BrightMoonLightStories

明月光 · Short films about Chinese characters and the stories behind them. One character per episode.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Not tea, salt, and a different load entirely, but the same province and the same decade as our porters in 山 shān. Gamble photographed this man in Chengdu in 1917. We keep finding these and keep being surprised how much of old Sichuan moved on somebody's shoulders.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

The Confucius Temple in Beijing, around 1918. Sidney Gamble took this. Whatever that stele says, someone decided it needed to outlast the person reading it, which is most of what 日 rì is about for us. Duke has the Gamble archive free to browse if you want to go looking yourself.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

They could not set the load down and pick it up again, so each porter carried an iron-tipped staff and rested standing on it every few steps.

The staffs wore holes into the rock. They are still there, filling with rainwater.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Every frame in these films is painted by hand. This is Natasha, who does the ink.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Halfway across a gorge in Sichuan, 1917, on a twisted bamboo cable. This is how you crossed a river on the tea road where there was no bridge.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

「胡」左邊那個「月」也是「肉」，本義是牛下巴垂下來的那塊。後來借去指北方的人，再後來就跟著胡椒、胡桃、胡麻一起進來了。

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Episode three is about 山. Sixty to ninety kilos of tea, above the head, on a mountain road. Set it down and there is no lifting it back on.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

東, east, is usually taught as the sun coming up behind a tree. In the oracle bones it looks more like a sack tied off at both ends. The sun and the tree arrive later, once the shape had already changed.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Children in a moon gate at Ding Xian, 1931 or 1932. The gate is a full circle. The character for moon has never been one.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

霸 means overlord now. In the bronzes it has a moon in it and meant the light on a waxing moon, 既生霸. The overlord sense is borrowed from somewhere else entirely.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Episode two is about 月. Chinese architecture makes the moon round. The character does not, it is a sliver, which is the shape you actually see on most nights.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

碑, the Chinese word for a carved stone, meant just an upright stone first. At a grave it was the post the ropes ran over to lower the coffin.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

A yard of stone tablets at the Confucius temple in Beijing, 1918 or 1919. Every one of them is a text somebody wanted to survive being copied wrong.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

「月」在「肝」和「肺」裡面，其實不是月亮，是「肉」。隸變之後兩個形狀就長得一樣了。

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

The sundial at the Hall of Classics in Beijing, photographed by Sidney Gamble between 1918 and 1919. Duke put his negatives online and waived every right they had in them.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

朏 is the moon just beginning to show. One character for the sliver on the third day, which tells you what people were actually watching.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

Episode one is about 日. The sun, four thousand years of it, and a king with toothache asking a burnt shoulder blade whether the pain would stop.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

@JeffreyKotyk One I only noticed recently, 駝 has 它 in it for the sound, and 它 was a picture of a snake before it got borrowed away for the pronoun.

[BrightMoonLightStories @BrightMoonStory]

@ihptaiwan Thank you for posting these. I keep ending up in the Grand Secretariat holdings when I want the actual wording of something rather than a summary of it.