Chinese Symbol for Hope (望): Meaning, Origin, and Tattoo Notes

望 runs to eleven strokes and stacks a small scene. The base is 王, the character for king: three level strokes pinned by one upright. The top half splits in two. On the left sits 亡 (wáng), which on its own means "to lose" or "to be gone"; on the right sits the moon, 月. Taken as parts, the character reads something like gone, moon, and a standing figure beneath, which turns out to be very close to its real history, worked out below. The one thing to keep straight as you write it is that top-right element: it is the moon 月, with two short strokes inside, not the sun 日, which has only one. It is identical in simplified and traditional Chinese, so there is no second version to learn.

望 (wàng) gathers a cluster of linked senses that all point the same way: to gaze into the distance, to look toward, to hope, to expect. The same character even names the full moon, the round one you tip your head back to see. Under all of them sits a single gesture, looking toward something far off that you want.

If you are writing "hope" in an ordinary sentence, though, a Chinese speaker reaches for the two-character word 希望 (xīwàng), plain "hope" as a noun or a verb. The lone character 望 is the more literary and more visual one, the one you would carve, paint, or ink. So the honest answer to "the Chinese symbol for hope" depends a little on what you are after:

What makes 望 worth the deeper look is that it is really the root of a whole vocabulary of longing, and it runs in both directions at once. That is the story the rest of this page tells.

The photograph that built nineteen thousand schools

The most famous act of hope in modern China is a single photograph. In 1991 a photographer named Xie Hailong, traveling through rural Anhui for a young charity, caught an eight-year-old named Su Mingjuan looking up from her school desk, pencil in hand, with a pair of enormous, fiercely determined eyes. The image, known ever after as "Big Eyes," became the face of 希望工程, Project Hope, the education fund the China Youth Development Foundation had launched in 1989 to keep poor rural children in school. The photo did what no statistic could. By China Daily's count, Project Hope had by 2016 raised some 13 billion yuan and built more than nineteen thousand primary schools. The girl in the picture went to college on the program she had come to stand for, took a job at a bank, and has given money back to it every year since. Hope, in China, is not only a character to hang on a wall. It is a line item that put roofs on schools.

The dragon every parent is hoping for

The most-repeated hope in Chinese life is the one parents hold for a child, and it has its own four-character phrase: wàng zǐ chéng lóng, "hoping your child becomes a dragon." The dragon is the imperial one, the old emblem of the very highest success, and the phrase carries the full, sometimes crushing weight of a family's expectations funneled onto one kid and one exam. It is said with pride and with a wince, often in the same breath. A whole modern vocabulary of exhausted over-parenting has grown up around it, but the wish underneath is the ancient one: a parent watching, quietly hoping the child gets further than they did.

From hoping to giving up, in one character

Here is the quiet genius of 望: bolt a second character onto it and you can dial hope up or down the entire emotional range. Add "rare" and you get xīwàng, hope itself. Add "expect" for qīwàng, expectation; add "thirst" for kěwàng, to crave; add "look" for pànwàng, to look forward. Then the character turns and goes the other way. Lose what you hoped for and you have shīwàng, disappointment; lose it entirely and you reach juéwàng, despair, which reads, with brutal literalness, as "cut-off hope." One small character holds the whole arc from longing to defeat, which may be the most honest thing any language has said about hope.

Curious what your own name could become in Chinese, built from its sound and a

good meaning? Our Chinese name generator does exactly that.

The character is older and stranger than its tidy modern shape lets on. On the bronze and oracle-bone forms of three thousand years ago, 望 is a single vivid drawing: a person standing upright on the ground, with one enormous eye raised, staring off into the distance. It is body language turned into writing, the whole posture of looking-out for something. Only later was the moon 月 added, giving the watcher something to fix on, and the element 亡, "gone," folded in to carry the sound.

The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, compiled by Xu Shen around the year 100, records exactly what that figure is watching for. It defines 望 with a short line, chū wáng zài wài, wàng qí huán yě: "one who has gone away is abroad, and those at home gaze for their return." That is the oldest definition of hope in the Chinese record, and there is nothing abstract about it. Hope is a household standing at the edge of the village, watching the road, waiting for someone to come home.

There is a second thread twisted into the character, and it explains that moon. In the earliest writing the sense "full moon" belonged to a closely related graph, 朢, and 望 slowly absorbed it, until one character carried both "to watch and long for" and "the moon at its fullest." Watching and the full moon have been braided together in this single shape from very early on, which is why so much of what follows happens by moonlight.

Watching the road, turned to stone

Because 望 means watching for a return, Chinese folklore fills up with women who never stopped watching. Scattered across the country, from a granite outcrop above Hong Kong to hills in half a dozen provinces, stand rocks called 望夫石, "the wife who watches for her husband." Each carries the same story. A woman climbs to a high place day after day, in many versions with a child on her back, to watch the sea or the road for a husband gone to war or trade, and she watches so long and so faithfully that she turns to stone still facing the horizon. The Hong Kong one, Amah Rock, is a fifteen-meter pillar that really does resemble a woman with a baby, and women still visit it. It is hope in its most literal and most heartbreaking form: longing made permanent, a person who became the act of waiting.

The moon you are both looking at

望 also names the full moon, and the two meanings feed each other. To look at the round moon, in Chinese poetry, is to hope across distance, because the person you miss is, wherever they are, under the same moon tonight. The most memorized poem in the language turns on exactly this. Li Bai's four-line "Quiet Night Thought" ends: "I raise my head and gaze at the bright moon; I lower it and think of home." The verb in that third line, the raising of the head to the moon, is 望. A thousand years of homesick students, soldiers, and travelers have looked up at a full moon and hoped along the same line.

That braid of moon and longing has grown its own festival. On the fifteenth night of the eighth lunar month, when the moon comes up at its roundest and brightest, China keeps the Mid-Autumn Festival, and the round moon is the entire point of it: in Chinese a round shape means completeness and reunion, tuányuán, so the full moon overhead stands for a family made whole. Those who can get home gather in the yard to gaze up at it together; those who cannot look at the same moon from wherever they are stranded and think of the people they miss. It is 望 written into a holiday, several hundred million people on one night all looking up and hoping in the same direction.

The plum grove that wasn't there

The most surprising thing hope ever did in the Chinese record is win a battle, and the story is set down in the fifth-century anecdote collection A New Account of the Tales of the World. The warlord Cao Cao was marching an army through waterless country and the men were folding from thirst. So he sent word down the line that just ahead lay a great grove of plums, sour-sweet and heavy with fruit. At the mere thought, the text says, every soldier's mouth ran with water, and on the strength of that imagined fruit the army kept moving until it reached a real spring. The phrase it left behind, wàng méi zhǐ kě, "gazing at plums to quench thirst," is what Chinese still says for comforting yourself with a hope not yet in reach. Sometimes, the story notes with a straight face, the hope by itself is enough to get you to the water.