My favorite Chinese character

During my time in China and Taiwan, I learned about 20 or so characters, mostly off of street and city signs.

My favorite is ‘jing’, as in ‘Beijing’.

‘Jing’ means “capital city”. (‘Bei’ means north.)

Why is it my favorite?  Well, Chinese characters are sort of like looking at the clouds. You can make up your own idea of what it looks like.

I always thought of it as “Jing, the elephant wearing a hat.”