The table in the Beijing restaurant had been loud a moment before. Then the visitor, waiting for the next dish, pushed his chopsticks upright into his bowl of rice and let go. They stood there, two thin poles rising from the white grains. Nobody said anything. An older woman lifted them out and laid them across the rim of the bowl. He had not been rude. He simply didn’t know that Chinese chopstick etiquette gives that gesture a name.

Most guides hand you a list of don’ts and leave it at that: don’t point, don’t tap, don’t stab. What they rarely tell you is that each of these prohibitions carries a four-character Chinese name, and that every one of those names is a small picture. One describes the boards of a coffin. One describes incense burning on an ancestor’s altar. One describes a beggar knocking an empty bowl for coins. Learn the names, and the rules stop being a minefield of foreign offense. They become something closer to a language: the way generations of Chinese families taught children to notice the people sitting beside them.

What follows are 13 taboos. Twelve come from a widely circulated folk tradition, each with a Chinese name and an image hidden inside it. The 13th is one that Chinese tables have added within living memory.

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