Random 东西

A silk painting of koi fish, of the exact design that hangs above my desk

1. One of the common Chinese words for "things" is 东西 (dōngxī), which literally means East-West.

What's the origin story behind this word?

In ancient times, the five directions were associated with the five elements.

East-Wood (东-木, dōng-mù)
West-Metal or Gold (西-金, xī-jīn)
North-Water (北-水, běi-shuǐ)
South-Fire (南-火, nán-huǒ)
Centre-Earth (中-土, zhōng-tǔ)

The most useful material things in the world at the time were made of wood or metal, and hence the directions associated with them (East and West) were used to represent "things", hence 东西 (dōngxī).

A commonly heard phrase 买东西 (mǎi dōngxī) means "to buy things".

2. Incidentally, the Mandarin words for "buy" and "sell" look and sound very similar, and differ only in tone.

买 mǎi (buy)
卖 mài (sell)

Until now, I thought German was the most confusing in this regard (kaufen = "to buy", and verkaufen = "to sell"), but Mandarin trumps it.

3. Now that we know the words for North (北 běi) and South (南 nán), we can see that the words 北京 (běi-jīng) and 南京 (nán-jīng) mean "Northern capital" and "Southern capital". And indeed, Beijing and Nanjing were among many cities that served as the capital for various dynasties.

4. An interesting aside is that the character 东 (dōng, East) is the simplified form of the traditional character 東.

Why does 東 represent the East? It's a combination of the symbols for the sun (日 rì) and for tree (木 mù). (mù also means "wood", as we saw earlier in this piece.)

If you squint a bit, you can see that the character for East (東) is a combination of the characters for sun (日) and tree (木). In other words, East is the direction where the sun is seen behind the trees.

5. Is there an Eastern capital (東京 dōng-jīng)? You'd be surprised. Those are actually the ideographic (kanji) characters for "Tokyo". In Japanese, the same characters are pronounced to-kyo instead of dōng-jīng, but the meaning is the same.

6. The word for ideographic character in Mandarin is 汉字 hàn-zì, literally, "Chinese letter". The corresponding words in Japanese and Korean are "kanji" and "hanja".