gold ingot

元

寶

ㄩㄢˊ ㄅㄠˇ yuán bǎo

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

Layout

The boat-shaped lump of silver or gold used as currency in imperial China, now a standing symbol of wealth at new year.

Before you commit

Choose with care元寶 names an object, not a virtue. It reads roughly the way a gold bar would read in English - clearly about money, with none of the dignity that 財 or 富 carries.

Cultural notePaper 元寶 are folded and burned as offerings to the dead. The shape is lucky at new year and funerary at a grave, and Chinese readers know both contexts.

At small sizesTwo characters, and 寶 has twenty strokes under a roof. This combination needs real size or the lower half of 寶 turns solid.

Meaning

The boat-shaped ingot of gold or silver used as old currency.

The name of the object itself; no single character carries it.

Other characters for “gold ingot”

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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