城
Symbols Protection
fortress
ㄔㄥˊ chéng
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.
A walled place built to be held. In Chinese the same character covers a fortress and a city, because for most of history they were one thing.
Before you commit
Choose with care城 now reads as city first. A modern reader sees 城 and thinks of a place people live, not of walls and defence.
Pairs well with城堡 is castle, 長城 is the Great Wall. If you want the defensive sense unmistakably, 堡 or 要塞 carries it better alone.
At small sizesNine strokes in a left-right split with a long diagonal on the right. Legible small, and the diagonal takes a curved placement well.
Meaning
A walled city; the wall itself; a fortified place.
For two thousand years a city was defined by its wall, so one character serves both.
Other characters for “fortress”
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.
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