Chinese characters were not created arbitrarily. Over 5000 years, generations of religious writers, court officials, scholars, artists and countless others have built, through their collective effort, a distinctive, extensive and systematic writing system. One fascinating fact about the Chinese writing system is that many characters retained, in their design, pieces of information about the era, the culture, the society, the ideologies in which they were created.
A Chinese character is a time capsule – a time capsule that can bring the reader and student back in time, back to the character’s moment of creation – back to the birth of a language, the birth of a nation.
Let’s open as many of these time capsules as possible!
ABOUT ZICIUS
Zicius is an online platform designed to:
- discover the beauty, poetry and history embedded in the Chinese writing system through the study of Chinese characters
- illustrate the beauty, poetry and history of the Chinese writing system in a visual, creative, entertaining way
- share that beauty, poetry and history with curious souls around the world
- avoid tattoo tragedies… (perhaps not a main goal, but nonetheless a noble goal!)
ABOUT MASTER ZICIUS
Master Zicius is one of the great Chinese linguist-etymologist-philosophers of the Internet Age, and is a distant, distant, distant cousin of the great Confucius. Named Zi, meaning “word” in Chinese, Zicius is a tremendously well read and learned scholar of the Chinese language. He will be able to help us decipher the etymology of some of the most difficult characters out there. We are honored to have the Master among us!