Most Chinese characters share their four-corner code with other characters
The four-corner code turns the stroke shapes at a Chinese character's corners into digits, a lookup method Wang Yunwu ma...
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The temple's own grades for Wong Tai Sin's 100 fortune sticks
Sik Sik Yuen publishes all 100 Wong Tai Sin fortune sticks with their verses and grades. How the five grades divide the...
How to tell the upper line of a Spring Festival couplet from the lower
How to tell the upper line of a spring couplet (春联, 春聯) from the lower, which side each goes on, why the Mandarin to...
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Fan Tai Sui 2027 and why the lists of signs disagree
Four of five counting schemes name the same four animals for 犯太岁 in the 2027 Goat year: the Goat, Ox, Dog and Rat. Wh...
Who wrote the Zhou Gong dream book, and why copies disagree
No dream book can be traced to the Duke of Zhou. His name most likely came to the genre through a line of Confucius. The...
Chinese character riddles, and how to solve them
一口咬掉牛尾巴 — one mouth bites off the ox's tail. Bite the tail off 牛, put 口 underneath, and you have written 告. Th...
What bone weight (称骨) most people get
In the 称骨 bone-weighing reading, the most common weight is 3两9钱 and the middle one is 4两. We added up the weight fo...
How China, Taiwan and Unicode each choose between 峰 and 峯
峰 and 峯 are one word with one sound. Whether they count as one character depends on who is asking. Here is how the mai...
Counting the sounds a Mandarin tongue twister is built to drill
Mandarin tongue twisters are built from pairs of sounds that some speakers pronounce the same. Counting those pairs in t...
A Ziwei chart is four numbers and some arithmetic
The static chart is a function of the year stem, the lunar month, the lunar day and the birth hour. Locating the Life Pa...
Most of a Chinese almanac entry is arithmetic, and the rest disagrees
The day's stem and branch, officer, mansion and clash all follow from the date by formula. The suitable and avoid lists...
Two temples print the same Guanyin oracle and not one of its hundred poems matches
The Guanyin oracle is a set of a hundred numbered poems, drawn by lot in temples across Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore....
Four governments publish stroke order and only one publishes the rules
Taiwan publishes seventeen numbered principles. The mainland publishes 8,105 per-character orders and no principles at a...
How Cangjie turns a Chinese character into five keystrokes
The 24 Cangjie keys are abstract shapes rather than the characters printed on them, and the five-code limit is derived f...
Half the pronunciation changes people argued about had already happened
The viral lists of Chinese readings the ministry supposedly changed trace to a 2016 draft that was never issued. But the...
Taiwan's passport rules name no romanisation system at all
The received account is that Taiwan uses Wade-Giles, or 通用拼音, or has moved to Hanyu Pinyin. Article 14 of the passpo...
The letter Chinese passports will not print
Hanyu Pinyin has a letter no Chinese travel document will print: ü. The rule that replaces it is two rules, not one — 吕...
花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten
Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says ten — a num...
The 226-page book that decides how Macau spells your name
Macau has a statutory table for romanising Cantonese names, running 226 pages of the 1985 gazette. Hong Kong has no rule...
Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file
Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard. It is on...
Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity
干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obscenity in T...
Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011
The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the st...
The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon
Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixe...
The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei
兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a s...
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