The mission of the Chinese puzzle: From a quest for order to seeking entertainment
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Zhang Shu-Ping
Abstract
The puzzle has played a significant role in Chinese culture since its formation. The Lo-shu and the Ba-gua, the most prominent number puzzle in ancient China, with its instinctual quest for universal order, has constructed a philosophical system that has incorporated human being as an integral part of nature. The system has exerted great influence on Chinese culture to this day. Because of its mysterious origin and magical evolution, the Ba-gua has been used to predict the fortune of both the nation and the individual. The Chinese character-deconstructing puzzle has also functioned as a foreshadow of one’s fate. By analyzing the components of a character, written by the subject in a specific context, divination was made. In contrast to the solemn mission of the number puzzle, and the character-deconstructing puzzle, the wedding puzzle and the riddle are lighthearted, and intended to provoke humor, and to function pedagogically. A latecomer, once the mysteriousness of number and character has faded, the riddle is used to promote the intellectual development of children. The wedding puzzle has been popular among those who are illiterate and make analogy by using common occurrence to allude to taboo in the oral dialect. Since their illiteracy has excluded them from reading and writing, they are free to make puzzles in their own dialect without being limited by a reverence for the written character.
Funding statement: The project is supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of the Chinese Ministry of Education (Grant No. 16YJA850006).
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to Meaningful data/Données signifiantes
- A data-driven computational semiotics: The semantic vector space of Magritte’s artworks
- New approaches to plastic language: Prolegomena to a computer-aided approach to pictorial semiotics
- Mesures et savoirs : Quelles méthodes pour l’histoire culturelle à l’heure du big data ?
- Visual semiotics and automatic analysis of images from the Cultural Analytics Lab: How can quantitative and qualitative analysis be combined?
- Uncertain infographics: Expressing doubt in data visualization
- Quelques expériences pour développer l’expression de sens en cartographie thématique
- Raw data or hypersymbols? Meaning-making with digital data, between discursive processes and machinic procedures
- Differential heterogenesis and the emergence of semiotic function
- Regular Articles
- Semiotic alignment: Towards a dialogical model of interspecific communication
- Modal functioning of rhetorical resources in selected multimodal cartoons
- The mission of the Chinese puzzle: From a quest for order to seeking entertainment
- Memes, genes, and signs: Semiotics in the conceptual interface of evolutionary biology and memetics
- Formalisation sémiotique de la traduction : Le modèle transformationnel d’Alexandre Ljudskanov
- Glossopoesis in Thomas More’s Utopia: Beyond a representation of foreignness
- Playing peripatos: Creativity and abductive inference in religion, art and war
- Borders and translation: Revisiting Juri Lotman’s semiosphere
- Peirce’s philosophy of communication and language communication
- Mythic symbolic type, utopia, and body without organs
- The contribution of narrative semiotics of experiential imaginary to the ideation of new digital customer experiences
- Transference of brand personality in brand name translation: A case study on the Chinese-English translation of men’s clothing brands
- Intertextuality as a strategy of glocalization: A comparative study of Nike’s and Adidas’s 2008 advertising campaigns in China
- The semiotic web of the research proposal
- Sic vita est: Visual representation in painting of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY
