兴 (xīng) — To Raise · To Get Something Off the Ground · Rising by Joint Force

许慎 sorted the whole of written Chinese into 540 sections, and one of those sections is a pair of hands meeting another pair. 舁 got its own heading in the 说文解字 (c. 100 CE), defined in three characters — 共舉也, to lift together — and barely anything is filed underneath it: 與, what is handed across; 興, what comes up; and one rare character for raising a thing high. The entry for 興 gives the meaning in two characters, 起也, to rise, and then adds a reason for the shape: 同力也, joint force. That reason is what the middle element of the graph contributes — in the bone forms a flat 凡, regularized by the seal script into 同, same — and it is why the word keeps other people inside it.

What 兴 then did for three thousand years is take objects, which its neighbours cannot. 王于兴师 in the 诗经 raises an army. 兴建 puts up a building, 兴修 cuts a canal, 兴办 founds a school, 兴学 gets education going in a place that had none. Nothing is ever 旺ed, and 盛 takes an object only under its other reading, chéng, where it means to ladle rice into a bowl. In the senses that matter here, both words report a condition a thing is in. 兴 turns up without a stated doer as well — 百废具兴, 万事兴 — and the difference survives it, because what the word names is the coming-up rather than the state left behind. That is why 复兴 and 振兴 and 中兴 are possible at all: a condition cannot be repeated, and a lift can. Its standing opposite is 亡. 兴亡, rise and ruin, is the pair Chinese historians use for the whole life of a state, with 兴衰 and 兴废 for smaller things.

The same graph carries a second reading, xìng, and in everyday speech it is the one a learner meets first — 高兴 for gladness, 兴趣 for interest, 兴致 for the mood to do something, 扫兴 for the person who kills it. Nothing has been merged here; this is one character with one root sense pointed at a different object. What rises in 高兴 is a person's attention rather than a building. Which of the two is meant is normally settled by where the character is standing: on red paper at the turn of the year, or over a shop door, there is no ambiguity at all, and a bare 兴 with no such frame around it is a genuinely open question. 《毛诗序》 names the technique and the tradition reads it under the second tone — among the 六义 of the 诗经, 兴 is the move where a poem opens on ospreys at a river or on reeds white with frost and lets the real subject come up behind the image.

• 岂曰无衣？与子同袍。王于兴师，修我戈矛，与子同仇。

  《诗经·秦风·无衣》(Book of Songs, "No Clothes," c. 9th–7th c. BCE)
  Who says you have nothing to wear? We'll share my war-coat. The king is raising an army — I'll see to my dagger-axe and spear, and your enemy is mine. — The oldest 兴 in the songs already has a subject on one side and an object on the other: somebody raises something. The stanza is also a small demonstration of the 同力 in the character's own definition, since the phrase it keeps returning to is 与子同 — with you, the same.

• 兴于诗，立于礼，成于乐。

  《论语·泰伯》(Analects, Book 8, c. 5th c. BCE)
  Raised by the Odes, steadied by ritual, finished in music. — Confucius on how a person gets assembled, in three verbs. 兴 is the first stage and the only one done to you from outside; something has to lift you before anything can be built on top of it. It is the same word used for putting up a building, applied to a student.

• 越明年，政通人和，百废具兴。

  范仲淹《岳阳楼记》(Fan Zhongyan, "On Yueyang Tower," 1046 CE)
  By the next year the administration ran, the people were in accord, and a hundred abandoned things had been raised again. — The essay opens by naming the man it was written for, 滕子京; the eight characters after the date are his year's work. Most people now write the phrase as 百废俱兴. 范仲淹 wrote 具, which stands in for 俱, all — and which in its own right means fully provided, everything present and accounted for.

Chinese historiography keeps a term for a house raised back up partway through, after a collapse that by rights should have ended it: 中兴. 光武中兴 is the standard case — 刘秀 reassembled Han in 25 CE after 王莽 had taken it apart — and the label reads the Eastern Han as the same house lifted again rather than a new one opened. That the same man is also called 东汉开国皇帝 is not a contradiction; 兴 names the lift, not the priority. Houses are allowed more than one: 汉 has 昭宣中兴 before 光武, 商 has 盘庚 and then 武丁. What the term will not do is attach to something that never fell. Nothing is ever described as 中兴 because it went on doing well.

The other place the word lives is the shopfront. 生意兴隆通四海，财源茂盛达三江 — may the trade rise and reach the four seas, may the sources of income flourish and reach the three rivers — is among the most-pasted New Year couplets in Chinese, printed by the million and stuck to the doorframes of restaurants, hardware stores and phone-repair counters every spring. Read it as the parallelism intends and the halves line up: 兴隆 against 茂盛, 通四海 against 达三江. What the couplet asks for in its first four characters is not a quantity of money. It is motion, in a shop that has just been opened by somebody's hands.