A roof — and under it, a pig. That is home, in the oldest Chinese: not a person under the roof, but the family pig, because a farmstead with a pig was a household that would eat this winter. Home is where the wealth sleeps. Unromantic, honest, and unforgettable once you have seen it.
A piece of culture
The family at the center No idea sits deeper in Chinese culture than 家. The state was imagined as a family (国家, "country" — literally state-family, a word you can nearly read); the emperor was the father of all; and to this day the great homecoming before New Year — hundreds of millions traveling at once — is the largest annual human migration on the planet. Confucius put it simply: put the family in order, and the world follows.
Use it in a real word
大家
dàjiā · daai6 gaa1
everyone — literally "the big family": how Chinese addresses a whole room