China Emoji & Symbols

🇨🇳 the Chinese flag is the first China emoji people reach for: national pride, a match, a trip, or simply where you are from. Its colours work as hearts too, ❤️💛, and ⭐ stands for the five gold stars on the red field.

🐼 Giant panda is the friendliest China emoji of all. Wild pandas live only in the mountain forests of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, and the pandas China lends to foreign zoos are known as panda diplomacy. 🐉 and 🐲 are the Chinese dragon, lóng 龙: not the fire-breathing monster of European stories but a powerful, kindly creature of water and rain, once the emblem of the emperor and still the sign many parents hope their child is born under. 🏮 the red lantern hangs over doorways and streets at every celebration, and 🧧 the red envelope, hóngbāo, holds the money given at New Year, weddings and birthdays. Red is the colour of luck and joy, which is why so many China emoji are red.

Some emoji say where things come from. Paper 📜, the compass 🧭 and gunpowder 🧨, together with printing, are China's Four Great Inventions, and the kite 🪁 and the abacus 🧮 (the suànpán, whose skills UNESCO lists as intangible heritage) are Chinese too. 🖌️ stands for the brush of calligraphy and ink painting, 🪭 for the folding fan of fan dances and opera, and 🀄 for mahjong, the tile game of family gatherings: its red dragon tile carries 中, the first character of 中国, China. ☯️ is the yin and yang of Taoism, and 🪷 the lotus of Buddhism, a picture of purity growing out of mud.

Chinese flag emoji: copy and paste 🇨🇳, and why Windows shows CN

The Chinese flag emoji is not a picture stored as one character. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇨 and 🇳, the country code CN, which phones and Macs draw as the red flag with five yellow stars. Windows has no country flag pictures in its emoji font, so on a Windows PC the same emoji appears as the letters CN. Copy it anyway: the person reading on a phone sees the flag. On Discord you can also type :flag_cn:.

🇨🇳 is one of the oldest flag emoji: it was among the ten flags of the Japanese phone emoji sets that entered Unicode 6.0 in 2010. The real flag, the Five-star Red Flag (五星红旗, Wǔxīng Hóngqí), was adopted in 1949: one large star with four smaller ones turned towards it. It flies everywhere on 1 October, National Day, which opens a week-long holiday, the Golden Week. Hong Kong 🇭🇰 and Macao 🇲🇴 have flags and collections of their own; for every other flag see our Flag Emoji collection.

Chinese New Year emoji, the zodiac animals and other festivals

Spring Festival, Chūnjié 春节, the Chinese or Lunar New Year, falls between 21 January and 20 February. In 2026 it came on 17 February and opened the Year of the Horse 🐎; the next one, on 6 February 2027, opens the Year of the Goat 🐐. Its emoji follow the holiday: 🧧 red envelopes, today mostly sent as digital red packets in WeChat, 🏮 lanterns, 🧨 firecrackers and 🎆🎇 fireworks at midnight, 🦁🐉 for the lion and dragon dances, 🥟 for the jiaozi northern families fold together on New Year's Eve, 🐟 because fish, 鱼 yú, sounds like 余 yú, surplus (年年有余, plenty every year), and 🍊 for the mandarins given for luck. The greetings are 新年快乐 xīnnián kuàilè, Happy New Year, and 恭喜发财 gōngxǐ fācái, wishing you prosperity. The 福 pasted upside down on doors is a pun: upside down, 倒 dào, sounds like 到 dào, arrived, so luck has arrived.

The twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac all have emoji, in this order: 🐀 Rat, 🐂 Ox, 🐅 Tiger, 🐇 Rabbit, 🐉 Dragon, 🐍 Snake, 🐎 Horse, 🐐 Goat, 🐒 Monkey, 🐓 Rooster, 🐕 Dog and 🐖 Pig. The eighth sign, 羊 yáng, means both goat and sheep, so people use 🐐 or 🐑. Your sign is the animal of the Chinese lunar year you were born in, and in your own animal's year, běnmìngnián, tradition says to wear red for luck.

Fifteen days after New Year the Lantern Festival fills streets with 🏮. On the 15th day of the eighth lunar month the Mid-Autumn Festival brings families together under the full moon 🌕 with mooncakes 🥮, and 🐇 joins them as the Jade Rabbit that lives on the moon with the goddess Chang'e. On the fifth day of the fifth month the Dragon Boat Festival races long boats with dragon heads, 🐉🚣, in memory of the poet Qu Yuan. At weddings everything is red and marked with 囍, double happiness.

Chinese food emoji, tea and sports

The food emoji people pair with 🇨🇳 are 🥟 dumplings (jiaozi and dumplings served as dim sum in southern China), 🍜 noodles, from Lanzhou hand-pulled beef noodles to the long noodles eaten on birthdays for a long life, 🍚 rice, 🦆 for Peking roast duck, 🍲 for the bubbling hot pot of Chongqing and Sichuan, 🌶️ for the numbing-hot málà of Sichuan and the heat of Hunan, 🥬 for bok choy, and 🥢 chopsticks, kuàizi. 🍑 is the peach of long life: peach-shaped buns are served at elders' birthdays. 🥝 belongs here too, because kiwifruit is native to China.

Tea 🍵 began in China, and it is still drunk all day: green tea such as Longjing from Hangzhou, oolong, pu'er, poured from small clay teapots 🫖 like those of Yixing. 🥡 and 🥠 are Chinese food as North America knows it, the folded takeout box and the fortune cookie, which was popularised in California and is barely known in China: use them for takeout night, not for a dinner in Beijing.

🏓 Table tennis is China's sport by reputation, and the ping-pong diplomacy of 1971 opened contact between China and the United States. 🏸 badminton is played in every park and schoolyard, 🏀 basketball is one of the most played and watched sports (Yao Ming made it huge), and 🥋 stands for kung fu and wushu and the slow tai chi of the morning parks. 🚄 fits modern China: it has the largest high-speed rail network in the world.

China symbols: the yuan sign ¥ and Chinese symbols for luck

The yuan symbol is ¥, the same character as the Japanese yen sign. China's currency is the renminbi (RMB, 人民币, the people's currency), its unit the yuan, code CNY. In Chinese, prices are usually written with the character 元 after the number, 25元, and said as kuài in speech; banknotes print the formal form 圆. When it could be confused with yen, write CN¥, RMB or CNY. Chinese input methods type the full-width ￥ for Shift + 4. On Windows hold Alt and type 0165 on the number pad for ¥; on a Mac press Option + Y. 💴 is officially the yen banknote, but its ¥ makes it work for yuan too.

The Chinese symbols for luck people copy most are characters: 福 fú, good fortune, 吉 jí, auspicious, 喜 xǐ, joy, 囍 shuāngxǐ, double happiness, the wedding sign, and 寿 shòu, long life, seen at birthdays of the old. 春 chūn, spring, goes up for Spring Festival, 爱 ài is love, 好 hǎo good, 龙 lóng dragon, and 中国 Zhōngguó, the Middle Kingdom, is China itself. Unicode also has six rounded seals of the same blessings, 🉠 fu, 🉡 lu (prosperity), 🉢 shou, 🉣 xi, 🉤 shuangxi and 🉥 cai (wealth); they are symbols, not emoji, so some fonts lack them.

☰ ☱ ☲ ☳ ☴ ☵ ☶ ☷ are the eight trigrams, bāguà, of the I Ching, the Book of Changes: heaven, lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain and earth. Paired into sixty-four hexagrams (䷀ to ䷿, also in Unicode) they are used for divination, and they surround ☯ on many feng shui charms.

Pinyin tone marks and Chinese punctuation: how to type them

China has about 1.4 billion people, and the great majority of them speak some form of Chinese. Standard Mandarin, Pǔtōnghuà, is written in simplified characters and spelled in Latin letters with pinyin, adopted in 1958. Other Chinese languages are spoken by tens of millions each: Wu around Shanghai (about 80 million), Cantonese (about 70 million), Xiang (about 40 million), Hakka (about 35 million), Min Nan (about 28 million) and Gan (about 22 million), all rough estimates that vary by source. Among minority languages, Sichuan Yi (about 2 million) has its own syllabary, Uyghur (about 10 million) is written in Arabic script, Zhuang (about 16 million) in Latin letters and Mongolian (several million speakers in Inner Mongolia) in its vertical script. Each has a collection here, starting with Chinese and Cantonese.

Pinyin needs letters A–Z lacks, because Mandarin is tonal: the same syllable means different things at different pitches. ā (first tone, high and level), á (second, rising), ǎ (third, dipping) and à (fourth, falling) turn mā mother, má hemp, mǎ horse and mà to scold into four words; the neutral tone takes no mark. ü is a separate vowel, as in nǚ woman and lǜ green, written plain u after j, q, x and y. The mark goes on a or e if there is one, on the o of ou, and otherwise on the last vowel: guì, liù.

On a Mac add the ABC – Extended keyboard and press Option + A then a vowel for ā, Option + E for á, Option + V for ǎ and Option + ` for à. In Word on Windows type the code and press Alt + X: 0101 ā, 01CE ǎ, 011B ě, 01D0 ǐ, 01D2 ǒ, 01D4 ǔ, 01DA ǚ. Phone keyboards show some toned vowels on long-press but often not ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ, so copying them here is quickest. To write characters, Chinese input methods take pinyin without tones and offer the matching characters; type v for ü.

Chinese punctuation is full-width, each mark filling a whole character square: the hollow full stop 。, the comma ，, the enumeration comma 、 that separates items in a list, ！ ？ ： ；, the quotation marks “ ” of mainland China (「 」 in Hong Kong, Taiwan and vertical text), the title marks 《 》 around names of books and films, and 【 】 for headings and tags. · separates the parts of foreign names (迈克尔·乔丹, Michael Jordan), and the dash and ellipsis are written double: —— and …….