Calligraphy is understood in China as the art of hand with the brush. In the history of Chinese art, calligraphy has always been held in equal importance to painting. Chinese calligraphy began with the hieroglyphs and, over the long ages of evolution, has developed various styles and schools, constituting an important part of the heritage of national culture. In traditional Chinese art, calligraphy, seal and painting are all thought as parts of a complete artistic work.
Chinese scripts are generally divided into five categories: the seal character (zhuan), the official or clerical script (li), the regular script (kai), the running hand (xing) and the cursive hand (cao).
Zhuan Script
The zhuan script or seal character was the earliest form of writing after the oracle inscriptions, which must have caused great inconvenience because they lacked uniformity and many characters were written in variant forms. The first effort for the unification of writing, it is said, took place during the reign of King Xuan (827-782 B. C.) of the Western Zhou Dynasty, when his taishi (grand historian) Shi Zhou compiled a lexicon of 15 chapters, standardizing Chinese writing under script called zhuan. It is also known as zhouwen after the name of the author. This script, often used in seals, is translated into English as the seal character or as the “curly script after the shape of its strokes.
When Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the whole of China in 221 B. C, he ordered his Prime Minister Li Si to sort out all the different systems of writing hitherto prevalent in different parts of the country so as to unify the written language under one system. What Li did, in effect, was to simplify the ancient zhuan (small seal) script.
Today we have a most valuable relic of this ancient writing in the creator Li Si’s own hand engraved on a stele standing in the Temple to the God of Taishan Mountain in Shandong Province. The 2,200-year-old stele, worn by age and weather, has only nine and a half characters left on it.
Lishu Script
The lishu (official script) came in the wake of the xiaozhuan in the same short-lived Qin Dynasty (221 – 207 B. C.). This was because the xiaozhuan, though a simplified form of script, was still too complicated for the scribes in the various government offices who had to copy an increasing amount of documents. Cheng Miao, a prison warden, made a further simplification of the xiaozhuan, changing the curly strokes into straight and angular ones and thus making writing much easier. A further step away from the pictographs, it was named lishu because li in classical Chinese means “clerk” or “scribe”. Another version says that Cheng Miao, because of certain offence, became a prisoner and slave himself; as the ancients also called bound slaves “li“, so the script was named lishu or the “script of a slave”.
Kaishu Script
The lishu was already very close to, and led to the adoption of, kaishu, regular script. The oldest existing example of this dates from the Wei (220-265), and the script developed under the Jin (265-420). The standard writing today is square in form, non-cursive and architectural in style. The characters are composed of a number of strokes out of a total of eight kinds-the dot, the horizontal, the vertical, the hook, the rising, the left-falling (short and long) and the right-falling strokes. Any aspirant for the status of calligrapher must start by learning to write a good hand in kaishu.
Caoshu Script
On the basis of lishu also evolved caoshu (cursive handwriting), which is rapid and used for making quick but rough copies. The first of these emerged at the time the Qin was replaced by the Han Dynasty between the 3rd and 2nd centuries B. C. The characters, though written rapidly, still stand separate one from another and the dots are not linked up with other strokes.
(Source: ancienthistory.mrdonn.org)
