Calligraphy

2)The lishu (official script) came in the wake of the xiaozhuan in the same short-lived Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.). This was because the xiaozhuan, though a simplified form of script, was still too complicated for the scribers 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 meant “clerk” or “scriber”.

Another version says that Cheng Miao, because of certain offence, because 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”.

3)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.

4)On the basis of lishu also evolved caoshu (grass writing or cursive hand), which is raid and used for making quick but rough copies. This style is subdivided into two schools: zhangcao and jincao.

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.

Jincao or the modern cursive hand is said to have been developed by Zhang Zhi (?-c.192 A.D.) of the Eastern Han Dynasty, flourished in the Jin and Tang dynasties and is still widely popular today.

It is the essence of the caoshu, especially jincao, that the characters are executed swiftly with the strokes running together. The characters are often joined up, with the last stroke of the first merging into the initial stroke of the next. They also vary in size in the same piece of writing, all seemingly dictated by the whims of the writer.

A great master at caoshu was Zhang Xu (early 8th century) of the Tang Dynasty, noted for the complete abandon with which he applied the brush. It is said that be would not set about writin guntil he had got drunk.

This he did, allowing the brush to “gallop” across the paper, curling, twisting or meandering in one unbroken stroke, thus creating an original style. Today one may still see fragments of a stele carved with characters in his handwriting, kept in the Provincial Museum of Shaanxi.