KangXi (康煕) was the second Emperor of Qing Dynasty (淸朝) China. He commisioned a dictionary of all Chinese characters, and in 1716, it was completed and honoured with his name. It is known as the KangXi ZiDian (康煕字典).

The dictionary ordered the characters according to radicals or bushou (部首) and the remaining number of strokes. The horizontal window above this section shows numbers followed by 畫 which indicates the total number of strokes of the radicals themselves. There are 214 bushou listed on the left in order of their appearance in the KangXi character dictionary. Variants or simplified forms of the radical characters are listed beside the links.

Unicode has used the 214 radicals as a convenient way to order the characters found in the character set standards for computing from the CJK locales. Where there are Chinese simplified characters, they depend on two factors.

• The radical itself is simplified
  All traditional characters are listed in one block first then the simplified characters follow immediately.
  e.g. 言 radical 149 all traditional characters are listed from 35328 言 to 35743 讟and the simplified characters begin with 35744 讠 and end at 35894 谶.
• All others
  Where the simplifications do not involve the radical, all simplifications are distributed in order of total number of strokes throughout the listing.