Chinese Symbol for Honor (荣): Meaning, Origin, and Tattoo

荣 is nine strokes in three stacked parts, written top to bottom. On top sit the three strokes of the grass radical, 艹, a horizontal line crossed by two short verticals. Under it lies a flat cover, 冖, a lid drawn wider than the grass above it. And at the bottom stands 木 (mù), "tree," the four-stroke picture of a trunk with spreading roots that Chinese children learn in their first week: a horizontal for the branches, a vertical for the trunk, two diagonals splaying down from the crossing.

The traditional form, 榮, is the same tree under the same lid, but the crown is different: two fires, 火火, where the simplified form has grass. That pair of fires is the original, and it is the whole secret of the character (see the etymology below). The mid-twentieth-century simplification replaced the two fires with the grass radical, which is why a mainland Chinese reader sees a plant and a Taiwanese or Hong Kong reader sees a blaze.

One thing to know before you write it anywhere permanent: the grass-and-lid cap is shared by a whole family of characters that differ only in what sits underneath. Put earth, 土, under the lid and you have 茔 (yíng), a grave. Put silk under it and you have "to wind around"; put a fire and you have "glimmer"; put strength and you have "labor." Everything that makes the character mean honor is in the tree at the bottom. Draw that tree cleanly.

荣 (róng) covers the ground that English splits between honor and glory. It is the public, visible kind of honor: the medal, the title, the promotion, the name on the board at the front of the school. The everyday noun is róngyù, "honor" or "reputation," the word on a certificate; róngyào is "glory," with more shine to it; guāngróng, "light and honor," is the adjective for a glorious deed or a proud family; and róngxìng, the one you will hear most, is the polite "I am honored," said at the start of every speech and the acceptance of every award.

What makes the word tick is its opposite. Honor in Chinese is one half of a pair, róngrǔ, honor and disgrace, and the second character, 辱 (rǔ), is not the inner blush of shame but the outward fact of being disgraced. You are honored or you are disgraced, in front of people, and the whole moral vocabulary of the classical philosophers is organized around which of the two you end up with. Modern Chinese still says it as one breath: to share honor and disgrace, to know honor from disgrace, to take something as an honor rather than a disgrace.

A reader hunting for "honor" in Chinese usually has one of four words in mind, and they are not interchangeable.

So a soldier's honor, the kind you keep, is closer to yì, which has its own page here. The honor that is given to you, and that can be taken away, is róng. This page is about that one.

The honor in your pocket

Two of the most-used pieces of software and hardware in China carry the word. Honor, the smartphone brand, is róngyào in Chinese, "glory"; it began as a Huawei sub-brand and was sold off in November 2020, amid American sanctions on its parent, and now sells phones worldwide under an English name that is the literal translation of its Chinese one. And Honor of Kings, the mobile game from Tencent's TiMi studio, is Wángzhě Róngyào, "the glory of kings." Released in October 2015, it had passed 100 million daily players by 2020 and was, by Wikipedia's tally of the industry figures, the highest-grossing mobile game in the world in 2024, at 2.6 billion dollars. Its heroes are a roll call of the people on this site, Sun Wukong and Nezha and Guan Yu among them, which means a fair share of the world's teenagers have spent more hours with the character for glory than with any other on this page.

"It is an honor"

Róngxìng is the word you will hear most often, and it is the reflex politeness of any speech, toast, or job interview: it is an honor to be here, an honor to meet you, an honor to be chosen. Beyond that the word runs through the machinery of public praise. Every award is rónghuò, "honored to receive." Every promotion is róngshēng, "honored to rise." The board at the front of a school or factory listing the best students and workers is the guāngróng bǎng, the honor roll, with the same word Chinese uses for a glorious deed. An honorary citizen is a róngyù citizen; a disabled veteran is, officially, a róngyù soldier, an "honored soldier." And the athlete or graduate who comes back to a small town with a medal or a degree is said to róngguī, to return in glory, a phrase that is more than two thousand years old and has a boiling in its history (see below).

Eight honors and eight disgraces

The honor-and-disgrace pair is still the grammar of public morality. In 2006 the Chinese leader Hu Jintao issued a moral code known as the Eight Honors and Eight Shames, officially the Socialist Concept of Honor and Disgrace: eight things to take as an honor, from loving the country to hard work, each paired with the disgrace of doing the opposite. It went up on classroom walls across the country in exactly the same róng-versus-rǔ form Mencius used twenty-three centuries earlier, which tells you how little the word's shape has moved.

A surname and a wish

Róng is also a surname, not a common one, but a distinguished one. Rong Yiren, of a Shanghai industrial family, was the rare pre-1949 capitalist who stayed on and thrived, ending up Vice President of China from 1993 to 1998 and known on both sides of the Pacific as "the Red Capitalist." As a given name, 荣 is a wish for a flourishing life, common in the generation born mid-century, when a boy named Róng was being told to bloom.

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Open the Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, compiled around the year 100, and honor turns out to be a tree. The entry for 榮 reads, in full, that it is the tong tree, built from the tree radical with an abbreviated 熒 (yíng, "glimmering lights") for the sound, and adds a second, older sense: the upturned ends of a roof's eaves. No honor, no glory, not a word about virtue. Xu Shen, the dictionary's compiler, was describing a plant, and the plant was the wutong, the Chinese parasol tree with the enormous leaves.

The Erya, an even older glossary of classical terms, explains how a tree became a feeling. In its chapter on plants it lays down a rule of vocabulary: the blossom of a tree is called huá, and the blossom of a grass is called róng; a plant that flowers and fruits is called xiù, and one that flowers without fruiting is called yīng. So róng was a word for blossoming, the moment a plant is at its most visible, and from there it slid, the way words do, to "flourishing," then "prospering," then the human version of being in full bloom in front of everyone: honor. Chinese never lost the botanical sense. Rónghuā, "glory and splendor," is literally "blossom and blossom," and the standard adjective for a booming economy is still a phrase about trees.

The two fires in the crown of the traditional form are what the dictionary means by the abbreviated "glimmering lights": the sound component 熒 is a pair of flames under a cover, and 榮 keeps the flames and swaps in a tree. Handian, the standard online Chinese dictionary, reads the bronze-age form as two flower-heads shining at each other like torches, which is a fair description of a parasol tree in bloom. The folk version you will meet online, that the grass radical "shows it is a plant word," is true only of the simplified character, and only by accident: the grass arrived with the mainland script reform, which rebuilt the top of the character. The fires are original. Honor, in its oldest written form, is a tree lit up.

The tree the phoenix lands on

The tree inside the character is not just any tree. The wutong, the Chinese parasol tree, is the one tree in Chinese lore that the phoenix will consent to perch on, and the pairing is as old as the Book of Songs, where a poem in the "Greater Odes" sets the phoenix singing on a high ridge while the parasol tree grows on the sunny slope below. Later writers made it a rule: the bird eats nothing but bamboo seed, drinks nothing but sweet spring water, and lands on nothing but the wutong. So when the Shuowen defines honor as the tong tree, it is defining it as the tree a phoenix chooses. There is a whole theory of honor folded into that: it is not something you grab, it is something that alights on you if you are the right kind of tree. Our page on the Chinese phoenix has the bird's side of the story.

Honor and disgrace

Mencius, the tradition's second sage, made the pair into a law of politics. In the chapter named for his disciple Gongsun Chou he says, in James Legge's translation, "Benevolence brings glory to a prince, and the opposite of it brings disgrace," and then adds the image every Chinese student remembers: a ruler who hates disgrace and yet governs cruelly is like a man who hates damp and insists on living in a hollow. The "glory" in Legge's English is róng. Xunzi, a generation later and a good deal harder headed, gave the pair its own chapter, titled simply "Honor and Disgrace," and boiled the whole distinction down to an order of priorities: the person who puts what is right ahead of what is profitable ends up honored, and the person who puts profit first ends up disgraced; the honored get their way in the world, and the disgraced are pushed around by it. Note what neither philosopher says. Honor is not rank, not wealth, not birth. It is what conduct earns, in public, over time.

Brocade in the dark

The phrase for coming home in glory has a body count. In 206 BCE the warlord Xiang Yu had just burned the capital of the fallen Qin dynasty, and an adviser suggested he stay and rule from there, since the region was rich and walled in by mountains. Xiang Yu, homesick, refused, and Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian preserves his reason: to become rich and powerful and not go home to show it, he said, would be like walking about at night in embroidered robes. Who would ever know? The adviser muttered that people were right to call the men of Chu monkeys in hats, and Xiang Yu had him boiled. The embroidered robes became the four-character phrase for returning to your hometown in brocade, and the version built on this character, róngguī gùlǐ, "return to the old village in glory," is what Chinese newspapers still write over the photograph of an Olympic medalist stepping off the train.

The House of Glory

Chinese readers meet the character on the gate of the most famous house in fiction. Dream of the Red Chamber, the great eighteenth-century novel, is set in two adjoining compounds of the aristocratic Jia clan: the Ningguo House and the Rongguo House, the "Glory of the State" mansion, where the hero Jia Baoyu grows up among his cousins. In the fourth chapter a wily clerk explains to a new magistrate how the four great families of the capital are all intermarried, so that if one is damaged all are damaged, and if one flourishes all flourish. The line, built on this character, became a proverb for any network of interests bound together, and the whole novel is the slow proof of its first half: the House of Glory, in the end, does not stay glorious.

Trees flourishing toward glory

The most beautiful use of the word is not about honor at all. In the year 405 the poet Tao Yuanming quit his government post after eighty days, went home to his farm, and wrote the essay "Returning Home," in which he walks his own land in early spring and sees the trees flourishing toward róng, growing eagerly into bloom, while a stream begins to trickle. That line gave modern Chinese its standard phrase for anything thriving, xīnxīn xiàng róng, which today is what an economist says about a booming province. Sixteen centuries on, the word still means what the Erya said it meant: a plant that has decided to flower.