#chaizi

There were many styles of divination in ancient Chinese history, the most famous of which were the oracle bones, which were (usually) turtle shells on which questions were inscribed, and then burned over a fire until the shell cracked, and the cracks were interpreted as the answers to the questions.

However, today’s subject is a form of divination based entirely on written language:  chaizi/拆字.  Chaizi basically means “deconstructing (Chinese) characters”, and can also be called pozi/破字 (lit. “breaking characters) or xiangzi/相字 (lit. “judging characters”) or cezi/测字 (lit. “measuring characters”).  How it works is pretty simple:  the diviner will look at the structure of characters in your given name or in a character you gave at random, and try to interpret your future from those characters.

For example, there was once a guy who was about to enter the civil service examinations (keju/科举; exams in the imperial era designed to test one’s merit, and if one ranks high enough, one can become a government official).  He went to a diviner named Xie Shi (谢石), who was good at chaizi divination, and asked about his future for fun.  He gave Xie Shi the character 乃.  Xie Shi then told him he will never rank high enough in the exams, because ranking high enough in the exams is called jidi/及第, and the character he gave, 乃, is an “incomplete form” of 及.  This story is from Miscellaneous Records of the Scholarly Halls (《玉堂杂记》) by Zhou Bida (周必大) in Southern Song dynasty (12th-13th century).

In old times, chaizi can also be played as a game, and this is sometimes called chaibaidaozi/拆白道字.  A couplet from Qing dynasty (written in late 18th-early 19th century) contained the phrase “ 谢金圃, 抽身便讨; 吴玉纶 倒口就吞”.  In the first part, 谢 is the character being deconstructed.  谢 can be deconstructed into 3 parts:    讠, 身, 寸.  So the poet wrote “抽身便讨”, or “take away the 身 in the middle and you will have 讨”.  In the second part, 吴 is the character being deconstructed.  吴 is composed of the characters 口 and 天, with the former on top of the latter, but if you flip these two, the character become 吞/swallow.  So the poet wrote “倒口就吞”, or “flip the 口 and there’s 吞”.  

In modern times, chaizi is still used online, but instead of for divination or for fun, it’s actually used as a way to add emphasis (only applicable for characters that can be deconstructed into right and left parts), similar to typing in all caps in English, since separating the elements of a character makes it appear bigger.  An example is the character 强/strong, which becomes bigger if deconstructed and typed out separately as 弓虽.