Clarity - Ch’ing

Ch’ing means ‘clear’, ‘lucid’, and ‘pure’. The character is a simple ideogram composed of two elements: ‘water’, represented by the three ‘drops’ of the water radical and ‘the colour of nature’. When water has clarity you see in it the colour that nature gave it, just as the essential humaneness that nature gave us shines through when our energy is pure, like a pearl through clear water. This was the title chosen by China’s last imperial dynasty in 1644, which called itself the Ch’ing Dynasty.