Shuowen Jiezi is the title of an educational television series broadcast daily on China's Sun TV

Sun TV (Hong Kong)

Sun TV is a commercial Mandarin-language satellite television station broadcasting from Hong Kong, mostly to the Asia-Pacific region on the following satellites: Telstar 18, Apstar VI, NSS 11 and AsiaSat 3S...

 channel and presented by Zhuang Jing (庄婧). The title is taken from the ancient Chinese etymological dictionary Shuowen Jiezi

Shuowen Jiezi

The Shuōwén Jiězì was an early 2nd century CE Chinese dictionary from the Han Dynasty. Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary , it was still the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give the rationale behind them , as well as the first to use the...

, and each episode briefly explains a Chinese character.

For scheduling purposes the series is also given an English title, Hanzi Tracing, but this is not a translation of the Chinese title. There is no English in the programs themselves.

Broadcast times

The program is 5 minutes in length and a new episode is broadcast each day. The day's episode is repeated up to 4 times during the next 24 hours. As of December 2010, the usual broadcast times were 04:07, 11:18, 16:53 and 19:55 UTC+08:00 (= 03:18, 08:53, 11:55 and 20:07 UTC) but these do vary.

Previous episodes are also available on the program's Web archive.

Opening and closing lines

Zhuang Jing starts each episode with a couplet followed by an introduction ( where X is the sound of the character about to be discussed). The episode usually ends with a variant of a standard closing .

External links

• Series home page with archive of characters explained