兴旺 (xīng wàng) — Thriving · Flourishing · A Household or Trade Burning Bright

Four hands and one load. In its oracle-bone form 興 shows 舁 — two pairs of hands, one pair above and one below — closed around the element that later regularized into 同: in the bone graphs a flat 凡, the thing being hoisted between them. Readers have taken it for a tray, for a vessel, for the rammed-earth mold raised at a building site, and either way the picture is the same: nobody lifts it alone. China's first dictionary (Shuowen Jiezi, c. 100 CE) glosses the character in two words, 起也 — to rise — and then gives the reason in two more: 同力也, joint strength. Every later sense grows out of that lift. To 兴 is to raise a thing up: 兴建 to put up a building, 复兴 to raise something fallen, 兴盛 to rise into flourishing. The word never quite loses the many hands.

旺 is the younger of the two by more than a millennium. The Shuowen, cataloging some nine thousand characters, does not have it — only its ancestor 暀, glossed 光美也, light at its finest. When 旺 itself surfaces, in the dictionaries of the sixth century, it is plainly built: 日, the sun, beside 王 (wáng) for sound. What it names is light at full strength, and its most concrete uses are still the physical ones — 火旺, a fire burning hard; 炉火正旺, the stove at its hottest. From there it moves outward to any capacity fully spent: 旺盛 for vigor, 精力旺盛 for a body at full energy, 旺季 for the season a trade runs hottest. Where 兴 is a verb of rising, 旺 is a state of burning.

Put together they make rise-and-blaze, and Chinese hands the compound to the two things a family actually watches. 人丁兴旺 says the household is thriving in the only currency that matters to a line — people. 生意兴旺 says the trade is. 香火兴旺 says the incense is still being lit, said of a temple full of worshippers and of a family whose descendants still tend the ancestral altar. What separates 兴旺 from its neighbors is the pairing itself: 兴 supplies the climb, 旺 supplies the heat, and the word insists on both. A thing that is 兴旺 is not merely large. It is growing, and it is warm.

• 天保定尔，以莫不兴。如山如阜，如冈如陵，如川之方至，以莫不增。

  《诗经·小雅·天保》(Book of Songs, "Heaven Protects," c. 9th–7th c. BCE)
  Heaven guards and settles you, so that nothing fails to rise — like a mountain, like a hill, like a ridge, like a rise of land; like a river arriving in flood, so that nothing fails to increase. — The 诗经's great blessing song reaches for 兴 in its plainest sense, rising, and then piles up five images of terrain and water to say it — five of the nine 如 that earned the poem its nickname, 天保九如, the nine likenesses.

• 禹、汤罪己，其兴也悖焉；桀、纣罪人，其亡也忽焉。

  《左传·庄公十一年》(Zuo Commentary, c. 4th c. BCE)
  Yu and Tang, who founded their dynasties, blamed themselves — and their rise was swift; Jie of Xia and King Zhòu of Shang, who lost theirs, blamed everyone else — and their fall was just as quick. — The line the Chinese political tradition never stopped quoting. It reads 兴 as something earned rather than granted: what rises, rises because of what its people did.

• 螽斯羽，诜诜兮。宜尔子孙，振振兮。

  《诗经·周南·螽斯》(Book of Songs, "Locusts," c. 9th–7th c. BCE)
  The locusts' wings, in their thronging crowds — fitting that your children and grandchildren should be so numerous. — An unlikely compliment by modern standards: the poem wishes a family as many descendants as a swarm has insects. It is 人丁兴旺 three thousand years early, and it shows how literally the old wish counted.

The 丁 in 人丁兴旺 is a tax word. For most of imperial history the state's household registers counted 丁 — able-bodied adult men, liable for labor service and head tax — and a family's standing was legible in that number on the roll. So the phrase everyone still says at the New Year, 人丁兴旺, is not a poetic figure for a happy family: it is bookkeeping. It says the headcount is up. That bluntness is worth keeping in view, because it explains both the word's grip and its old lopsidedness. In a society where a household's survival ran on hands and only some hands were counted, a thriving family, a crowded one, and one with sons were the same sentence.

The other place 兴旺 lives is the shop. Small businesses hang 生意兴旺 or its close cousin 生意兴隆 behind the register and paste it on the doorframe each spring, often beside a small altar to 财神, the god of wealth, or to 关公. The same fire logic runs through 香火兴旺, which is said first of a temple thick with worshippers and, of a family, of a line still lighting the incense at the ancestral altar — the proof, in either case, being simply that someone is still there to tend it. That is the whole grammar of the word. 兴旺 is never a state a thing merely has; it is a fire, and fires are things people feed.