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| Ancient official-script characters writ-ten on silk. | In the Qin Dynasty, There were busy exchanges of documents between the central and local governments and cultural and information exchanges between various parts of the country were speeded up. These exchanges demanded the swift writing of documents and notices, with little attention to the nice forms of the characters or the length and thickness of strokes. Also, people believed changeable, vigorous and not well-proportioned characters were nicer than those in even and symmetrical forms, and with unified strokes. As a result , the cursive and cursive-seal hands appeared.
The cursive-seal
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| Ancient official-script characters on bamboo strips from the Han Dynasty, discovered in Wuwei, Gansu Province, in 1959. | hand is quite different from the cursive hand and official hand, and even the lesser-seal hand. Later, it demonstrated more features of the standard official hand and was called the ancient official hand.
In the process of disintegration of the seal hand, the role of the same thickness and length of strokes was broken by more and more calligraphers. Some intentionally
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| Part of the Shichen Tablet, carved in 169, Eastern Han Dynasty. | extended the vertical strokes and hook strokes, or exaggerated right-downward strokes. Some even tried to write characters in a new way: starting the single horizontal stroke or the last of two or three horizontal strokes with a depiction of a silkworm's head and ending in a wild goose's tail. Such a style was followed by many calligraphers gradually, and finally developed into the official script, different from the ancient official script. The inscription on the "Shichen Tablet" is a typical example of such a hand. The official hand was developed in the Eastern Han Dynasty (c.first century) and is the second generation basic calligraphic style to evolve after the seal style.
The evolution from the seal hand and ancient official style to official hand was a mystery until the turn of the 20th century. The 2,000-3,000-year interval between pictographs and inscriptions on tortoise shells and bronze objects used to be a blank in the history of the development of Chinese writing.
Then in the 1890s and 1900s, inscriptions on a total of 100,000 bamboo or wooden strips 20-30 cm long and 1-5 cm wide dating from the Qin and Han dynasties were discovered in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, Hunan, Hubei, Shandong and Henan. The inscriptions are in the ancient
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| A horizontal stroke in the official hand starts with a "silkworm head" and ends in a "wild goose tail." | official style, different from the official style of the Eastern Han Dynasty found on stone steles. They proved t
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| Part of Ode on Sending Out the Troops in "zhang cao" cursive script. | o be a transitional form of writing between the seal and official styles.
After the official style, calligraphers sought a simpler and more elegant style, discarding horizontal strokes starting with a silkworm's head and ending with a wild goose's tail, and created the cursive style. Simple and smooth, the strokes of the characters written in the cursive hand are not linked but remain separate. This style is called the "zhang cao" cursive script, and was in fashion in the third and fourth centuries. But not too many people know it.
Following the "zhang cao" cursive script, a "modem" cursive hand appeared. But the latter was not developed from the "zhang cao" cursive script, but from the ancient official style. Characters in the former cursive style are independent, while those of the latter are usually linked together.
The running hand is another script which developed after the official hand, and was commonly used in letters and documents. It is easy to recognize, and simple, and
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| Baiyuan Scroll in the running-cursive hand, written by Wang Xun of the Jin Dynasty. Wang Xun (350-401) was director of the imperial secretariat and a distant relation of Wang Xizhi.He was famous for his essays and calligraphic works, and was acclaimed for his mastery of the cursive script.This calligraphic model has 47 characters. | flexible to use. In the process of its development, it absorbed elements of the formal and cursive styles.
As these new calligraphic styles developed, the formal script appeared too. People found it troublesome to follow the way of starting a horizontal stroke with a silkworm's head and ending it in a wild goose's tail and thick right downward stroke on bamboo or wooden strips. So they adopted some strokes from the cursive hand. to develop the formal hand. Initiated in the Han Dynasty, the formal hand came to be commonly used in the early Tang Dynasty (618-907). It became a new basic calligraphic style of the third generation used for the following 1,300 years.
From the official and other new styles mentioned above, some other styles were developed, such as the running cursive hand, the formal-running hand and the wild cursive hand. They all developed from the official script.
Here we need to talk about the current "simplified Chinese characters" and the way of arranging them. Nearly half a century ago, for convenience in writing and reading, the government stipulated the use of simplified Chinese in daily writing and typesetting. If there are several ways of writing a character, only one is adopted. Typesetting is horizontal, from left to right, and the lines run from top to bottom. However, calligraphic writing retains its traditional right-to-left and top-to-bottom patterns. |
