Chinese Symbol for Freedom: Meaning, History, and Tattoo Tips

Eleven strokes in total, six for the first character and five for the second, and both are shapes most learners meet in their first month.

自 (zì), self. A short slanting tick on top, then a tall, narrow box closed at the bottom with two short horizontal strokes inside it. Write the tick first, then the left side, then the top-and-right in one turning stroke, then the two inner bars, then the base that closes the box.

由 (yóu), from. This is 田, the field, a box split into four cells, with one change: the central vertical pushes up through the lid and out the top. Order: the left side, the top-and-right turning stroke, the middle horizontal, the long central vertical, and finally the bottom stroke that seals the box. That poking-up vertical is the whole character. Move it, lose it, or let it run out the bottom and you have written a different word, which is why the tattoo section below spends so long on it.

A popular memory trick reads the second character as a shoot pushing up out of a field, the thing that springs from the soil. It is a good mnemonic. It is not quite an etymology, as the next section explains. If you would like to see the pair brushed in seal script or running hand, our calligraphy tool will draw it in each style.

Take the word apart and it is almost a stutter. Both halves can mean "from." The first, zì, is "self" and also "from" (as in "from ancient times"). The second, yóu, is "from, by way of, following," and an old Chinese dictionary of synonyms, the Erya, glosses it simply with the first. So ziyou is something like "self-following," or "going by your own way," which is a fair definition of freedom in any language. It covers both of the English words: freedom and liberty have one Chinese translation between them, so "freedom of speech" and "the Statue of Liberty" share the same two characters.

That is the modern, formal word. Chinese has older and gentler ways to say "free," and they are the ones to know if you want the feeling rather than the political noun:

The everyday Chinese speaker slides between them without thinking. A child let out of school for the summer is zizai. A poet who quits his post to grow beans is xiaoyao. A country is jiefang, and a citizen has ziyou. The neighbor that shares the most territory with freedom on this site is peace, and the two often share a banner.

"Cherry freedom" and the freedom to eat

Modern Chinese has turned the grandest word in political philosophy into a joke about groceries, and it did so almost overnight. Around the Spring Festival of 2019 a viral essay lamented that a 26-year-old earning ten thousand yuan a month still could not afford to eat imported cherries, and the internet coined chelizi ziyou, "cherry freedom," for the ability to buy the expensive fruit without checking the price. Sixth Tone reported the meme spreading as a wry measure of the cost of living, and it spawned a formula: shixian X ziyou, "achieve X freedom." The World of Chinese has cataloged the family since: milk-tea freedom and fried-chicken freedom (for the dieter who has given both up), dressing freedom (to wear what you like without comment), transportation freedom (owning a car, or simply getting a train ticket home at New Year). In early 2020, with deliveries halted, people mourned the loss of luosifen freedom, the right to a bowl of the famously pungent snail noodle soup.

The joke works because the word is so heavy. Attaching the vocabulary of constitutions to a carton of fruit is the same move as an English speaker declaring a "human right" to brunch.

Financial freedom and the freedom to travel

Two compounds carry the word through ordinary life. Caiwu ziyou, financial freedom, is the Chinese version of the early-retirement dream, and it is the ceiling of the cherry scale: first cherries, then a car, then enough money never to work again. Ziyou xing, "free travel," is what a travel agency calls a trip without a tour group, and it is how a generation that grew up on packaged coach tours now describes going abroad on its own terms. A freelancer is a "free-profession" worker, freestyle swimming is "free swimming," and a physics student learns ziyou luoti, free fall.

The song

In the Cantonese-speaking world, one song owns the word. Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies, a 1993 ballad by the Hong Kong rock band Beyond, has lyrics that celebrate Nelson Mandela's release from prison. Two months after it came out, the band's singer Wong Ka Kui suffered a fatal head injury during a shoot in Tokyo; he was 31. As the critic Krish Raghav traced for The China Project, the song has been sung for decades since, during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and at rallies in Hong Kong and Taipei. Its title is a four-character idiom for open sea and empty sky (it is in the idioms below), and Raghav calls it "a rare, enduring anthem."

The first character has the most charming origin on the page. The Shuowen Jiezi, the first great Chinese dictionary (around 100 CE), defines it in two words: it is the nose, and the shape is a picture of a nose. The Qing scholar Duan Yucai, annotating the entry, noted that by his day almost nobody used the character to mean "nose" anymore; the senses "self" and "from" had taken over. The nose still has the last word, though. When a Chinese speaker wants to say "who, me?" they do not point at their chest. They point at their nose.

The second character is a mystery, and an unusually well-documented one. It is not in the Shuowen at all. The Kangxi Dictionary of 1716 quotes an early Shuowen commentator surnamed Xu on the point: the Shuowen has no entry for it, only a related, longer form meaning new growth sprouting from a fallen tree, which later writers shortened. The character does turn up earlier than the dictionary, on Shang oracle bones and Western Zhou bronzes (the character database at Zdic lists twenty oracle-bone examples), but scholars have never agreed on what those early drawings depict. So the honest answer to "what is the picture in 由?" is that nobody knows. The field-and-sprout story you will find online is half right by accident: there is a sprout in the old dictionary's stand-in form, but there was never a field.

What is certain is that for most of history yóu was a busy little function word meaning "from," "by," or "the cause of," which is why the same character sits inside the ordinary word for "reason." Freedom was, in effect, built from two prepositions.

A mother's rebuke

The first famous ziyou in Chinese literature is a scolding. It comes from the ballad known as Southeast Fly the Peacocks, preserved in the sixth-century anthology New Songs from a Jade Terrace and set, according to its preface, at the end of the Han dynasty, around 200 CE. A young official named Jiao Zhongqing is devoted to his wife, Liu Lanzhi; his mother cannot stand her. In two consecutive lines the mother makes her case. The girl has no manners, she says, and does whatever she pleases on her own authority. And you, she tells her son, what makes you think you get your own way? That second charge is the word: ziyou, having your own say. It ends, as ballads do, with the couple dead and two birds calling over their graves. For centuries after, "free" in Chinese leaned toward "willful," which is exactly the reputation Yan Fu would later have to fight.

The poet who could not pick a flower

The same word could also be soft and sad. In the last years of his life the poet Liu Zongyuan was serving out a political exile as governor of Liuzhou, in the far south, when a friend passed through a nearby county and sent him a poem. Liu wrote back four lines: a green river under a mountain, a traveler moored in a magnolia-wood boat, a spring wind full of longing, and the poet wanting to gather duckweed flowers to send his friend and finding himself bu ziyou, not free to. He was an official who could not leave his post. No law was broken and no slogan was raised. A man simply could not walk down to the river.

Riding the wind is not enough

The deepest Chinese idea of freedom is older than the word and does not use it. The Zhuangzi, a Daoist classic of the fourth century BCE, opens with a chapter Burton Watson translated as "Free and Easy Wandering," and its hero is a bird whose wings hang across the sky like clouds. The chapter then makes a sly point about the sage Liezi, who could ride the wind and come home after fifteen days. Impressive, the text allows, but Liezi still depended on something: the wind. The truly free person rides the nature of heaven and earth itself, and so depends on nothing at all. Right after comes a story about the hermit Xu You, to whom the sage-king Yao offered the whole empire. Xu You declined. A wren nesting in the deep forest, he said, needs no more than one branch. The hermit who turned down China was named, of all things, You, written with the same character as the second half of ziyou.

The monkey with nothing to do

At the start of chapter five of Journey to the West, the Monkey King has been bought off with exactly what he demanded: the grand title Great Sage Equal to Heaven, a mansion, and two offices of attendants. He has no duties, no salary he cares about, three meals a day and a bed at night, and the novel describes him as ziyou zizai, free and at his ease, wandering the palaces making friends with the stars. The celestial court finds this alarming. An idle monkey, a Daoist immortal at court warns, will make trouble. So they give him a job guarding the peach orchard of immortality, which is roughly like putting a raccoon in charge of the trash cans, and before the chapter is out he has eaten the peaches.

Yan Fu's extra strokes

The modern word arrived through a translator who did not quite trust it. In 1903 Yan Fu, the scholar who translated Thomas Huxley and Adam Smith for Chinese readers, published his version of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty under the title The Boundaries Between the Group and the Self. In the translator's notes he faced the obvious problem. The Chinese word, he wrote, usually carried bad senses: recklessness, license, having no scruples at all. Those were later accretions, he argued; the original meaning was only that a person is not held back by outside things. As proof he quoted Liu Zongyuan's duckweed line, the one above, and said that was exactly the sense he meant.

Then he did something no translator would dare today. He changed the spelling. Throughout the book he wrote 自繇, borrowing an older character that ancient texts used interchangeably with you, to mark the new abstract noun as a different thing from the old willfulness. And he gave it a limit in the same breath: once people live in a group, he wrote, one person's freedom must take other people's freedom as its boundary. The spelling did not catch on. The idea did. Three years earlier Liang Qichao had already written, in his essay Young China, that when the young are free the nation is free, and within a generation the scold-word of the peacock ballad had become the name of a right.