The Chinese character tian (天) is rich in important meaning: it can refer to the sky, the day, the weather, and Heaven; Chinese emperors in the past were even called “Tiɑn Zi”, which means “son of Heaven”! So today, let’s talk about the character tian .
Ancient Chinese people said that tiɑn originally referred to the human head, which consists of “一”（“one”） and “大”（“big”）. In its ancient form, tiɑn was written as the image of a large headed person standing and facing forward. In the oracle-bone characters in the Shang Dynasty (1600 BC–1046 BC), the head part of the character was a square, which in the Bronze Age characters was a round dot. So tiɑn originally referred the head of a person. The head part was later written as a horizontal stroke “一”, and the part below was in the shape of a standing person facing forward with the four limbs outstretched. This is the origin of the way tian is written today.
In Chinese mythology, after a hero named Xingtian was decapitated, he turned his breasts into eyes, and his navel into a mouth and kept on fighting. In fact, the original meaning of Xingtiɑn was “decapitation”, and the character tian in his name keeps the original meaning.
The character “大”（big）was originally “人”（human, person）too, which is in the shape of a person standing and facing forward. Above “人” or “大” is the boundless sky, so the ancient people called it “天”（heaven）too. So who is in charge of the sun, the moon and all the stars? Or the wind, the rain, the thunder and lightning? Who determines all the changes in weather? The ancient people therefore created a “Heavenly Emperor” who is in charge of everything. In the conception of the ancient Chinese, “the sky is huge, the earth is huge, the human is huge too,” so the character of “大” resembling the human figure could also be used to mean big or great. The sky, the earth and the human are all “huge”. But the “human” (大) is the greatest of all, for he stands between the sky and the earth, with “天”（sky） above and “地”（earth）beneath. In fact, the character “立” （stand） is written as an upside-down “天” （sky）, which consists of “大”（human, person）standing on “一” （the earth）.
Though getting richer in meaning in modern Chinese, tian (天) is always related to the basic meaning of head or sky. To chat is called “liɑotiɑn’r” or “tɑntiɑn” in Chinese – Does the tian here simply refer to the sky or air? The answer is no. Tian (sky) is so vast it embraces everything; hence the word "liaotian’r”, which means a leisurely chat on extensive topics. A Chinese idiom “tantian shuodi” (谈天说地) means to chat with such an extensive range of topics that it could be about anything; in the idiom, the di (地) , meaning the same as tian (天) here, means boundlessness rather than its original meaning of “earth” or “land”.
