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| 漢 | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Meaning | Han; Chinese | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radical | 水 + 11 | Strokes | 14 | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Composition | ⿰氵𦰩 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Formation | Phono-semantic | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Unicode | U+6F22 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
[ Mandarin ]
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[ Cantonese ]
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[ Japanese ]
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[ Korean ]
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[ Vietnamese ]
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| 漢 across regional standards | ||
| Traditional | 漢 | U+6F22 |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese | 漢 | U+6F22 |
| Korean | 漢 | U+6F22 |
| Simplified | 汉 | U+6C49 |
| Glyph shape depends on installed fonts; three of these share one code point. | ||
漢 (simplified Chinese: 汉; pronounced hàn in Mandarin) is a Chinese character with one of the deepest cultural footprints in East Asia. It first appears in bronze inscriptions from roughly 3,000 years ago as the name of a river. From there, it became the name of one of China's most influential dynasties, and through that dynasty, it became the standard term for the Chinese people themselves.
The character's reach extends across the region. The names that three different countries use for "Chinese characters" — hànzì in China, kanji in Japan, and hanja in Korea — are all written with 漢 followed by 字 ("character"). The same character also gives Wuhan its name, appears in countless personal and place names across East Asia, and has even acquired meanings in Japanese that have nothing to do with China at all.
The meanings of 漢 trace a path from geography to history to identity, with each new sense building on the previous one.
The original meaning of 漢 is the Han River, a major waterway in central China. It rises in the mountains of Shaanxi Province, flows southeast through Hubei Province, and joins the Yangtze at the city of Wuhan — whose name literally means "Wu plus Han," after the river. The Han is the longest tributary of the Yangtze and has been an important trade and travel route for thousands of years.
The river's importance is built into the structure of the character itself. The left side of 漢 is 氵, the "water radical," a graphical element that signals the character relates to water in some way. Roughly 80–90% of Chinese characters are constructed this way, with one part hinting at meaning and another at sound.
In classical poetry, 漢 was extended to mean the Milky Way, often called the "heavenly river" (天漢, tiānhàn). Ancient Chinese poets saw the band of stars stretching across the night sky and described it as a celestial counterpart to the Han flowing across the earth.
In 206 BCE, a former peasant turned rebel commander named Liu Bang founded the Han dynasty. Before taking the throne, he had been granted a fiefdom called Hanzhong (漢中) — "the middle reaches of the Han" — situated along the upper Han River. When he became emperor, he kept that geographic name for his new dynasty.
The Han dynasty lasted, with one brief interruption, from 206 BCE to 220 CE, ruling China for more than four centuries. It is widely regarded as a golden age. Paper was invented during the Han, the Silk Road opened to connect China with Central Asia and the Mediterranean, Confucianism was established as the state philosophy, and a professional civil service began to take shape. The dynasty's prestige was so durable that, more than a thousand years later, several smaller kingdoms still chose to call themselves "Han" to claim its legacy.
The most far-reaching use of 漢 emerged after the dynasty fell. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties period (roughly the 4th to 6th centuries CE), as China fragmented and various non-Chinese peoples ruled parts of the country, the ethnic Chinese population began identifying themselves as "Han people" — invoking the dynasty as a symbol of cultural unity and prestige.
The label stuck. Today, the Han Chinese are the largest ethnic group in China, comprising roughly 92% of the country's population, and the largest ethnic group in the world by a wide margin. The term distinguishes them from China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities, including Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols, and Manchus.
Before this usage took hold, the Chinese had referred to themselves and their land using older terms like Huaxia (華夏) and Zhuhua (諸華). These terms still exist but are now mostly literary or formal.
In addition to the major senses above, 漢 carries some smaller, related meanings:
漢 is a phono-semantic compound, the most common type of Chinese character. It combines a meaning element with a sound element:
The right side has a complicated history. In the earliest forms found on Western Zhou bronzes around the 11th century BCE, it depicted a bound human figure, possibly crying out. Some scholars connect this to ancient sacrificial practices in which prisoners were burned to pray for rain — which would explain the water radical. Over the centuries, this element gradually changed shape and lost its original pictorial meaning, settling into the form we see today.
In the 1950s, the People's Republic of China introduced a simplified character set to improve literacy. The simplified form of 漢 is 汉, in which the elaborate 𦰩 component is replaced with the much simpler 又. The traditional form has 14 strokes; the simplified form has only 5.
Japan and Korea both retained the traditional form. Japan's standard form, called shinjitai ("new character form"), is essentially identical to the Chinese traditional version, with a one-stroke difference in the top of the right-side component that most readers would not notice.
The way computers store 漢 is a common source of confusion, because the character has three separate Unicode code points — but only one of them is meant to be used.
The correct code point is U+6F22, named CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-6F22. It is the single, shared encoding for 漢 in every language that uses the character. This is the principle of Han unification: Unicode assigns one code point per character rather than one per country, so the Chinese traditional, Japanese shinjitai, and Korean hanja forms of 漢 all share U+6F22, and the shape a reader sees is decided by the font, not the stored data.
Two additional code points also encode 漢:
| Code point | Glyph | Unicode name | Source standard | Added |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| U+6F22 | 漢 | CJK Unified Ideograph-6F22 | Unified repertoire | Unicode 1.0 (1991) |
| U+FA47 | 漢 | CJK Compatibility Ideograph-FA47 | JIS X 0213 (Japan) | Unicode 3.2 (2002) |
| U+FA9A | 漢 | CJK Compatibility Ideograph-FA9A | KPS 10721-2000 (North Korea) | Unicode 4.1 (2005) |
| U+6C49 | 汉 | CJK Unified Ideograph-6C49 | Unified repertoire | Unicode 1.0 (1991) |
U+FA47 and U+FA9A are compatibility ideographs. They exist for one narrow technical reason: several older national character encodings had assigned 漢 a second slot of their own, and Unicode needed a matching slot so that text could be converted into Unicode and back out again without loss — a property called round-tripping. U+FA47 covers the Japanese JIS X 0213 standard; U+FA9A covers the North Korean KPS 10721-2000 standard. The Unicode Standard states plainly that they should not be used for any other purpose.
A natural assumption is that these extra code points let a writer specify the Japanese or the North Korean form of 漢 directly. They do not, for a reason that catches out a lot of people: normalization.
Unicode defines four normalization forms — NFC, NFD, NFKC, and NFKD — that rewrite text into a consistent canonical shape. All four convert a compatibility ideograph back into its unified equivalent. Both U+FA47 and U+FA9A collapse to U+6F22 under every one of them, because the conversion is a canonical equivalence rather than a merely compatible one.
Normalization is applied silently and routinely — by file systems, by database indexes, by web forms, by search engines, by internationalized domain names. So a compatibility ideograph typed into any of those places is liable to turn into U+6F22 without warning, and two strings that look different will compare as equal. The distinction is not durable enough to build anything on.
The supported way to request a specific regional shape is either to set the language of the text and let the font system choose (for example, marking a passage as Japanese so a Japanese font is selected), or to use an Ideographic Variation Sequence — U+6F22 followed by an invisible variation selector that names a registered glyph form.
One further point of confusion is worth separating out. 汉, the simplified form, is U+6C49 — a genuinely distinct Unicode character, not a variant encoding of U+6F22. Traditional and simplified forms were never unified, because they differ in their component structure rather than in styling. Converting between 漢 and 汉 is a text-conversion operation, not a font choice, and no normalization form will turn one into the other.
Because 漢 was borrowed into Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese over the course of more than a thousand years, each language has its own pronunciation. The Japanese case is especially complex, with both Chinese-derived readings (on'yomi) and native Japanese readings (kun'yomi).
| Language | Reading | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mandarin Chinese | hàn | Standard pronunciation in mainland China and Taiwan |
| Cantonese | hon3 | Used in Hong Kong and Guangdong Province |
| Japanese (on'yomi) | kan (かん) | Reading borrowed from Chinese, used in most compound words |
| Japanese (kun'yomi) | aya, kara, otoko | Native Japanese readings, each with a different historical origin |
| Korean | han (한) | Used in hanja, the Chinese characters that appear in Korean |
| Vietnamese | hán | Used historically in Hán Nôm, Vietnam's classical writing system |
漢 is one of the most productive characters in the East Asian writing tradition, appearing in hundreds of compounds across multiple languages.
The most globally recognized use of 漢 is in the names that three East Asian languages give to Chinese characters themselves:
| Country | Word | Reading | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| China | 漢字 / 汉字 | hànzì | Chinese characters |
| Japan | 漢字 | kanji | Chinese characters as used in Japanese |
| Korea | 漢字 | hanja (한자) | Chinese characters as used in Korean |
In all three cases, 漢 carries the meaning "Han / Chinese" and 字 means "character" or "written symbol." Vietnam historically used a similar term, Hán tự (漢字), though Vietnamese is now written almost exclusively in the Latin alphabet.
漢 is one of the most frequent characters in everyday Chinese. A small selection of common compounds:
Japanese has expanded the use of 漢 in directions Chinese never took. Beyond the standard kan reading used in compound words borrowed from Chinese — such as 漢方 (kanpō, traditional Chinese medicine), 漢詩 (kanshi, Chinese-style poetry), and 漢文 (kanbun, Classical Chinese literature) — Japanese uses 漢 to describe particular kinds of men:
There is also a slangy, dramatic use of 漢 read as otoko — the same word normally written 男, "man." Writing otoko as 漢 instead of 男 carries connotations of romantic toughness, the way an English writer might capitalize "Man" for emphasis. This usage shows up most often in manga, video games, and martial-arts contexts.
The reading kara (から) has a different history. It originally referred to the Gaya confederacy, a coalition of small states in southern Korea that existed from the 1st to 6th centuries CE. The meaning gradually expanded — first to the Korean peninsula in general, then to China, and eventually to foreign lands as a whole. This is why some Japanese words for things imported from abroad use 漢 with the kara reading, even when those things are not specifically Chinese.
In Korean, 漢 is read as han (한) and appears in many words borrowed from Chinese, including 한자 (漢字, hanja, Chinese characters), 한문 (漢文, hanmun, Classical Chinese), and 한족 (漢族, hanjok, the Han ethnic group).
It also appears in a name familiar to anyone who has visited Seoul: the Han River (한강, Hangang), which runs through the South Korean capital. Despite sharing the character 漢 with the Chinese Han River, the two are not actually related. The Korean river's name comes from a native Korean root meaning "great" or "big," and 漢 was simply borrowed to write the sound — a common pattern in pre-modern Korean, when most writing was done with Chinese characters.
The historical Chinese name for Seoul itself, Hanseong (漢城, "Han City"), used this same character. The name was officially retired in 2005 in favor of the new Chinese rendering Shǒu'ěr (首爾), which is a phonetic approximation of "Seoul."
This article is a general overview. Readers wanting fuller detail — reconstructed Old Chinese phonology, the full set of historical glyph variants, exhaustive compound lists in each language, and classical citations — can consult the following:
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