This is Hanmoji Puzzles, your bi-weekly dose of emoji word puzzles inspired by The Hanmoji Handbook. And don’t worry — you don’t need to speak Chinese at all in order to play along. You just need a love for emoji and be curious about how language works!
🧩 This week’s puzzle
For our last Halloween issue, we introduced the Chinese word for pumpkin: 南瓜 (nánguā/naam4 gwaa1), which literally means southern melon/gourd/squash. To represent this using emoji, we used 🧭⬇️ for southern and 🍈 for melon/gourd/squash. For this upcoming Halloween, we wanted to move in a different direction this time, beyond everybody’s favorite orange 🍈 瓜 (guā/gwaa1).
So, what melon/gourd/squash do you think the following emoji combo represents:
🧭⬅️ 🍈
Hint: This 🍈 is not native to China, but was introduced as a crop from the 🧭⬅️.
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🫢 Answer (spoilers ahead!)
🧭⬅️ 🍈 stands for 西瓜, which is how we write watermelon in Chinese. It’s pronounced xīguā in Mandarin and sai1 gwaa1 in Cantonese. But why is the watermelon the Western melon?
Researchers generally believe that watermelons are originally from Africa, but we don’t generally call African things Western. We usually reserve that label to refer to items and ideas from present-day Europe, Australia and North America. But from China’s point of view, Africa does lie west of them geographically, and indeed this narrative account in ChanMag describes how watermelons were indeed introduced to ancient China from Egypt, probably via the Central Asian part of the Silk Road.
💡 Fun fact: While watermelons might not be native to China, it is now the biggest producer of watermelons in the world. One UN statistic puts them at having produced 60% of the world’s watermelons in 2020.
SHOP Cooper Hewitt selected our book to accompany their Give Me a Sign 2023-2024 exhibition.
The paperback edition of The Hanmoji Handbook is out now in the US and Canada, and will be out on November 2 in the UK.
You can get our paperback and hardcover editions on Bookshop.org 🇺🇸, Shop Local 🇨🇦, and Blackwell’s 🌏.
Hanmoji Puzzles is a spin off of The Hanmoji Handbook: A Guide to Learning Chinese Through Emoji, which you should absolutely order today 😗. This newsletter is a project by Jason Li, An Xiao Mina and Jennifer 8. Lee.