never done before copy paste

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There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

ooh, a friday treat for me?? thank you

(this is one topic that i don't get sick of reiterating because i love hieroglyphs so much)

"hieroglyphic" is the term applied to a couple of ancient writing systems, especially egyptian (the domain where the term originated) and mayan. generally, it refers to writing systems with notably pictorial elements, that is, systems where the signs' pictorial origins are recognizable. i've seen some claims that hieroglyphic writing is limited to monumental texts, which may be accurate for egyptian—i believe different versions of the script, hieratic and demotic, were used for non-monumental writing—but is definitely not true for mayan glyphs, which also appear incised and painted on portable objects and in codices and graffiti.

the classic mayan logogram AK "turtle," representing a turtle shell.

although emojis are obviously pictorial, they don't have the linguistic value that hieroglyphics do. any "hieroglyphic" system is encoding a specific language, and none of them are actually "pictorial," which would indicate something like an ideographic system where every symbol stands for an independent idea. (this was a popular early explanation for egyptian hieroglyphs among european scholars, but 19th-century decipherment pretty roundly shut that down. it was also suggested for mayan glyphs in the 19th and even 20th centuries—including among very prominent mayanists—but again, thoroughly disproven.)

so: hieroglyphic systems represent specific linguistic units, which may or may not have semantic associations. phonograms are used for their sound referents, like alphabetic signs. logograms are used for their semantic referents, but also (in my experience) point to specific words. both egyptian and mayan hieroglyphic scripts make use of some kind of complementation in cases of homophony or polyvalence, where a determinative (for egyptian) or syllabogram (for mayan) is associated with a logogram to clarify its intended referent.

the logogram WITZ "mountain" with initial complementation by the syllabogram wi (shaded in gray), clarifying the word's pronunciation.

emojis, having no agreed-upon linguistic value, can be described as pictorial or ideographic. we don't have a system of associating specific sounds with individual symbols, and in cases where a symbol can have multiple meanings, there's no formalized understanding of complementation to clarify (you just have to figure out your interlocutor's intention from context clues).

there's also an important social factor to consider here: writing systems do not get developed and especially disseminated without an infrastructure to back them up. as law (2015:162)* writes, "writing needs complex society more than complex societies need writing." script practices can change from the bottom up, sure, but without social structures in place surrounding those script practices, they'd have nowhere to go**. emojis have no such structure. they are unformalized, unstandardized, and entirely lack a pedagogical infrastructure. there's no way to tell everyone what their singular meanings may be. and, honestly, there aren't enough of them for a full writing system! logosyllabaries have at minimum hundreds of symbols, and that's even with the ability to write phonetically using syllabograms alone. coe and van stone (2005:18–19)*** very accurately call out how ambiguous and unwieldy a purely logographic system would be, requiring thousands upon thousands of individual signs to represent the full breadth of human conceptual capability.

...anyway, that's been my soapbox.

*Law, Danny. 2015. “Reading Early Maya Cities: Interpreting the Role of Writing in Urbanization.” In A World with Cities, 4000 BCE – 1200 CE, edited by Norman Yoffee, 158–81. The Cambridge World History, III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

**Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi, and Marcus W. Feldman. 1981. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

***Coe, Michael D., and Mark Van Stone. 2005. Reading the Maya Glyphs. 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson.