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<\/a><\/p>\nHere's a closeup of a different exemplar (woven into a textile) of the bottom part:<\/p>\n
A few of the characters written here may actually be \"real\" in the sense that they may have occurred one or more times before in history and are among the over 100,000 Sinographs that have been gathered together in the biggest dictionaries and data bases.\u00a0 But most of them have been made up by the author(s) of this text, though not entirely whimsically as with Xu Bing's \"A Book from the Sky<\/a>\":<\/p>\n \"The unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation<\/a>\" (2\/6\/12)<\/p>\n Rather, the characters in this d\u0101nw\u00e9n \u4e39\u6587 (\"cinnabar<\/a>\u00a0writing\") largely consist of components (mostly themselves characters) that individually and collectively make a sort of sense.\u00a0 Thus ti\u0101n \u5929 (\"heaven\" over b\u011bn \u672c (\"root\") might mean something like \"root of heaven\" and sh\u0113n \u8eab (\"body\") next to zh\u0113n \u771f (\"true\") might mean something like \"true body\".\u00a0 Some of these made-up characters are quite cryptic, such as three men over one woman or the character for \"eye\" or \"spirit\" inside of an enclosure.<\/p>\n Jason's uncle-in-law is a Taoist and he says that he can \"read\" this text.\u00a0 Here's the \"annotation\" (zh\u00f9w\u00e9n \u8a3b\u6587) by means of which the text can be read as Literary Sinitic \/ Classical Chinese:<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n