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.

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."