What 蓪 means
It appears chiefly in 蓪草, a name for Tetrapanax and its pith.
Pith is the soft, white core inside the stem. It can be sliced into pith-paper sheets or shaped into flower ornaments.
A 2024 dictionary entry says the earlier dictionary Shuowen omits 蓪 and cites Guangyun, a Chinese rhyming dictionary, for a medicinal gloss of 蓪草. Tang-era Chinese texts about medicinal substances use 通草 as a medicinal term; later sources connect 蓪草 with 通脫木, though the names do not line up one-for-one across periods.
Why was 蓪 used in medicine and craft?
Its plant and pith appear in medicine and craft records.
Premodern records place the material in medicine and flower adornment. Accounts disagree about how the flower craft began, so those records give no single secure origin.
In the 19th century, makers in Guangzhou sliced the pith into painting sheets for export watercolor albums. Western buyers called them “rice-paper pictures” because they looked like paper; the sheets were pith, not rice.
Specialist plant, medicine, and craft vocabulary, usually encountered inside compounds such as 蓪草.
Alone, it can look like an unexplained rare character rather than a reaction.
Don't confuse it with
1Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
1Is 蓪草紙 made from rice?
No. It is sliced from Tetrapanax pith; “rice paper” describes its paperlike appearance, not an ingredient.
How to type 蓪
蓪\84EACodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.