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

> The Chinese symbol for hope is 望 (wàng), which pictures someone watching the road for a return. Its meaning and origin, the word 希望, and tattoo notes.

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

The Chinese symbol for hope is 望 (wàng, said like "wahng"), and it hides a
small, moving picture. The oldest dictionary in China explains the character as
a person watching the road for someone who has gone away, hoping to see them
come back. Hope, in Chinese, is not really a warm feeling. It is a posture:
standing still, eyes on the distance, waiting for a return.

## Meaning

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:

| Character | Pinyin | What it really means | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 望 | wàng | To gaze afar; to look toward, to hope | A single symbol for hope, with a "watching for it" feeling |
| 希望 | xīwàng | Hope, as an everyday noun or verb | Writing "hope" in a normal Chinese sentence |
| 愿 | yuàn | A wish, a heartfelt vow, willingness | A wish or vow, as in a birthday wish |
| 盼 | pàn | To long for, to look forward eagerly | Eager, impatient longing for what is coming |

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.

## Character build

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.

## Etymology

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.

## Modern life

### 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](/chinese-name) does exactly that.

## Cultural story

### 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](/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.

## Tattoo notes

望 is a striking and genuinely meaningful choice for a tattoo, and it is written
identically in simplified and traditional Chinese, so there is no regional version
to weigh. Two cautions are worth taking. The first is the character living right
next door: 忘, also read wàng, which means "to forget." It is the same 亡 sitting
on top of the heart 心, and it looks and sounds close enough to 望 that a careless
stencil or a low-resolution reference could hand you "forget" where you meant
"hope." Check yours against a dictionary. The second is a choice rather than an
error: on its own, 望 leans toward "gaze, look toward" every bit as much as "hope,"
so some people prefer the unambiguous two-character word 希望 (xīwàng), which reads
plainly as "hope" to any Chinese speaker. Neither is wrong. 望 is the more poetic
and more compact; 希望 is the more literal. As ever, print the design at full size
and have someone who reads Chinese confirm it before the needle comes out.

## Compounds

- 希望 · xīwàng · hope (the everyday word, noun and verb)

- 期望 · qīwàng · to expect; expectation, high hopes

- 渴望 · kěwàng · to crave; to long for (literally 'thirst-hope')

- 盼望 · pànwàng · to look forward to; to hope for

- 愿望 · yuànwàng · a wish; a desire

- 失望 · shīwàng · disappointment; to be let down (literally 'lose-hope')

- 绝望 · juéwàng · despair (literally 'cut-off hope')

- 展望 · zhǎnwàng · to look ahead; an outlook, a prospect

- 名望 · míngwàng · reputation; prestige, standing

- 望远镜 · wàngyuǎnjìng · telescope (literally 'gaze-far-glass')

## Idioms

- 望梅止渴 · wàng méi zhǐ kě · gaze at plums to quench thirst · to comfort yourself with a hope not yet within reach; to feed on anticipation. From Cao Cao's thirsty army and the plum grove ahead. · A New Account of the Tales of the World (世说新语, Jiajue)

- 望子成龙 · wàng zǐ chéng lóng · to hope one's child becomes a dragon · to place high hopes on a child's success; the defining ambition of the Chinese parent. · 

- 望穿秋水 · wàng chuān qiū shuǐ · to gaze until the autumn waters run dry · to await someone with aching, worn-out longing; to look for them until your eyes give out. · 

- 望眼欲穿 · wàng yǎn yù chuān · gazing until the eyes would pierce through · to look forward to something with anxious, straining impatience. · 

- 大失所望 · dà shī suǒ wàng · greatly to lose what was hoped for · to be bitterly disappointed; for a hope to fall badly short. · 

## Variants

- 望 · simplified · The standard modern form, and identical in simplified and traditional Chinese: 望 was never simplified, so mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore all write the same eleven strokes. There is no simplified-versus-traditional choice to make.

- 忘 (chosen instead of 望) · wrong · The trap next door. 忘, also read wàng, is the 亡 element sitting over the heart 心, and it means 'to forget,' the near-opposite of hope. The two look and sound alike enough that a sloppy reference can swap them. If you want hope, make sure the bottom half is 王 (king), not 心 (heart).

- 望 (flipped or rotated) · mirrored · Not a real variant. Low-resolution stencils sometimes come out mirrored or rotated, and a reversed 望 reads instantly as an error to anyone literate. Check against a dictionary at full size before inking.

## FAQ

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

It is 望 (wàng), an eleven-stroke character meaning to gaze into the distance, to look toward, and to hope. Its oldest dictionary definition describes a household watching the road for someone who has gone away, so the character is literally the posture of hoping for a return. It is written the same in simplified and traditional Chinese. For 'hope' in an ordinary sentence, Chinese uses the two-character word 希望 (xīwàng).

**Is there a single Chinese character for hope, or is it two characters?**

Both exist, for different jobs. The single character is 望 (wàng): the literary, visual one you would carve or ink, though it also carries the sense of 'gaze into the distance.' The everyday word, the one used in normal speech and writing, is the two-character 希望 (xīwàng), which reads unambiguously as 'hope.' For a symbol or tattoo, people usually choose 望; for a sentence, 希望.

**What is hope in Chinese?**

The ordinary word is 希望 (xīwàng), used as both noun and verb, as in 'I hope' or 'a hope.' It is built on the single character 望 (wàng), which means to gaze toward or look forward to something far off. So 希望 is the everyday word, and 望 is the older, single-character root it grows from, the one that also names the full moon.

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

It can be, with two checks. First, do not confuse 望 (hope) with the look-alike 忘 (also wàng), which means 'to forget': make sure the bottom of the character is 王, not the heart 心. Second, decide whether you want the single character 望, which also means 'to gaze afar,' or the fully unambiguous two-character word 希望 (xīwàng). 望 is identical in simplified and traditional Chinese, so there is no regional version to get wrong.

**What does the Chinese character wàng mean?**

望 means to gaze into the distance, to look toward, to hope or expect, and, as a noun, the full moon and one's reputation (as in míngwàng). The senses share one image: looking toward something far away. Its oracle-bone form shows a person standing with a raised eye, watching the horizon, and the Shuowen dictionary glosses it as gazing for the return of someone who has gone away.

**What is the Asian symbol for hope?**

It is a Chinese character, 望 (wàng), since there is no writing system shared across Asia to draw one from. The trap with this word is a different one from the usual script confusion: hope in ordinary Chinese is two characters, 希望 (xīwàng), not one. 望 alone carries the older sense of gazing at something far off, which is exactly why it works as a single-character design and why it does not read as the everyday noun.

## Sources

- Wiktionary: 望 (glyph origin, radical, strokes, meanings): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%9C%9B

- Shuowen Jiezi entry for 望 (hancibao.com): 出亡在外，望其還也: https://www.hancibao.com/shuowen/671b

- Amah Rock (望夫石), the husband-gazing stone (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amah_Rock

- Li Bai, 'Quiet Night Thought' (静夜思): 举头望明月 (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought

- 望梅止渴, from A New Account of the Tales of the World (世说新语, via Gushiwen): https://m.gushiwen.cn/shiwenv_684fe457d4b0.aspx

- Project Hope (希望工程) and Su Mingjuan, the 'Big Eyes' photo (China Daily): https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201712/17/WS5a35d63aa3108bc8c673514f.html

- Mid-Autumn Festival: the full moon, reunion (团圆), and moon-gazing (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival

- Wiktionary: 忘 (wàng), 'to forget', the look-alike of 望: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%BF%98