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Bright Moonlight stories

@brightmoonstories.bsky.social
70 followers 674 following 68 posts

明月光 · Short films about Chinese characters and the stories behind them, made with the channels resident artist natashakhe.com. One character per episode. brightmoonlightstories.com youtube.com/@brightmoonlightstories…

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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The Confucius Temple in Beijing, around 1918. Sidney Gamble took this. Whatever that stele says, someone decided it needed to outlast the person reading it, which is most of what 日 rì is about for us. Duke has the Gamble archive free to browse if you want to go looking yourself.
A stone stele at the Confucius Temple in Beijing, photographed by Sidney Gamble around 1918
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
They could not set the load down and pick it up again, so each porter carried an iron-tipped staff and rested standing on it every few steps. The staffs wore holes into the rock. They are still there, filling with rainwater.
A line of tea porters with tall carrying frames climbing a path below snow-lit peaks, a fire burning below them.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
A woman shaman at her altar with her frame drum. Jinzhou, Liaoning, 1935. All eight shamans in the town were women. Below, pit-sawyers in the larch of the Khingan range, 1936. 木 mù is a tree drawn whole. Our new film turns on one cut down to make a drum. 25 minutes. youtu.be/mHlV_1xZoJE
Black and white photograph. A woman stands at a household altar holding a large round frame drum upright in front of her, her hand on the grip behind it. On the altar table beside her, brass candlesticks, vases of flowers, an incense pot bristling with sticks, and a row of polished vessels. Jinzhou, Liaoning, 1935.Black and white photograph. Pit-sawyers working a felled trunk on a timber trestle in a thin larch forest, snow on the ground. Two men stand on top of the log, three more work below with long saws. Bare larches and a low ridge behind. The Khingan range, 1936.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Two men sawing a coffin lid out of a log. Sichuan, 1917. Our new film turns on a tree felled to make a stretcher for a boy who was dying. They cut down something living to carry him, and he went first.
Two men sawing a coffin lid from a log with a two-man frame saw in a village street, Sichuan, 1917. Sidney D. Gamble. Duke University Libraries. CC0.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
A moon gate in Kaifeng, 1919, with another one behind it. Chinese architecture makes the moon round. The character does not. It is a sliver. The shape you actually see on most nights, rather than the shape you know it is.
A circular moon gate cut through a brick wall in Kaifeng, 1919, with a second moon gate visible through it in the courtyard beyond. Sidney D. Gamble. Duke University Libraries. CC0.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
We imagine the oldest writing being laws and victories. One of the oldest surviving questions asks whether the king’s toothache will stop hurting in the night. Shang oracle bone, 5.4 centimetres across. Carved, burned until it split, then read. The Met have it open access.
A small fragment of inscribed oracle bone, pale tan, with incised Shang characters across its face. Metropolitan Museum of Art 18.56.71, Rogers Fund 1918. Open Access, CC0.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Sidney Gamble first went to China in 1908 and kept going back into the thirties. Duke put his negatives online and waived every right they had in them. I have been in there all week, looking for the films. This is a stele in the Tai mountains, 1919.
Three men standing beside a tall stone stele carved with dragons in a temple courtyard in the Tai mountains, Shandong, 1919. One wears a pith helmet. Sidney D. Gamble. Duke University Libraries. CC0.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
There's a stone in Beijing that turns out to be a picture of you. Episode 3: a 16-minute ink animation about one Chinese character '山' a porter named Wei on the Tea Horse Road, and that stone. Full episode here: youtu.be/Z38gZQZ5lOg
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I made a starter pack for animated documentary. Thirty people who either make it or study it. I looked for one first and there wasn't one. Nothing for the part where the drawing is the record rather than the illustration. Tell me who I've missed. bsky.app/starter-pack...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
The tea porters in EP3 are drawn, but photographs of them exist. Wilson took one on the Ya'an road in 1908, Gamble shot the same trade in 1917. So the animation is not filling a gap. It goes back over a record that does survive and picks what to keep. Both photographs agree on the staff.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Lets find everyone tell me who i missed...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Hebei, 1918 or 1919. A village shrine under a pine, a dozen people sitting on the steps in the shade. 休 is a person beside a tree. Rest. The odd bit is that in Zhou bronze inscriptions that same character is the word for a king's favour. One records it handed over as twenty strings of cowries.
Black and white photograph, Hebei 1918 or 1919. A stone village shrine on a raised platform beneath a large spreading pine, with about a dozen villagers sitting in the shade on the steps and low wall, and children standing on the sunlit ground to the right. Photograph by Sidney D. Gamble, provided by Duke University Libraries.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
An Egg not wanting to hatch? Why?
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Sichuan, 1917. The Chinese written on this photograph is 背茶叶. Carrying tea on the back. Look at the size of the bales against the people under them. See the stick they used to prop the load when they stopped, because putting it down meant getting it up again.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
The original Chinese word for flower was 華. When 華 drifted towards splendid and magnificent, a new character was built to take the plain flower job back. 花, grass over 化 for the sound. So the old word for flower is now the 華 in 中華, China. #etymology youtube.com/@brightmoonlightstories
youtube.com
Bright Moonlight Stories
Ink films about Chinese characters, the myths behind them, and where meaning began. London once meant something. Two thousand years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norman French buried it, and now nobody c...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
The 內經圖, cut into stone at the White Cloud Temple in Beijing in 1886. It is a map of the inside of a human body. The head is a mountain, the spine a river running down out of it. Look closely at the lower back. There are farmers working waterwheels. 🏺 #history youtu.be/Z38gZQZ5lOg
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Before 1899 the oldest Chinese writing was sold in pharmacies as dragon bones, ground up for medicine. Wang Yirong, ill, noticed marks on the pieces in his prescription. Shang divination records, 3,000 years old. It survived because a sick man looked closely. 🏺 #history youtu.be/sij7lYW_JhQ
youtu.be
日 (Ri) The 3,000-Year-Old Bone Medicine Mystery | Relax in Ink Art & Music (Story) Ep1
YouTube video by Bright Moonlight Stories
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
There was no starter pack on here for Chinese script and calligraphy, so I made one. 44 people working on oracle bones, palaeography, manuscripts and the writing itself. Still adding. Tell me who is missing. 🀄️📚 bsky.app/starter-pack...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Every frame of our films starts as pen and ink on paper. Natasha K. HE draws them. She also won the competition to design Guernsey's new banknotes, so from 2027 her work is in everyone's pocket on the island. Thirty seconds of her at the desk: youtube.com/shorts/w0dNO...
youtube.com
Natasha K He Resident Artist | Bright Moonlight Stories #shorts
YouTube video by Bright Moonlight Stories
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I looked for a starter pack on Chinese script. Oracle bones, palaeography, calligraphy, the writing itself. There are 2,366 packs on here. Not one of them covered it. So I made one. 44 people who post about how the writing actually works. Tell me who I have missed. bsky.app/starter-pack...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Every film starts here. Natasha K. HE draws the ink for Bright Moonlight Stories. Her work is in the permanent collection of Guernsey Museums, and she won the competition to design the back of Guernsey's new banknote. natashakhe.com youtube.com/@brightmoonlightstories
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
A stone set into a wall at the White Cloud Temple in Beijing, carved 1886, draws the human body as a landscape. The head is Mount Kunlun. The spine is a river running out of it. 山, shān. New film, 17 minutes. youtu.be/Z38gZQZ5lOg?...
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Relax in Ink Art (Story and Music): 3000yr Tea Horse Road Journey and Finding Your Mountain 山 (Shān)
YouTube video by Bright Moonlight Stories
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
The word 'window' was once 'wind eye'. Chinese characters kept what English let go. Three thousand years on, the oldest shapes are still sitting inside the ones on your phone. First short story: youtu.be/sij7lYW_JhQ?...
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Central Tibet, 1900. Two women walking barefoot across open ground with loads roped to their backs. Ovshe Norzunov plate, public domain. Research for my new film about the mountain road and the people who crossed it. Releases this Sunday.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Ya'an to Tachien-lu road, 1908. These are the bèifū, the tea porters of the Tea Horse Road. A staff holds the load so they can rest on the brutal journey. My new short film about these people releases this Sunday. Photo: Ernest Henry Wilson, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University.
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Before 1899 old Chinese writing was being sold in pharmacies and eaten. Farmers turned the bones up in their fields, and dealers sold them on as dragon bones. The marks on them were questions the Shang kings had put to their ancestors three thousand years ago. youtube.com/shorts/-07oe...
youtube.com
The sun and the icon on your phone are the same picture
YouTube video by Bright Moonlight Stories
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
There was no starter pack for Chinese script and calligraphy so I made one. Tell me who I have missed. go.bsky.app/NLEZDzu
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Bright Moonlight stories @brightmoonstories.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
明月光 Bright Moonlight Stories 日 the man who found China's oldest writing in a bag of medicine. 月 the hare that lives on the moon. 山 a tea porter on the Sichuan road, 1908. Short films about Chinese characters and the myths behind them. youtube.com/@brightmoonl...
youtube.com
Bright Moonlight Stories
Ink films about Chinese characters, the myths behind them, and where meaning began. London once meant something. Two thousand years of Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Norman French buried it, and now nobody c...
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