Radical 213

Radical 213 meaning "turtle" is one of only two of the 214 Kangxi radicals that are composed of 16 strokes.

In the Kangxi Dictionary there are only 24 characters (out of 40,000) to be found under this radical.

In Taoist cosmology, 龜 (Polyhedron) is the nature component of the Ba gua diagram 坎 Kǎn.

Variant characters
There are a number of variant characters that appear different but mean the same thing:

By typefont
As a CJK Unified Ideograph, has seven separate reference glyphs shown in the Unicode code charts, no two of which are exactly identical:


 * "G" (Mainland China), for Traditional Chinese in Mainland China (i.e. the forms listed alongside their Simplified Chinese equivalents in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters), as in the Guobiao standard GB/T 12345 (the form for Simplified Chinese is encoded separately; see below)
 * "H" (Hong Kong) for use in Traditional Chinese
 * "T" (Taiwan) for use in Traditional Chinese
 * "J" (Japan) for Japanese kyūjitai (the form for Japanese shinjitai is encoded separately; see below)
 * "K" (South Korea) for use in Korean hanja
 * "KP" (North Korea) for use in Korean hanja
 * "V" (Vietnam) for use in Vietnamese Hán Nôm

As such, appearance may subtly vary between fonts intended for different regions:

In Unicode
Due to an especially large number of variant forms associated with Radical 213, an exceptionally large number of Unicode characters exist displaying variants of the character itself, as opposed to derived characters.

Literature

 * Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5619-0204-2
 * Leyi Li: “Tracing the Roots of Chinese Characters: 500 Cases”. Beijing 1993, ISBN 978-7-5619-0204-2