Chinese Symbol for Forever (永): Meaning, the Eight Strokes, and Tattoo Notes

永 has five strokes, and they go in this order. First, a single dot floating alone at the top, touching nothing. Second, a short horizontal that starts left of center, turns, and falls away to the lower left. Third, the long central vertical, the spine of the character, ending in a small hook that flicks up off its foot. Fourth, a left-falling sweep on the left side. Fifth, a broad right-falling press on the right, thickening as it goes.

What you end up with is a dot above a spine with one wing on either side, and the two wings are deliberately unalike: the left one sweeps, the right one presses. Cover the top dot with a finger and what remains is very nearly 水 (shuǐ), water. That is not a coincidence. Both characters are drawings of the same thing, which the etymology section gets into below.

Five strokes make 永 one of the easiest characters in this collection to write, and one of the hardest to write well. Those five strokes contain eight distinct brush movements, which is the reason every calligraphy student in China has copied this character more times than any other. That story is further down the page.

永 (yǒng) means forever, eternal, perpetual, and behind all of those it means something plainer: long. Long in space, as a river is long, and long in time, which is the sense that took over. The word covers duration itself rather than a good long life, which is the job of 寿 (shòu), or of being alive, which belongs to 生 (shēng). If a thing simply keeps going, it is 永.

Here is the honest complication, and it matters if you are thinking about a tattoo. In modern Chinese, 永 does not stand alone in a sentence. It behaves as a prefix, waiting for a second syllable, and the three it most often takes divide the work neatly between them. Yǒngyuǎn is the everyday adverb, the one in "I'll love you forever." Yǒngjiǔ is the official word, the one on permanent residence permits and permanent magnets. Yǒnghéng is the noun, eternity, the register of philosophy, gravestones, and love songs. Put 永 in front of a negative and you get yǒngbù, "never," the emphatic kind that shows up in oaths.

It also does gentle work at the end of life. A death is a yǒngbié, a "forever parting," and to die is to enter yǒngmián, "eternal sleep." Chinese habitually softens the subject of dying by talking about duration instead, the same instinct that turns burial clothes into "longevity clothes" on the 寿 page. The character for forever is one of the language's kindest euphemisms.

Forever, the bicycle

For most of the twentieth century, the most famous 永 in China had two wheels. A Shanghai factory that started building bicycles around 1940 relaunched its brand on New Year's Day 1951 as Yǒngjiǔ, "Forever." By 1952, as Shanghai Daily's account of the company records, it was turning out more than 28,000 bikes a year, better than a third of the national total. In the 1970s and 1980s a bicycle was one of the "three big things" a family saved for before a wedding, alongside a sewing machine and a watch, and in the countryside a borrowed Forever was what the groom rode to fetch the bride. The brand still exists and still sells more bicycles in China than anyone. A great many Chinese people's first association with the character for eternity is a heavy black frame with a rear rack.

Eight characters on a stone

The most-read instance of the character stands in the middle of Tiananmen Square. The front of the Monument to the People's Heroes carries eight large characters that Mao Zedong wrote out in June 1955, rendered in English as "Eternal glory to the People's Heroes." The third character is 永. The phrase behind it, yǒng chuí bù xiǔ, is the standard Chinese formula on war memorials and obituaries, and it literally says "forever hanging down, never rotting," an image of something suspended in view of posterity rather than something merely remembered.

The line on the wedding banner

At weddings the character turns up in a four-word blessing, yǒng jié tóng xīn, "forever tied of one heart," written on red banners, printed on envelopes, and engraved inside rings. You will usually find it sharing a wall with the doubled joy emblem 囍, which announces the marriage while this phrase makes the promise about it. English wedding language reaches for "always." Chinese reaches for a knot.

The word people actually say

In daily speech the character lives inside yǒngyuǎn. Chinese pop lyrics run on it, as does the phrase yǒng bù fàngqì, "never give up," which is what a Chinese coach shouts and a Chinese motivational poster says. And a much drier compound has quietly become one of the most-used words of the past decade: yǒngxù, "continuing without end," is the standard Chinese translation of "sustainable," so every corporate sustainability report in the country is built on the character for forever.

In names, and in the reigns of emperors

As a given-name element, 永 is a simple, unfussy wish that whatever follows it lasts. Emperors used the same wish at scale, since a Chinese reign was labeled with an era name chosen as a slogan for the years ahead, and 永 was a popular ingredient. The Yongle Emperor, who moved the capital to Beijing and built the Forbidden City, ruled under 永乐, "perpetual happiness." The Orchid Pavilion gathering, which the next section is about, is dated to the ninth year of the Yonghe era. It is worth noticing that these were bets rather than descriptions. Emperors who named their years "eternal" got, on average, about as long as everyone else.

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The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, compiled around the year 100, gives 永 one word of definition and then a picture: "Long. It depicts the lengthwise course of water." Then it quotes a line of poetry as proof, and the line it picks is from the Book of Songs: "the Jiang runs long." The oldest dictionary in China explains eternity by pointing at the Yangtze.

永 also heads its own section in that dictionary, a rank the Shuowen reserves for characters that other characters are built out of. Two readings of the oracle-bone form are current, and both survive in the reference works. In the first, the character is a river seen from above, one main channel running on while tributaries branch off it. In the second, it is a person swimming in water, which would make 永 the original form of 泳 (yǒng), the modern verb "to swim." The two are less far apart than they look, since either way you are being told about a body of water big enough to be a problem.

The river reading has an elegant piece of evidence going for it: 永 has a mirror twin. Flip it and you get the element behind 派 (pài), the character for a branch, a tributary, and by extension a faction or a school of thought. One picture, drawn two ways: the water running long, and the water dividing. Chinese wrote its word for "forever" and its word for "splitting into camps" out of the same river.

The eight strokes hidden in one character

Chinese calligraphy is taught through a single character, and this is the one. The method is called the Eight Principles of 永, and the claim behind it is neat enough to sound invented: every basic movement the brush makes in standard script is present in this one five-stroke character, so a student who can write 永 correctly has the whole alphabet of the brush in their hand.

Five strokes, eight movements, because a stroke can carry more than one. The central vertical, for instance, holds both the long descent and the hook that flicks off its foot, and each of those is trained separately. Note what the eight are called.

These are not the names of shapes. They are the names of actions, most of them violent, several of them borrowed from riding, archery, and butchery. Chinese calligraphy theory describes the brush as a body doing something rather than a pen making a mark, and this vocabulary is where a beginner first meets that idea. You do not draw the vertical. You draw a crossbow.

Who invented the method is honestly unsettled. The reference literature traces its ancestry to the Seven Powers, a set of stroke principles credited to Lady Wei Shuo of the Eastern Jin, who was Wang Xizhi's own teacher. Tang-dynasty writers including Liu Zongyuan and the great calligrapher Yan Zhenqing left texts in praise of the Eight Principles, and a Yuan-dynasty treatise by Li Puguang set them out in full. Popular tellings hand the credit to Wang Xizhi himself, or to his descendant the monk Zhi Yong, and nobody holds the receipt. What is certain is that by the Tang the method was established enough to be written about admiringly, and it has been the first exercise in Chinese calligraphy ever since.

China's most famous piece of writing opens with this character

In 353 the calligrapher Wang Xizhi hosted forty-two friends at the Orchid Pavilion in what is now Shaoxing for a spring purification gathering. Wine cups were floated down a winding stream, and whoever the cup stopped in front of had to produce a poem or drink a forfeit. Twenty-six of them managed thirty-seven poems between them, and Wang, by the traditional account well into the wine, wrote a preface to the collection on the spot. The Lantingji Xu is generally held to be the finest piece of calligraphy ever written in Chinese, and the story goes that Wang tried repeatedly to write it out again the next day and could never match the drunk version.

Its first two characters are 永和, the era name, and the opening line reads "in the ninth year of the Yonghe era." The most revered object in the history of Chinese writing begins with the character for forever, which is the sort of coincidence calligraphers have never quite been able to leave alone.

The original did not last. Emperor Taizong of Tang wanted it badly enough that his agent Xiao Yi obtained it from the monk who was keeping it by deception, and when Taizong died it went into his tomb at Zhaoling with him. Everything anyone has admired for the last fourteen centuries is a copy of a copy, which is a strange fate for the masterpiece that opens with the word "forever."

The monk who wore out the threshold

Wang Xizhi's seventh-generation descendant became a monk, took the name Zhi Yong, and settled at Yongxin Temple near Shaoxing during the Sui dynasty. Both his religious name and his temple's name carry 永, which is either a coincidence or a family with a strong sense of theme.

The traditional accounts, which have been repeated in Chinese calligraphy literature for well over a thousand years, say he spent some thirty years in an upper room copying the Thousand Character Classic, and produced eight hundred complete copies in regular and cursive script side by side, distributing them to temples across the east of the country. The brushes he wore out filled five baskets, and rather than discard them he buried them and called the spot the Retired Brush Mound. So many people came to beg a piece of his writing that the temple threshold had to be sheathed in iron to stop it being worn through, and the phrase for that, the "iron threshold," survives in Chinese as a way of describing a doorway everyone is trying to get past. These are traditional stories rather than documented fact, and they have grown in the telling. They are also exactly the kind of story a culture invents about the character for forever, which is that permanence is a thing you get by repetition until the equipment gives out.

A river you cannot get across

Return to that line of poetry the Shuowen quotes. It comes from a short poem in the Book of Songs, the oldest anthology in Chinese, and the poem is not about eternity at all. It is about a man who wants a woman he cannot reach, and it measures the distance in water: the Han is too wide to swim, and, in Jade Almanac's reading of the line, "the Jiang runs long, and no raft will cross it."

That is the character in its first recorded outing. Not a philosopher's eternity and not a promise on a wedding banner, but the length of a river standing between a man and what he wants. The sense that came later, the one on the memorial and the permanent residence permit, is the same idea with the water taken out.