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塞

sài / sāi / sè
noun #1,601

Meanings

  1. 1 frontier fortress; strategic stronghold
  2. 2 pass; border outpost

Examples

HSK 1
塞翁失马。
Sàiwēng-shīmǎ.
An old man at the frontier lost his horse.
HSK 6
将军守了这座要塞十年。
Jiāngjūn shǒu le zhè zuò yàosài shí nián.
The general defended this fortress for ten years.
HSK 7-9
塞北的秋色与众不同。
Sài běi de qiūsè yǔzhòng-bùtóng.
North of the frontier the autumn scenery is unlike anywhere else.

Tips

history
The sài reading is the classical military sense: a fortified earthwork blocking a mountain pass. 塞外 (beyond the frontier) and 塞北 historically meant the lands north of the Great Wall - Mongol and Xiongnu territory. Tang frontier poetry made the word evocative of exile, cold winds, and distance from the capital.
memory
Same character, different stakes: cram a cork into a bottle = sāi; cram a wall of soldiers into a mountain pass = sài. Foreign country names that pick 塞 for the syllable 'sai' inherit this reading: 塞尔维亚 (Serbia), 塞内加尔 (Senegal), 塞浦路斯 (Cyprus).

Components

radical
土 tǔ
earth; ground
Bottom earth radical - the indexing radical. Earth is the floor of the container, the foundation that makes the stuffing possible. Also grounds the alternate sài reading (要塞 frontier fortress) - an earthwork blocking a strategic pass. Same family: 堵 block, 填 fill in, 埋 bury.
semantic
宀 mián
roof; cover
Top roof radical 宀 - sets the enclosed-space scene. Plugging and stuffing happen inside something: a bottle, a bag, a doorway, a fortress. The roof on top of 塞 marks the bounded interior into which things get crammed. The whole char is indexed under Kangxi #32 土 - the soil at the base.
semantic
工 gōng
work; tool (here graphic)
Middle 7-stroke unit - visually a 工 fused with two pairs of crossing strokes, originally a graph of bricks packed tightly between supports. Standalone 工 is 3 strokes; here it has absorbed the bundling pattern into a single fused unit. The picture: stuff jammed between roof and earth - the 'cramming, stuffing, blocking' core.

Stroke Order

塞 sài