江
Symbols Nature
river
ㄐㄧㄤ jiāng
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.
River: the two main Chinese characters for it are named after the Yangtze and the Yellow River, and are not interchangeable.
Before you commit
Choose with care江 and 河 are not swappable in names. Southern rivers take 江 and northern ones take 河, and a Chinese reader hears the difference immediately.
Japanese川 is the ordinary Japanese word for river, read kawa, and sits in countless surnames. It will read as Japanese.
At small sizes川 is three strokes and survives anything. 江 and 河 depend on the water radical staying open.
Meaning
A large river; historically the Yangtze.
Six strokes, cleanly balanced, and the character in most southern river names.
Other characters for “river”
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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