How the character is built
The 水 radical marks this as a liquid, and that is not a coincidence of this one character — it holds right across the table. Read the radical first and the element's state at room temperature is already settled.
The one metal written with 水 underneath instead of 金 beside — because it is the only metal liquid at room temperature.
Where you actually meet it
汞中毒 (gǒng zhòngdú) — mercury poisoning
The element itself
Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at room temperature, and it does not wet glass, so a droplet rolls rather than spreads. Its ore, cinnabar, is a brilliant scarlet — the pigment vermilion — and the extraction is almost absurdly simple: heat the ore and the mercury leaves as a vapour, to be condensed as a liquid metal. At Almadén in Spain a single deposit held a large share of all the mercury in the world and was worked from Roman times until the trade wound down, a continuity of mining that few places anywhere can match.
Where it sits among the 118
Mercury is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In living things
Mercury's danger depends entirely on which mercury. The liquid metal is poorly absorbed if swallowed but evaporates, and the vapour crosses membranes easily — which is why the historical hazard was always in workshops and hat-making rather than in the flask. The greater problem is biological: sulfate-reducing bacteria in anoxic lake and ocean sediments convert inorganic mercury into methylmercury, which passes into cells, is shed slowly, and therefore concentrates at each step up a food chain until long-lived predatory fish carry vastly more than the water around them. Underlying all of it is mercury's appetite for sulfur, strong enough that thiols were once named mercaptans for their ability to capture it.
In Chinese history and language
Cinnabar, 朱砂 zhūshā, is mercury sulfide: a soft scarlet ore that gives up its metal on roasting, and Chinese alchemy built a tradition on watching red turn to silver and back again. The elixirs distilled from it were meant to confer immortality and reliably did the opposite — Sima Qian describes the first emperor's tomb with mercury flowing as the rivers and seas of the empire, and several Tang emperors died after long courses of cinnabar preparations. The pigment side of the story is gentler: the same mineral gives the vermilion of seal paste and of the red ink an emperor alone was permitted to write in. The everyday word is still the old one, 水银 shuǐyín, "water silver".
Where it comes from in China
Mercury belongs to the same low-temperature belt, above all around Wanshan in eastern Guizhou, where cinnabar fills Cambrian dolomite. Cinnabar is scarlet, and it was ground for vermilion long before anyone particularly wanted the metal, so the district supplied pigment and alchemists for centuries before it was worked as a mine in the modern sense. The ore there is now essentially exhausted and the workings have become a heritage site.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
汞Mercury in the dictionary →