Shān 山
The character for ‘mountain’, and radical 46 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for peaks, cliffs and hills are filed.
Meaning
Unihan defines 山 as ‘mountain, hill, peak’. 岩 ‘cliff; rocks; mountain’ and 峰 ‘peak, summit’ are filed under it, 山 on top in the first and on the left in the second. Mandarin reads it shān; Japanese, yama.
Origin and history
Wieger saw a mountain range with “On the top, three rocks”, and called it the radical “of characters relating to hills”.
A person and a mountain
仙 ‘immortal’, in Unihan’s words a ‘Taoist super-being, transcendent’, puts 人 beside 山. Wieger read it as the genii, the men who dwell on the mountains. Unihan files it under the person radical, number 9, not under 山.
Read next
- Next in Chinese radicalsRì 日The character for ‘sun’ and ‘day’, and radical 72 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for light and time are filed.
- The same shape in Chinese mythology and symbolsDouble happiness (囍)囍, the character 喜 (xǐ, joy) written twice and joined into one sign, read shuangxi, “double happiness”. It is the sign of a Chinese wedding, pasted on the door and worked into the couple’s gifts and furnishings.
See also
Rén 人, Nǚ 女, Zǐ 子, Kǒu 口, Xīn 心, Shǒu 手.
Sources
- Unihan data for U+5C71, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kTotalStrokes; kDefinition; kMandarin; kJapaneseKun
- Unihan data for U+5CA9, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+5CF0, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- Unihan data for U+4ED9, Unicode Han Database (Unihan), Unicode Consortium, kRSUnicode; kDefinition
- The Unicode Standard, chapter 18 (Han), The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0, Chapter 18: East Asia, Unicode Consortium, 18.1.8 Radical-Stroke Indices; 18.1.14 Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement
- Chinese Characters (Léon Wieger, 1927), Léon Wieger, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification and Signification, translated by L. Davrout, second edition (1927), Catholic Mission Press, Hsien-hsien (Internet Archive full text), Lesson 80 A
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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