting things on this board, including the characters 館 and 照 both of which are today non-standard character variants. Most of the characters are traditional but 間 and 準 are simplified. In fact, 間 appears in the same row twice, once as fantizi and once as jiantizi.


This is a sign advertising mobile phone cards. You can see that the characters 動, 眾 and 終 are simplified, whereas 國, 無 and 費.


A good luck sign, written in gold on a red background. 進 is simplified but 寶 and 財 are not.


This is a warning that you should use the safety rail on the cable car.


This is just a good wish board.



A store sign for alcohol and tobacco. 煙 and 昇 are traditional, 東 is simplified.


Watch out for hygiene!


A hotel sign mixing fantizi and jiantizi.


A no parking sign.


This is the sign of the celebrated Donglai Shun restaurant in Beijing, famous for its dumplings. I am a little ambivalent about including it here because the simplified characters could simply be considered a calligraphic feature. What do you think?


This is a parking lot sign. Pay attention also to the variant forms of the simplified 點, consisting of a 占 and 大.

Weird Chinese tattoos: Lost in translation

Here is a tattoo design I saw in the window of a tattoo parlor, showing someone's arm with a dragon and some Chinese characters on it. The Chinese characters say "hao jiu bu jian" which simply means "long time no see." I have no idea what it is supposed to be but it really makes no sense to have it tattooed on someone's arm.

Chinese character structure: Tracing it back

Let's look at the structure of variant Chinese characters for a second. (This post is triggered by Amida's comment to the blog entry below but I thought it deserves to be in a main entry.)

Does the structure of a particular character form always have to go back to a standard or a historical form? Or can you look at the structure of a form in its own right, without automatically tracing it back to earlier or more standard forms? I have always felt suspicious about the practice of analyzing Tang character forms by digging up earlier and earlier forms of the same character and eventually tracing it back to jiaguwen. It is true that even the Tang character forms originate from the oracle-bone script, I am not trying to deny that. At the same time the relevance of such a genealogy is highly debatable.

Would it make sense to look at running hand character forms in their own right? Instead of saying, "Ah, this is the abbreviation of this" or, "This should actually be written like this," just look at the way it is actually written. Take, for example, the character 盈 in the Santi Qianziwen page on the picture below. The caoshu form in the left-most column is clearly not of the same structure as its kaishu form. You cannot say that it has the 皿 component at the bottom, even though this particular character has that component in other styles, such as the kaishu and xingshu styles on its right. On the other hand, the components in this caoshu forms could also be analyzed and categorized. The little thing that replaces the component 皿 probably occurs in other caoshu forms, replacing the same or even other elements.

Now there might be some cases when you do not have a kaishu form to rely on, simply because it has not survived. Imagine a scenario where you only have caoshu characters and you have to make sense of those alone. You would not be able to take each character form and say, well, this actually should be written like this. Instead, you would have to work with what you actually see.

The same goes for tracing Han or Tang character forms back to oracle-bone inscriptions. Yes, there is a lineage but you should be able to look at the evidence at hand in its own light, shouldn't you? Plus then the oracle-bone inscriptions should be traced back to something as well, only we do not have anything to trace it back to.

I am really curious about what others have to say about this.


This is the beginning of the Santi Qianziwen, or the Tri-style Thousand Character Classic, which is essentially the same text written in three different calligraphic styles: kai (standard), xing (running hand) and cao (drafting).

Chinese character variant: Uighur-Chinese sign

This is the Chinese character "an1" for safety on a sign somewhere near Turfan in Xinjiang. Now what do you think is going on here with this character? Is this a common variant or just a local phenomenon? Or perhaps a personal calligraphic habit of the person who wrote it?

For the sake of the context, I am also including below the picture of the sign where this Chinese character comes from originally. You can see that the top row is in Uighur, the lower in Chinese. Also because of the context there can be now doubt as to what the above character is. But without context it is not so easy to recognize it, is it?


A Chinese-Uighur sign from Turfan: "This place is dangerous, please watch out for safety."

Too many Chinese characters: Busy web interface

Have you ever noticed how most Chinese websites are choke full of text? When I come to a Chinese website for the first time, I never know what I am supposed to do because there is so much content that I have a difficulty finding the part that brought me there in the first place.

Here is, for example, a section from the website Taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. (The real eBay never made it in China, apparently the Chinese preferred their own way of doing online garage sales.) If you click on this image to see the larger version, you can see that it is packed with text. Now I guess a Chinese person will just intuitively ignore the parts he does not need but I need to start reading to see what I need.


A section from the Chinese online auction site Taobao.com.

Or here is another example from one of the top Chinese search engines, Sohu.com. Sohu.com is extremely popular in China and you can do pretty much everything on it, starting from searching the Net and playing online games to trading stocks and buying property.


Characters flooding the page on Sohu.com's main page

Now my question is whether this is completely normal for Chinese users or they would also prefer a much less crowded interface? After all, why would you always want to have on your screen hundreds of words you never look at? I don't need to see "pet food" as a category on my auction site every single time I go there. I really don't because I do not own a pet. Neither am I interested in kitchen utensils, I never ever look at them.

So, going back to my original question, is this tolerable for others? Does it bother anyone else or is it just me?

Chinese characters on old European etchings

Have you noticed the Chinese characters on the pictures in old European books about China? Some of them are OK, others are flipped around, and some are downright illegible. I wonder if anybody has done a study on this, it would be a fascinating topic.

Here are, for example, some pictures from from William Alexander's famous book, The Costume of China, published in 1805 in London. You can see that of the Chinese characters on the pictures look OK, some not. My question is, why? If the artist does not know how to read and write Chinese, and in the case of Alexander I think he did not, then how come some of the characters are legible?


Chinese characters over a window, flipped horizontally.


Chinese characters on a gate. You can recognize the character sheng (holy) but not the other one. And the other characters along the horizontal planks are illegible to me, too.


These characters are completely illegible to me but I can sort of make out that they are flipped.

A bestseller on Japan: Frances Little

Just finished reading Frances Little's Lady of the Decoration which, as I learned was the number one bestseller in the US for the year of 1907. Wow! It is a fun little book but I would not have thought that it was so popular at one point. Now it does not even get a popularity grade on Amazon.

It was written by Fannie Caldwell using the psedonym Frances Little and it is about a young lady spending several years in Japan operating kindergartens with some American mission. The book consists of her letters to a friend of hers back in the US. She is very homesick, misses a man called Jack who at the end comes to Hiroshima to marry her. This is where the book ends.

Having said that, the book is fun but it would have been nice to have a bit more facts in it. Or at least some names. The heroine, for example, meets a Japanese princess and we do not even learn her name so there is no way of placing the event in history. It would have been a good background information on this particular English-speaking princess but we can only guess who that might have been.

Bushido as patriotism

As I was reading old newspaper articles on the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, I came across a reference to Bushido which surprised me. Admiral Sir Edward Seymour said over the annual dinner of the Japan Society that Japan was rich in many things but especially in "bushido," translating it as "passionate patriotism," and that a country which possessed passionate patriotism was safe.

On a second thought, this is not such a bad rendering for Bushido, wasn't it? After all what it really means is that the warrior, be it the samurai or the kamikaze teenager towards the end of WWII, follows the orders of his officer without questioning those, all in the name of patriotism. "Passionate" simply means that he goes to the extent ordinary people would not, such as sacrificing his life, or the life of others, in the most unthinkable way.

As for Japan being safe with its Bushido, well, we know that it worked only for a while. In 1910 Japan was still bathing in the glory of its victorious Russo-Japanese War and things looked promising. As they indeed were for the next 30 years. Also, during the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, Japan was a British ally, whereas in later years they were at war with each other.

Going back to Bushido, which we usually understand along the lines of the Way of the Warrior, the Warrior's Code, etc., interpreting it as a political/social conduct was quite interesting to me.

"The Chinese Alphabet": Logoi.com in blog mode

I've been too busy for the past few years to do major improvements to this site but now a new look and a new structure is becoming a matter of urgency. So until I can make up my mind which way to go and what to do with the whole thing, I am using Logoi.com for a blog on the mythical subject of "Chinese alphabet," something this site is most associated with.