The most difficult Chinese characters to write by hand

The characters with the most strokes

These are the most complex characters in our stroke data of over 9,000 characters. Most are rare, but each is a real character with a real meaning:

What makes them so complex

A many-stroke character is almost always several simpler characters stacked together. Read them as parts and they stop looking like noise:

• 鱻 (xiān) is three 魚 (fish), an old way of writing 鮮 (fresh), as in fresh fish.
• 爨 (cuàn) pictures a stove: hands lifting a cooking pot above wood (林) and fire (火). It means to cook, and it is also a family name. It was never simplified, so it has 30 strokes in simplified Chinese too.
• 鬱 (yù) is the famous one. It appears in 憂鬱 (yōuyù, melancholy), and Chinese speakers joke about being unable to write it from memory. Simplified Chinese replaced it with 郁 (8 strokes), an older character with the same sound.
• 籲 (yù) is written in 呼籲 (hūyù, to call for, to appeal). Its simplified form is 吁, with just 6 strokes.

Complicated characters you will actually see

You do not need rare characters to find complexity. These everyday traditional characters appear on signs and menus in Taiwan and Hong Kong:

How simplification cut the strokes

In the 1950s and 1960s, mainland China introduced simplified characters to make reading and writing easier to learn. The most complicated common characters lost the most:

Simplification was not applied everywhere: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau still write traditional characters. You can compare the two forms in the stroke order tool by looking up each, for example 龍 and 龙.

Even bigger characters

A few characters are more complex still, but they are too rare for our stroke data, so they are not animated here:

• biáng, the character for biángbiáng noodles from Shaanxi, has over 50 strokes in its traditional form. It is so complex that it only joined Unicode in 2020, and many fonts still cannot show it.
• 龘 (dá), three dragons, has 48 strokes and describes a dragon in flight.
• 齉 (nàng), a stuffy, nasal voice, has 36 strokes.
• 𪚥 (zhé), four dragons, has 64 strokes and appears in old dictionaries.

None of these are needed to read modern Chinese. The characters above, and the common ones in the 100 most common Chinese characters, are where to spend your time.

How to write a 30-stroke character

• Find the parts. Break the character into components you already know, such as 言, 金, 鳥, or 魚, and write one component at a time.
• Apply the usual rules. Top before bottom and left before right still decide which part comes first: 讓 is 言 on the left, then 襄.
• Watch it first. In the stroke order tool, turn on stroke numbers and use Fast to see the whole order, then slow down for the parts you get wrong.

For the rules themselves and the basic strokes, see how to write Chinese characters.

Questions about complicated characters

What is the most complicated Chinese character? In everyday writing, characters like 鬱 (29 strokes) and 籲 (32 strokes). Among characters still used at all, biáng from biángbiáng noodles has over 50. Dictionaries list stranger ones still, like 𪚥 with 64 strokes.

What is the hardest Chinese character to write? Many Chinese speakers would say 鬱 (yù): it is common enough to need, and complex enough that few can write it from memory.

Are traditional characters harder to learn? They take longer to write, but their extra parts often hint at meaning or sound, which some learners find easier to remember. Start with whichever form is used where you plan to read Chinese.

Which character has the most strokes in simplified Chinese? Among characters in common use, 爨 (cuàn, 30 strokes) is one of the most complex, because it was never simplified.