Reflect on the character of "dismantling"

One of the most frequent characters in the urban scenery of the small stone of the development and the transformation is chai - to dismantle.

Any walk along the ancient quarters of most of the Chinese cities was leading to facing continuously this character, painted generally in red on the white walls of a house.

Chai, literally a hand (to the left) that seizes an axe with his pronounced knife-edge (to the right), was not, nevertheless a character of most used, since it was not even considered by the official books between the two thousand most frequent characters, but if I start looking between the thousands of photos that I have done during these 20 years in China, I am sure that it is between the most frequent.

Chai is a sentence of death, of the death of a quarter, of the death of the ancient China (not that of the books, but of the China of the XXth century to which there belongs most of the houses that fall down), the death sentence of a form of life. But while the occasional observer to observe the character chai takes him to interesting reflections on the briefness of the life and the passage of time; for the local population chai acquires a new meaning.

To be reborn. Yes, many of these projects marked with the axe are houses that reflect a form of simple life, sometimes espartada, which the foreigners we have got accustomed to contemplating like part of a scenery that turns out to be familiar to us. For many families, the character chai on the door of his walls, it means that they will leave finally his rudimentary housings, to take part for once of the progress that spreads over the country. For others the fact is that the hammer of the speculators blow his lives.

The eternal cycle of the yin and the yang. To die and to be reborn, conjugate at present in this curious character.

Pedro Ceinos is an author of the Manual of Writing of the Chinese Characters, and other works on China.

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