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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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...
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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...
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...
How Chinese Given Names Actually Work — and Why Everyone Picks the Same Ones
A person could once carry four names: a milk name, a generation character shared with every cousin, a given name, and a...
Tracing Chinese Ancestry in Southeast Asia: Start With How Your Name Is Spelled
Tan, Chan and Chin are the same character. Which one is on your IC records which dialect group your family belonged to,...
Dates, Calendars and Holidays Across ASEAN
Ask our working-days calculator how many working days Singapore has in 2026 and it used to say 252. The answer is 251 —...
How a Luopan Actually Works: the Chinese Compass and Its 24 Mountains
An honestly-framed look at the Chinese geomantic compass as an instrument: the needle housing, the rotating plate, and t...
Feng Shui Kua Numbers and the Eight Mansions, Explained: One Formula, Eight Trigrams, Three New Years
An honestly-framed look at how Eight Mansions (八宅) is actually constructed: the Later Heaven trigram grid it runs on,...
The Chinese Zodiac Beyond Horoscopes: 12 Animals, 5 Elements, and How Compatibility Really Works
An honestly-framed look at how the Chinese zodiac is actually built: the twelve animals and the ancient Earthly Branches...
What Bazi Actually Is: Reading the Four Pillars of Destiny, for Beginners
A plain-English, honestly-framed look at how a Bazi (Four Pillars) chart is constructed: eight characters, ten Heavenly...
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