# Chinese Symbol for Freedom (自由): Meaning, History, and Tattoo Tips

> The Chinese symbol for freedom is 自由 (zì yóu): what each character means, how a 1,800-year-old scold-word became liberty, and tattoo tips.

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

## Radical

自 (self; Kangxi 132) + 由, which dictionaries file under 田 (field; Kangxi 102)

## Formation

Two-character compound: 自 (self) + 由 (from, following)

The Chinese symbol for freedom is 自由 (zì yóu, roughly "dzuh yo"), two
characters that read, quite literally, "from oneself": acting on your own say-so
rather than someone else's, and it is written identically in simplified and
traditional Chinese. The surprise is its past. For most of its eighteen hundred years
on record, *ziyou* was not a right anyone demanded. More often it was a charge a
parent leveled at a willful child.

## Meaning

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:

| Word | Pinyin | Where it comes from | What it means | Reach for it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 自由 | zìyóu | Han-dynasty poetry; the modern sense from the 1900s | freedom, liberty; the right to act on your own will | you mean freedom as a principle or a right |
| 自在 | zìzài | Buddhist writing | at ease, unconstrained, comfortable in your own skin | you mean inner ease, not politics |
| 逍遥 | xiāoyáo | the first chapter of the *Zhuangzi* | free and easy wandering; drifting with nothing to hold you | you mean a carefree way of life |
| 解放 | jiěfàng | modern political usage | liberation; being set free from something | you mean an act of release, usually collective |

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](/chinese-symbols/peace),
and the two often share a banner.

## Character build

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.

## Etymology

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.

## Modern life

### "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."

## Cultural story

### 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](/chinese-mythology/wukong)
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.

## Tattoo notes

Freedom is a perennial tattoo request, and the good news is that it is a safe
one. The characters are common, the meaning
is unambiguous, and they are written the same way in simplified and traditional
Chinese, so there is no version to choose. What goes wrong is small and
permanent, and nearly all of it lives in the second character.

**Check the vertical in the second character.** It must poke up through the top
of the box and stop at the bottom edge. If it runs out the bottom instead, the
character becomes 甲 (armor, or "first-rate"). If it runs through both top and
bottom, it becomes 申 (to state, and the ninth earthly branch). If it does not
leave the box at all, it is the field, and your arm says "self field." These are
real characters, so a spell-checker will not catch them.

**Check the first character's tick and bars.** It needs the small slanting tick
on top and exactly two bars inside the box. Drop the tick and you get 目, the
eye. Keep the tick but draw only one bar and it reads 白, white.

**Keep the order.** Top to bottom if the design runs down your spine or forearm;
left to right if it runs across. Self comes first, then "from." Mirrored stencils
are the other classic accident; if the design was flipped for transfer, check it
on the skin before the needle starts.

**Consider what it says to a Chinese reader.** *Ziyou* is a public, political
noun, the word on banners and in constitutions, so on skin it reads roughly the
way LIBERTY in capital letters would. If what you mean is the feeling rather
than the principle, the older *xiaoyao*, the "free and easy wandering" of the
*Zhuangzi*, is the choice a Chinese reader would find more personal and more
poetic. Either way, print the characters from a real font at the size you plan
to ink, and ask someone who reads Chinese to look at the stencil.

## Tracer note

the half tattoo stencils most often get wrong

## Compounds

- 自由行 · zìyóu xíng · independent travel, a trip without a tour group

- 财务自由 · cáiwù zìyóu · financial freedom, enough money never to need a job

- 言论自由 · yánlùn zìyóu · freedom of speech

- 自由职业 · zìyóu zhíyè · freelancing (literally a free profession)

- 自由泳 · zìyóu yǒng · freestyle swimming

- 自由落体 · zìyóu luòtǐ · free fall, in physics

- 车厘子自由 · chēlízi zìyóu · cherry freedom: being able to buy imported cherries without checking the price (2019 slang)

## Idioms

- 自由自在 · zìyóu zìzài · free by oneself, at ease by oneself · carefree and unconstrained; the everyday phrase for a life with no leash · Platform Sutra (Tang); Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, ch. 23; Journey to the West, ch. 5

- 无拘无束 · wú jū wú shù · no restraint, no binding · completely unrestricted, free as you please · Journey to the West, ch. 2

- 逍遥自在 · xiāoyáo zìzài · wandering freely, at ease · leisurely and carefree, answerable to no one · Li Zhi, A Book to Burn (Ming)

- 身不由己 · shēn bù yóu jǐ · the body does not follow oneself · acting against your own will; not free to choose. The second character of freedom, working alone as 'following' · Romance of the Three Kingdoms, ch. 74

- 海阔天空 · hǎi kuò tiān kōng · the sea wide, the sky empty · boundless open space; also talk that ranges without limit. The title of Beyond's 1993 freedom anthem · Zha Shenxing (Qing poet); the late-Qing novel Wenming Xiaoshi, ch. 42

## Variants

- 自由 · simplified · The standard word, identical in simplified and traditional Chinese (and written the same way in Japanese). Use this.

- 自繇 · traditional · Yan Fu's deliberate 1903 spelling in his translation of Mill's On Liberty. A real historical form, but no modern reader writes it; not for a tattoo.

- 自甲 · wrong · The vertical in the second character runs out the bottom instead of the top. Reads 'self armor.'

- 自申 · wrong · The vertical runs out both ends. A real character (to state; the ninth earthly branch), so it will not look obviously broken.

- 目由 · wrong · The tick is missing from the first character, which turns 'self' into 'eye.'

- 白由 · wrong · Only one bar inside the first character's box, which turns it into 'white.'

- 由自 · mirrored · The characters in the wrong order. Top to bottom or left to right, self always comes first.

- 逍遥 (逍遙) · simplified · Not a spelling of freedom but the poetic alternative: Zhuangzi's 'free and easy wandering.' Traditional form in brackets. A good choice if you mean the feeling rather than the right.

## FAQ

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

The Chinese word for freedom is 自由 (zì yóu), two characters meaning roughly 'from oneself': acting on your own will. It translates both 'freedom' and 'liberty.' The first character, 自, originally a picture of a nose, means self; the second, 由, means from or following. It is written the same way in simplified and traditional Chinese.

**Is there a single Chinese character for freedom?**

No. Freedom always takes two characters in Chinese: 自由 (zì yóu) for freedom as a principle or right, or the older 自在 (zì zài, at ease) and 逍遥 (xiāo yáo, free and easy wandering, from the Zhuangzi) for the feeling. Neither half of 自由 means freedom on its own; alone they mean 'self' and 'from.'

**Is the Chinese symbol for freedom a good tattoo?**

Yes, 自由 is a common, correct and unambiguous tattoo, identical in simplified and traditional Chinese. The main risk is the second character: its central stroke must poke out the top of the box only. Running out the bottom gives 甲 (armor), out both ends gives 申, and not at all gives 田 (field). To a Chinese reader 自由 reads as a public word, like LIBERTY; 逍遥 (xiāo yáo) is the more personal, poetic alternative.

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

Freedom is zì yóu, pronounced roughly 'dzuh yo': a falling tone on the first syllable, a rising tone on the second. The same characters 自由 are read jiyū in Japanese and jayu in Korean, because all three languages share the word in its character form.

**What does freedom mean in Chinese philosophy?**

The classic Chinese idea of freedom comes from the Zhuangzi (4th century BCE), whose first chapter, 'Free and Easy Wandering' (逍遙遊), argues that even the sage Liezi, who could ride the wind, was not truly free because he depended on the wind; the free person depends on nothing. The word 自由 itself was mostly negative ('willful') until Yan Fu's 1903 translation of Mill's On Liberty argued for its original neutral sense: not being held back by outside things, with other people's freedom as its limit.

## Sources

- Shuowen Jiezi and Duan Yucai's commentary on 自 (via Zdic): https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E8%87%AA

- Kangxi Dictionary entry for 由, quoting Xu Xuan that the Shuowen lacks it; oracle-bone and bronze forms (via Zdic): https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E7%94%B1

- Dictionary entry for 自由 with classical citations (Zdic): https://www.zdic.net/hans/%E8%87%AA%E7%94%B1

- Southeast Fly the Peacocks (Wikisource, Chinese original): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%AD%94%E9%9B%80%E6%9D%B1%E5%8D%97%E9%A3%9B

- Liu Zongyuan, reply poem to Censor Cao (Complete Tang Poems, j. 352; Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E9%85%AC%E6%9B%B9%E4%BE%8D%E5%BE%A1%E9%81%8E%E8%B1%A1%E7%B8%A3%E8%A6%8B%E5%AF%84

- Yan Fu, translator's notes to The Boundaries Between the Group and the Self (On Liberty), 1903 (Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E7%BE%A4%E5%B7%B1%E6%AC%8A%E7%95%8C%E8%AB%96/%E8%AD%AF%E5%87%A1%E4%BE%8B

- Zhuangzi, Free and Easy Wandering (Wikisource, Chinese original): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%8E%8A%E5%AD%90/%E9%80%8D%E9%81%99%E9%81%8A

- Journey to the West, chapter 5 (Wikisource, Chinese original): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%A5%BF%E9%81%8A%E8%A8%98/%E7%AC%AC005%E5%9B%9E

- Liang Qichao, Young China (Wikisource, Chinese original): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E5%B0%91%E5%B9%B4%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E8%AA%AA

- Sixth Tone, Viral 'Cherry Freedom' Meme Critiques China's Cost of Living (2019): https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003570/viral-cherry-freedom-meme-critiques-chinas-cost-of-living

- The World of Chinese, On Food Liberty (2020): https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2020/07/on-food-liberty/

- Krish Raghav, 'Forgive me for loving freedom': The enduring Hong Kong rock anthem, The China Project (2019): https://thechinaproject.com/2019/11/09/beyond-the-enduring-hong-kong-rock-anthem/