The strokes of Chinese Characters part 2

Rules for Stroke Order

The basic rule, when writing Chinese characters, is to always write from top to bottom, from left to right. If a character consists of more than one radical, you always write each included radical as a separate piece.

Within each radical you have six basic rules, which I will now illustrated with sequences of pictures. The complete characters are first shown on a yellow background, and then you see a sequence of pictures from left to right, showing how the character is built up, stroke by stroke, to form the final result:

Rule #1: Top down.
Special case: Left side of squares is drawn before the top.
Rule #2: Left to right.
Exception: Hook on the right side comes first.
Rule #3: Horizontal lines and squares before crossing vertical lines.
Exception: Bottom lines are always drawn last.
Rule #4: Frames before contents.
Note: The bottom line of a frame is drawn last.
Rule #5: Centre before symmetrical sides.
Rule #6: Secondary dots drawn last.

These rules are based on practical experience – the rules reflect what has been learnt from using brushes in practice. The rules give good guidelines, but to learn to write properly, it's probably best to find a dictionary or textbook that clearly shows the stroke orders of several characters. In my examples above, I've only chose characters that are relatively simple and easy to write – when the number of strokes increases, the risk of the basic rules becoming inadequate will increase. In some special cases it's even possible that there is more than one correct stroke order...