Gift Guide · By Recipient

For Your Wife

Four characters for the partner you chose, and keep choosing.

The picks

The best gift for a wife is something that names what the marriage is actually about. These four characters — love, harmony, joy, blessing — are the classical Chinese vocabulary of long partnership.

爱 (Ài) — Love

For when only the simplest word will do. 爱 is the character every Chinese child learns first; the one every grown couple returns to.

See 爱 →

和 (Hé) — Harmony

For the marriage that is also a friendship. 和 is the rhythm two people find when they have stopped competing and started listening. The character that makes long marriages last.

See 和 →

喜 (Xǐ) — Joy

For the wife who still makes ordinary days feel like an occasion. 喜 is the joy that compounds — small, daily, and the truest sign of a marriage still alive in the room.

See 喜 →

福 (Fú) — Blessing

A wish for the years ahead together. 福 is a quiet way of saying I want every kind of good thing for you — without the speech to go with it.

See 福 →

Each character is hand-brushed by Artist Lina Sun on rice paper.

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