The Chinese Character, an Interpretable Chinese Culture

"He" ("禾") is a pictographic character, which looks like a crop with heavy ears in the oracle bone inscriptions. So, the character is a general term for grain crops. In ancient times, it also meant "su", or what's known as "millet" today. In addition, "he" is used as a general term for any kind of crop. It is also one of the Chinese character radicals, and characters with the radical are mostly related to crops.

In the Classic of Poetry, the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems, there's a poem entitled "Shu Li" (the Grief over Crops). It is about a man's grief over the sight of crops on the former site of royal palaces when he was passing by the old capital. The poem is full of his lamentations over the loss of the country. Later, the phrase "grief over crops" was used to describe the ruin of one's home country or the loss of prosperous scenes.