china dispatch #15 - chop
It's Monday of Olympics week, and the town is getting ready. I noticed this evening that the air was sort of back to its normal hazy grey, but for the last several days it's been quite wonderful, because all the polluting factories have been either shut off completely or cut down to a tiny percentage of their usual output. So the sky has been blue, and it has had texture, and clouds, and the sun shines, and all that. It's like being in San Antonio or Houston or Dallas. Crazy.
You've no doubt seen the artwork associated with the games. The official emblem is a white figure that could be in action in any one of several possible sports, against a red background.
What you might not know about it is where it comes from culturally. It's a chop. A chop is a cross between a royal seal and a stamp like Marian uses at the library. It's usually made of stone, though sometimes wood and, in royal cases, jade. The character of a person's name is carved into it. Then you just dip it in ink and use it for official documents. (If you have any Chinese art around the house, there's a chance that it'll have the artist's chop somewhere on it, in place of a signature.)
The figure on the Olympic chop is a stylized jing. "Jing" is, of course, the second syllable of "Beijing." Generally, each character is one syllable, and each character signifies one word, though, naturally, sophisticated ideas that would be one word in English are represented by several characters in Chinese. Bei means "north" and jing means "capital." Nanjing or Nanking (as in the Rape of Nanking) was, you guessed it, at one time the southern capital. So, when you say "Beijing" in Chinese you're saying a place-name that, in English, would be something like "Northric."
Here's the word jing written in several fonts, roughly corresponding to Arial, Times Roman, and a couple of scripty fonts:
You've no doubt seen the artwork associated with the games. The official emblem is a white figure that could be in action in any one of several possible sports, against a red background.
What you might not know about it is where it comes from culturally. It's a chop. A chop is a cross between a royal seal and a stamp like Marian uses at the library. It's usually made of stone, though sometimes wood and, in royal cases, jade. The character of a person's name is carved into it. Then you just dip it in ink and use it for official documents. (If you have any Chinese art around the house, there's a chance that it'll have the artist's chop somewhere on it, in place of a signature.)
The figure on the Olympic chop is a stylized jing. "Jing" is, of course, the second syllable of "Beijing." Generally, each character is one syllable, and each character signifies one word, though, naturally, sophisticated ideas that would be one word in English are represented by several characters in Chinese. Bei means "north" and jing means "capital." Nanjing or Nanking (as in the Rape of Nanking) was, you guessed it, at one time the southern capital. So, when you say "Beijing" in Chinese you're saying a place-name that, in English, would be something like "Northric."
Here's the word jing written in several fonts, roughly corresponding to Arial, Times Roman, and a couple of scripty fonts:
And here's the Olympic emblem:
I think it's ingenious: a powerful glom of ideas — a character from one of the world's oldest alphabets, an official stamp that echoes centuries of civilization, a human figure of joy and prowess, the word itself signifying that Beijing is indeed the capital of the world for one moment — all brought together in one striking image.
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