中
Symbols Virtues
moderation
ㄓㄨㄥ zhōng
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.
Staying off the extremes. This is a central idea in Confucian thought.
Before you commit
Choose with care中 on its own reads as middle, centre, or China long before it reads as moderation. Alone it is not a virtue character.
JapaneseShared with Japanese, read chu or naka, with the same plain meanings. Very common in words and names.
At small sizesFour strokes, one vertical through a box. About as small-friendly as characters get, though visually plain.
Meaning
The centre; the middle course.
The 中 of 中庸, the doctrine of the mean.
Other characters for “moderation”
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