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

> The Chinese symbol for forever is 永 (yǒng), a picture of a long river. Its meaning, the eight brush strokes hidden inside it, and how it differs from 永恒.

Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-symbols/forever  
Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about  
Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources

## Radical

水 (water); dictionaries file 永 under the water radical, Kangxi 85

The Chinese symbol for forever is 永 (yǒng, said like "yong" with a dipping tone),
and China's oldest dictionary defines it in a single word: long. Underneath the
character is a river seen from above, the main channel running on while smaller
streams branch away. It is also the most-practiced character in Chinese calligraphy,
because its five strokes contain every basic movement a brush can make.

## Meaning

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)](/chinese-symbols/longevity), or of being alive,
which belongs to [生 (shēng)](/chinese-symbols/life). 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](/chinese-symbols/longevity). The character for forever is one of the
language's kindest euphemisms.

## Character build

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.

## Etymology

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.

## Modern life

### 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](/chinese-symbols/double-happiness), which announces the marriage while
this phrase makes the promise about it. English wedding language reaches for "always."
Chinese reaches for [a knot](/chinese-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.

> Curious what your own name could become in Chinese, matched to its sound and a good
> meaning? [Our Chinese name generator](/chinese-name) builds one for you.

## Cultural story

### 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.

| The movement | Pinyin | Literally | Where it is in 永 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 侧 | cè | leaning to the side | The floating dot at the top |
| 勒 | lè | reining in a horse | The short horizontal below it |
| 努 | nǔ | drawing a crossbow | The long central vertical |
| 趯 | tì | jumping | The hook flicking off the vertical's foot |
| 策 | cè | the horsewhip | The short upward flick on the left |
| 掠 | lüè | skimming past | The long left-falling sweep |
| 啄 | zhuó | a bird pecking | The short left-falling stroke on the right |
| 磔 | zhé | dismembering | The broad right-falling press |

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.

## Tattoo notes

永 is one of the safer characters in Chinese to put on skin, for three reasons. It was
never simplified, so mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all write it
identically, and Japan and Korea use the same form as well. It has only five strokes,
which means it stays legible at small sizes and will not blur into a smudge in ten
years, unlike characters with a crowded middle. And it is unambiguous: any Chinese
reader who sees it alone will read "eternal, forever" without hesitating, because a
single character displayed on its own is a normal thing in Chinese art and everyone
knows how to read one.

Two honest cautions. First, 永 is not a standalone word in a Chinese sentence. As
calligraphy it says forever perfectly well, but if what you want is the noun
"eternity" as it would be used in speech, that is yǒnghéng, two characters, not one.
Ask yourself whether you want a word or an emblem, because 永 is firmly the second.
Second, watch the dot. Remove it and you have 水, water, a different character
entirely, and adding a water radical to the left instead gives you 泳, "to swim,"
which is a real word and not the one you meant. Low-resolution stencils lose small
strokes.

One thing to know going in: this is the character every Chinese schoolchild copies
first. A Chinese viewer will register that, roughly the way an English reader registers
a tattoo in Copperplate. Most read it as informed rather than naive, but you should
know what you are saying. Keep it upright and unmirrored, since the left sweep and the
right press are not symmetrical and a flipped stencil is obvious, print at full size,
and have someone who reads Chinese check the design before the needle comes out.

## Compounds

- 永远 · yǒngyuǎn · forever, always (the everyday adverb)

- 永久 · yǒngjiǔ · permanent, perpetual (the official and legal word)

- 永恒 · yǒnghéng · eternal; eternity (the noun of philosophy and love songs)

- 永生 · yǒngshēng · eternal life; immortality

- 永别 · yǒngbié · to part forever; the parting at a death

- 永眠 · yǒngmián · eternal sleep, a gentle word for dying

- 永不 · yǒngbù · never, not ever (emphatic, the register of oaths)

- 永存 · yǒngcún · to endure, to live on

- 永葆 · yǒngbǎo · to keep forever, as in keeping one's youth

- 永续 · yǒngxù · continuing without end; the standard Chinese word for sustainable

## Idioms

- 永垂不朽 · yǒng chuí bù xiǔ · forever hanging down, never rotting · eternal glory; the standard formula on Chinese war memorials and obituaries. · Inscribed by Mao Zedong on the Monument to the People's Heroes, Beijing, 1955

- 一劳永逸 · yī láo yǒng yì · one labor, forever at ease · solve it properly once and never have to touch it again; the Chinese case for doing a job right. · Traced by Taiwan's Ministry of Education idiom dictionary to Yang Xiong's Han-dynasty memorial against receiving the Chanyu

- 永无止境 · yǒng wú zhǐ jìng · forever without a stopping point · endless; said of learning, greed, and roadworks alike. · 

- 永结同心 · yǒng jié tóng xīn · forever tied of one heart · may you be united as one for life; the standard Chinese wedding blessing. · 

- 永志不忘 · yǒng zhì bù wàng · forever recorded, never forgotten · to keep something in mind permanently; used of debts of gratitude and of grief. · 

## Variants

- 永 · simplified · The one and only standard form. 永 was never simplified, so mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore write it identically, and it is also the standard form in Japanese and Korean. There is no version decision to make.

- 水 · wrong · 永 without its top dot is 水 (shuǐ), water. The two are related historically and nearly identical on the page, so a stencil that loses the dot changes the word. Check that the dot is separate and floating, touching nothing.

- 泳 · wrong · Adding the three-drop water radical on the left gives 泳 (yǒng), the verb 'to swim.' It looks plausible and is a real character, which makes it a genuine trap rather than an obvious error.

- 永 (flipped or rotated) · mirrored · Not a variant. The character is not symmetrical: the left side is a falling sweep and the right side is a broad press. A mirrored stencil reads as wrong immediately to anyone who knows the character, which is everyone who took primary school in Chinese.

## FAQ

**What is the Chinese symbol for forever?**

The Chinese symbol for forever is 永 (yǒng), which means forever, eternal, and
perpetual. The oldest Chinese dictionary defines it simply as "long" and explains
the shape as a picture of water running its lengthwise course, so the word for
eternity started as the length of a river. It has five strokes and is written
identically in simplified and traditional Chinese.

**Is the Chinese character for forever the same in simplified and traditional Chinese?**

Yes. 永 was never simplified, so mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore
all write it exactly the same way, five strokes, and Japan and Korea use the same
form. That makes it a low-risk choice for calligraphy and tattoos compared with
characters that changed sharply under simplification, such as 寿 and 壽 on the
longevity page.

**How do you say eternity in Chinese?**

The noun is yǒnghéng (永恒), literally "forever constant," and that is the word you
would use in a sentence about eternity. The character 永 on its own is not a
standalone word in modern Chinese; it works as a prefix. The everyday adverb
"forever" is yǒngyuǎn (永远), as in "I will love you forever," and the formal word
for permanent is yǒngjiǔ (永久).

**Why do Chinese calligraphy students practice the character 永?**

Because its five strokes contain all eight basic brush movements of standard
script, a teaching method known as the Eight Principles of 永. The eight are named
for actions rather than shapes: leaning, reining in a horse, drawing a crossbow,
jumping, the horsewhip, skimming, pecking, and dismembering. A student who can
write 永 correctly has practiced every fundamental stroke, which is why it is the
first exercise in Chinese calligraphy.

**Is 永 a good tattoo for forever?**

It is one of the safer choices. It is identical in simplified and traditional
Chinese, has only five strokes so it stays legible small, and any Chinese reader
will read it as "eternal" on sight. Two cautions: it is an emblem rather than a
word you would speak, so if you want the spoken noun "eternity" that is yǒnghéng,
two characters. And guard the top dot, because without it the character becomes
水, water. Always have a Chinese reader check the stencil.

## Sources

- Wiktionary: 永 (glyph origin as a pictogram of a long river with tributaries, the alternative swimming reading and relation to 泳, readings and senses): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B0%B8

- Shuowen Jiezi, 永部: 永，長也。象水坙理之長。《詩》曰：江之永矣 (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%AA%AA%E6%96%87%E8%A7%A3%E5%AD%97/11

- Wikipedia: Eight Principles of Yong, the eight strokes and the Seven Powers of Lady Wei Shuo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Principles_of_Yong

- Wikipedia: Lantingji Xu, the Orchid Pavilion gathering of 353 and the fate of the original: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantingji_Xu

- Wikipedia: Monument to the People's Heroes, Mao Zedong's 1955 inscription: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_People%27s_Heroes

- Wikipedia: Yongle Emperor, whose era name 永樂 means 'perpetual happiness': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongle_Emperor

- Shanghai Daily: The Forever bike that ruled the streets of Shanghai (brand history and 1952 output): https://www.shine.cn/feature/art-culture/2103266556/

- Wiktionary: 永結同心, the wedding blessing: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B0%B8%E7%B5%90%E5%90%8C%E5%BF%83

- Dictionary of Chinese Idioms, Taiwan Ministry of Education: 一勞永逸, traced to Yang Xiong's Han-dynasty memorial: https://dict.idioms.moe.edu.tw/idiomView.jsp?ID=784&webMd=1&la=1