Elena

[mdzs bot @mdzstxt]

Lan SiZhui reproached, "JingYi, how could you call someone like that behind their back?"
Lan JingYi protested, "I clearly call him the same thing to his face."

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (https://t.co/4exP9zpqbc), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://t.co/yW7aR73MPc).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

Immense planning and technical precision was required for this absolutely preposterous (but real) view: I captured my friend @BlackGryph0n transiting the sun during a skydive.

This might be the first photo of it's kind in existence. See a video of this moment in the reply 👇

[ecah @nahz_oaix]

this is CINEMA 🤣🤣

#XiaoZhanxMeituan

[smol silly cat @Catsillyness]

"And iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii"

[XyraRei || screaming internally eternally @xyra_rei]

TGCF AD S3 EP13

So close, yet so dearly missed
It's you who traverse the mortal realm alone for me
Thousands of lanterns and countless statues, when I finally understood your wish
Turns out, from the moment we met, I've already loved you for all eternity

[shieru 🦋🌸 📌 TGCF GIVEAWAY @withhualian]

“Though nothing was said, it was enough.” 🥹❤️

🆕 AUDIO DRAMA

HERE'S TO MORE OFFICIAL ART OF THE HUALIAN BACKHUG FROM THE CONFESSION SCENE!!! 😭😭😭😭😭😭

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

If you're having a terrible day, watch this...

[Titania @TitaniasRealm]

Chinese artist Shou Xin creates the most wonderful cats with just a few pencil lines

[teea 🍋 @hualianful]

sobs forever

[El 🦋🌸 @Fereael]

Hua Cheng: Want to hear a joke?

33 heavenly officials: What?

Hua Cheng: Your temples

33 heavenly officials: I don't get it

Hua Cheng: Exactly

[🧘🏾‍♀️vee 👩🏾‍💻 @luoreos]

“Your Highness, I understand your everything,”

Hua Cheng said quietly.

“Your courage, your despair. Your kindness, your pain. Your resentment, your hate. Your wisdom, your foolishness.

“If I could, I would have you use me as your stepping stone, the bridge you take apart after crossing, the bones you need to trample on your climb, the sinner who endures the agony of a million knives. But I know you won’t allow it.”

[teea 🍋 @hualianful]

the idea of this scene is what inspired mxtx to write tgcf, and to see it adapted in such a powerful way is so heartbreakingly beautiful 🤧

[Ringdoll @ringdoll]

Do you want to bet big or small?

#TGCF #花城 #天官賜福漫画 #tgcf #天官赐福 #HuaCheng #bjd #血雨探花 #CrimsonRainSoughtFlower #resindoll #doll #dolls #balljointeddoll #bjdmakeup

[一生所归 @flowercityism]

still thinking about how xie lian was so lonely and had no one to listen to him for 800 years, but hua cheng loves listening to him talk and always wants to listen no matter what......

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Always aim to leave this world better than you found it

[❥ azia | lan wangji impregnator @omegawangji]

no more lonely longing winters !