Thus, héng zhé is a compound stroke, combining the two basic strokes héng and zhé.

Further combining one héng zhé stroke with each of the strokes you already know produces another common character:

Keep an eye in particular on the stroke order in this character: Begin with the shù stroke on the left side, continue with the héng zhé stroke, and finish with the héng stroke on the bottom. This order is common when forming a box shape using these three strokes.

Here's another character that follows a similar stroke order, incorporating both the order for a box as well as the top-to-bottom rule:

Generally speaking, when drawing something inside a box, begin with the shù and héng zhé strokes, then draw whatever's inside the box, and finally complete the box with a héng stroke on the bottom. Here's another character in which this same basic stroke order is maintained.

Here's one more Chinese character you can write using only the three strokes you've learned. This character also follows the same stroke order rules you've already learned:

And here's yet another character that that's composed only of the three strokes you know so far. Note that inside the box, the horizontal héng stroke precedes the vertical shù stroke, just as in 十:

Here's another example of a character in which the bottom stroke of the outer box is only completed after the contents inside have been drawn:

Here's a character that includes a shù stroke in the middle of the character. This time, because the shù stroke isn't wholly contained inside the box, this stroke is drawn after the box is completed:

Here are two more similar character, with a couple of key differences:

Both of these characters are drawn generally from top to bottom. However, in the character gǔ, meaning "old," the top vertical shù stroke is written first, and then the short héng stroke is written after that. In contrast, in the character zhàn, meaning "to occupy," the longer top héng stroke is written first, and then the vertical shù stroke crosses it.

Finally, here's a character that contains a total of nine strokes, but they're all easy to make:

In this case, stroke order requires you to draw three complete boxes: first the one on top, then the one on the left, and finally the one on the right. Each box is composed of three strokes drawn in the usual order.

As you may have guessed, there are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to stroke order, so don't make yourself crazy trying to follow them. Lots of Chinese people – and there are 1.5 billion of them! – fudge or simply ignore some of the rules and still write entirely legible characters.