祖
Symbols Relationships
ancestral home
籍
ㄗㄨˇ ㄐㄧˊ zǔ jí
Two versions of the same picture, and both are free with no account and no watermark. The first has no background at all, which is the one to send your artist — but a phone or computer photo viewer set to dark will show black strokes on dark grey and it can look like nothing downloaded. If that happens, use the second one: identical characters on a plain white background. Either way you get the characters on their own — the square and the faint guide lines you see above are not in the file. Each character is 1000px, so a two-character download is 2000×1000, and the script and layout are the ones you picked.
Script
Characters
Same in both
Layout
Rubbing mode: white on black, as a stone rubbing. The download is unaffected.
The place your family came from, whether or not you were born there. Chinese keeps this separate from the town you grew up in.
Before you commit
Choose with careNo single character means ancestral home. 祖 alone means ancestor and 家 alone means home; only the two-character words say it properly.
Cultural note祖籍 is a live category, not a sentimental one. People who have never visited still name the county their family left.
At small sizes祖籍 runs to about thirty strokes over two dense characters. It needs real size; 老家 is far kinder when small.
Meaning
Ancestral native place; the home region a family is registered to.
The exact term - what a form asks for and what people answer when introduced.
Other characters for “ancestral home”
What to do next
Pick the script and layout you want above, download the PNG, and send that file to your artist. Ask them to work from the file rather than redrawing the character freehand — that is where strokes go missing.
Related concepts