Sky and space

The sky is 天 tiān, and in Chinese the word has always had two meanings: the sky you look at and the Heaven you pray to, the power that entrusted its mandate to the emperors (see The Temple of Heaven). The character shows a man standing, 大 dà, with a stroke on top. For the 说文解字, 天 is 颠, the crown of the head, and on the oracle bones this stroke is often a big round head. But whether the meaning went from the head to the sky, or whether the stroke already showed the sky above the man, is not obvious, and specialists don't agree. The sky you actually see is rather 天空 tiānkōng, “the empty sky”.

The sun is 太阳 tàiyáng, literally “the great yang”, and the moon was long called 太阴 tàiyīn, “the great yin” (see The theory of yin and yang). Today people say 月亮 yuèliang, “the bright moon”. The two basic characters are drawings: 日 was a circle with a dot in the middle (it is sometimes said that the dot is the three-legged crow that lives in the sun; I'm not at all sure of that), and 月 a crescent. The moon is drawn as a crescent, never full. Otherwise, how would you tell it from the sun?

Put together, they give 明 míng, “bright”: the sun and the moon side by side, that's the explanation in every textbook. But careful: on some of the ancient forms, what you see on the left is not a sun, it's a window, 囧 (the same 囧 that now serves as an embarrassed emoticon on the Internet), and 明 would then be the moon shining in through the window. I like that picture better. As for the star, 星 xīng, it used to be written with three little suns, 晶, plus 生 shēng for the sound; 晶 has kept the meaning of “crystal”, of something that sparkles.

The five planets visible to the naked eye bear the names of the five phases, the 五行 wǔxíng: 水星 Mercury is “the Water star”, 金星 Venus “the Metal star”, 火星 Mars “the Fire star”, 木星 Jupiter “the Wood star” and 土星 Saturn “the Earth star”. Venus even has two names: 启明星 qǐmíngxīng, “the star that opens the light”, when it rises before the sun, and 长庚星 chánggēngxīng when it shines in the evening. The planets discovered through the telescope were given translations of the Western gods instead: 天王星 is the star of the “King of Heaven” (Uranus), 海王星 that of the “King of the Sea” (Neptune), 冥王星 that of the “King of the Underworld” (Pluto). Pluto lost its rank as a planet in 2006, but it kept its name.

For the Chinese, the Milky Way is a river, the 银河 yínhé, “the silver river”. On either side shine 牛郎星 Altair, the Cowherd, and 织女星 Vega, the Weaver Girl: the two lovers whom the Queen Mother of the West separated with this river, and who meet only one night a year, on the seventh day of the seventh moon, on a bridge of magpies (see Festivals). Look up one summer evening, far from the cities: the two stars really are on either side of the pale band (sentence 16).

Where we see a bear or a plough, the Chinese see a ladle, the 北斗七星 Běidǒu qīxīng, “the seven stars of the Northern Bushel”. The 斗 dǒu is a grain measure, and its handle turns with the seasons; hence 斗转星移 dǒu zhuǎn xīng yí, “the Bushel turns, the stars move”, to say that time goes by. The Bushel is how you find the Pole Star (sentence 11), and that is the star Confucius held up as a model for the good ruler, motionless while everything turns around it (sentence 25, see Chapter 2 of the Analects of Confucius). But Confucius's pole star was probably not ours: the Earth's axis shifts slowly, and I don't know which star he was looking at.

The sky was also a matter of state. An eclipse, 日食 rìshí, literally “the sun is eaten”, was taken as a warning to the Son of Heaven, and the court kept astronomers to predict it. The 尚书 tells how two of them, 羲和 Xi and He, were drunk and missed one, and an army was sent to punish them (the story has no doubt been touched up, but it shows what was at stake). The common people, for their part, blamed the 天狗 tiāngǒu, the heavenly dog, for devouring the sun, and beat gongs to make it let go (sentence 14). Comets had no better press: a comet is a 扫帚星 sàozhouxīng, “a broom star”, and the word still means a person who brings bad luck.

The universe is 宇宙 yǔzhòu, and both characters carry the roof, 宀: originally they were parts of the house (宇 is the eaves). The 淮南子 defines them like this: 四方上下谓之宇，往古来今谓之宙, “the four directions, up and down, that is 宇; past and future, that is 宙”. The Chinese universe is therefore made of space and time (in China people like to bring up Einstein here; it's a bit easy, but it's a nice thought).

For astronaut, Chinese has three words. 宇航员 yǔhángyuán, “the navigator of the universe”, is the most common; 航天员 hángtiānyuán, “the navigator of the sky”, is the official term in China; 太空人 tàikōngrén, “the space man”, is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It was from this 太空 tàikōng that the Western press made “taikonaut”, a word the Chinese never use. The first of them, 杨利伟 Yang Liwei, went up in 2003 (sentence 19).

The names in the Chinese space programme all come from mythology and poetry. The crewed spacecraft are called 神舟 Shénzhōu, “the divine vessel”, a homophone of 神州, “the divine land”, an old name for China. The station is 天宫 Tiāngōng, the heavenly palace where the Monkey King caused havoc. The lunar probes bear the name of 嫦娥 Chang'e, the goddess who fled to the Moon (sentence 20), and their rovers that of her jade rabbit, 玉兔 Yùtù. The Mars probes, finally, are the 天问 Tiānwèn, after the “Heavenly Questions” of the poet 屈原 Qu Yuan, who was already asking: 夜光何德，死则又育？, “what virtue has the light of the night, that it is reborn after it dies?”

In everyday language, the stars have come down to earth. 明星 míngxīng, “the bright star” ⟶ the celebrity, and 追星 zhuīxīng, “chasing the stars”, means being a fan. The 月光族 yuèguāngzú has nothing poetic about it: 月 here is the month, and 光 means “used up, down to the last bit” ⟶ those who have spent everything before the end of the month (sentence 17). Moonlight is an empty bank account.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order appears stroke by stroke, with the arrow showing the direction of the line.