Alchemy & Ancient Symbols
The stranger corners of Unicode: the alchemical symbols for the elements and processes, all 64 I Ching hexagrams, the Tai Xuan Jing tetragrams and the old rod numerals once used for counting in East Asia. Click any symbol to copy it.
These characters preserve writing and notation systems that long predate the computer. Unicode encodes them so that scholars, historians and enthusiasts can set these texts in plain digital type.
Alchemical symbols 116
I Ching hexagrams 64
Tai Xuan Jing symbols 87
Counting rod numerals 25
Writing systems older than the keyboard
The I Ching is among the oldest books in the world, a Chinese text of divination built around sixty-four hexagrams, each one a stack of six broken or solid lines. Unicode encodes all sixty-four so the work can be set on a screen exactly as it has been read for some three thousand years.
The alchemical symbols come from the long centuries when chemistry and mystery were the same pursuit, a shorthand for gold, mercury, sulphur and the processes of the laboratory bench. The Tai Xuan Jing tetragrams and the counting rod numerals preserve two more old Chinese systems, one for divination and one for arithmetic, kept alive in type for the scholars who still study them.