Text from the Guo Xiang recension, Wikisource · 莊子/秋水. Decompositions from cjkvi-ids (CHISE IDS); English glosses from Unicode Unihan plus story-specific notes.
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曳尾塗中
Zhuangzi declines the Chu king's offer of power by asking whether a sacred tortoise would rather be dead and honored in a temple, or alive with its tail dragging in the mud. Click any character in the passage to open its decomposition tree — each node can be explored further while it has constituent parts.
About the trees
These are structural decompositions (how the glyph is built from parts), not full etymological histories. Some characters are atomic in the IDS database — especially old pictographs like 曳 — and are shown as leaves even though scholars discuss deeper origins. Nodes marked ◆ describe composition pattern (left-right, top-bottom, etc.) rather than a written character.
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