Chinese calligraphy: five scripts, one hand moving once

Start with the doors. Every Chinese New Year, hundreds of millions of households paste a pair of red paper strips either side of the front door with a couplet brushed on them in black or gold, and for one week the most widely displayed art form in the world is calligraphy. A good many of those couplets are printed now, and a good many are still written by whoever in the family or the neighborhood has the best hand, which is how most Chinese people first learn that having a good hand is a thing you can be known for.

Then the classroom. In January 2013 the Ministry of Education issued its Guidelines for Calligraphy Education in Primary and Secondary Schools, and the operative sentence is short: in grades 3 through 6, one class hour a week is to be set aside for writing with a brush. The same document lays out the method in five verbs that have not changed in a thousand years: read the model, trace it, copy it freehand, compare, adjust. UNESCO put Chinese calligraphy on its Representative List of intangible cultural heritage in 2009, which is nice, but the ministry's one hour a week is the thing actually keeping it alive.

Then the gallery. Xu Bing's Square Word Calligraphy, begun in 1994, takes English words and builds each one into a block that looks, at a glance, like a Chinese character, so that a Western visitor stands in front of it feeling illiterate for a moment and then realizes they can read every word. He installs it as a classroom, with copybooks and an instructional video, and the joke lands because the copybook is exactly how the real thing is taught. Shao Yan, a generation younger, writes the single character for "sea" in cursive so violently that the strokes crash like surf; the Yale University Art Gallery, which owns one from 1998, describes it as the point "where traditional Chinese writing meets contemporary Western abstraction."

And then the tattoo parlor, where the brush script is the whole appeal and the character underneath it is frequently wrong. If that is why you are here, the tattoo symbols page handles the character; this one will help you tell a good hand from a bad one. Our calligraphy generator will show you any character in the scripts below, with one caveat this page will keep coming back to. A font draws every character the same way twice. Calligraphy is the record of a hand that did not.

The oldest account of how the scripts came about is also the oldest Chinese dictionary. Xu Shen finished the Shuowen Jiezi around 100 CE and wrote a postface explaining where writing came from, and the story he tells is one of bureaucrats in a hurry. When the First Emperor of Qin unified the country in 221 BCE, his chancellor Li Si took the old large seal forms and, in Xu Shen's words, "somewhat abbreviated and altered them, which is what we call small seal." That is the tall, even, curving script you see carved on stone and cut into seals, and it was the official script of the empire for about as long as the empire lasted, which was fifteen years.

The trouble was that nobody could write it quickly, and the Qin generated paperwork on a scale the world had not seen. The postface is blunt about what happened next: "the business of the offices and prisons was heavy, and so there first arose clerical script, which tended toward the brief and easy." Wei Heng, a calligrapher of the third century whose essay on the four scripts is preserved in the Book of Jin, puts it in five words: clerical is seal made fast. The Han inherited it, kept seal script for the things that needed to look official (seals, tallies, banners and signboards, Wei Heng says), and got on with writing everything else in the flat, wide clerical hand with the flared horizontal tail.

Then the sentence that upsets the tidy story. Xu Shen, having reached the founding of the Han in 206 BCE, writes: "When the Han rose there was cursive." Not regular script. Cursive. People who already wrote a fast hand for a living wrote it faster still, and the characters began to run together and lose strokes, and within a couple of centuries there were celebrities. Wei Heng names them: Du Du under Emperor Zhang, then Cui Yuan, then Zhang Zhi of Hongnong, who "wrote on every bolt of silk in the house before it was bleached," practiced beside a pond until "the water of the pond turned entirely black," and was called the Sage of Cursive. He is also the source of the best line ever said about the script, his standing excuse for answering a letter in a careful hand: he was "in too much of a hurry to write cursive." Cursive, done properly, is slow.

The neat, upright regular script, the one that looks to a Western eye like the "normal" Chinese writing, was the last of the five to arrive as a discipline. Wei Heng credits a Han figure, Wang Cizhong, with first setting down its model forms, and the Wei-dynasty statesman Zhong Yao is the earliest master whose name everyone agrees on, but it did not become the hand every child learns first until the Tang, four or five centuries after cursive had its sages. Running script, the compromise you use to write a letter, sits between them: Wei Heng says two Wei masters learned it from a late-Han teacher named Liu Desheng and made it "the hand in general use." It still is.

Two footnotes from the same postface, because they tell you what kind of thing calligraphy was before it was an art. Under the Han, a boy who wanted to become a government scribe sat an examination at seventeen in which he had to recite and write nine thousand characters and then be tested in all eight of the Qin scripts, and the rule for a scribe who wrote a character wrong was that he could be formally impeached for it. Handwriting was a civil-service qualification with legal consequences long before anyone framed a piece of it. If you want to see what each script does to a single character, type one into the generator and watch it go from carved to collapsed across the tiles.

A Chinese viewer looks at calligraphy at three magnifications, and you can learn all three in an afternoon.

The stroke

The oldest set of instructions for looking at a single stroke is a short text called the Bizhentu, the Battle Array of the Brush, attributed to Lady Wei, the fourth-century teacher of Wang Xizhi. Whether she wrote it is an open question; Sun Guoting, three hundred years later, already said he suspected it was a forgery, though a useful one for beginners. It gives seven strokes and an image for each. A horizontal should be "like a battle line of clouds a thousand miles long, dim but with real form in it." A dot is "a rock falling from a high peak." A vertical is "a withered vine ten thousand years old." The right-falling stroke is "a crashing wave, a peal of thunder." The point of the images is tension: a good stroke is drawn, not dragged, and has pressure at the start and the end.

The same text gives you the vocabulary for when it goes wrong. Strength in the brush shows as bone; weakness shows as flesh. "Much bone and little flesh is called sinew writing; much flesh and little bone is called an ink pig." Once you have heard the phrase you will see ink pigs everywhere, on restaurant signs, on tattoos, on the covers of books about Zen, and you will be right.

The character

The best single essay on calligraphy in Chinese is Sun Guoting's Shupu, the Treatise on Calligraphy, which he wrote in his own cursive in 687 and which now sits in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. For the character he gives you one rule and then a set of tensions. The rule: "one dot becomes the standard for a character; one character becomes the standard for the whole piece." The first mark you make decides the size, weight and slant of everything after it, which is why calligraphers stare at blank paper for so long. The tensions: strokes should "differ without offending, harmonize without being the same"; the brush should be "neither always slow nor always fast"; and, the line every student memorizes, "bring dryness and it turns moist, let it be thick and it goes lean." A character in which every stroke is equally wet and equally dark is a character written by a machine. Look for the place where the brush ran out of ink and the writer kept going.

Sun also describes what the strokes should do to you, and his list is worth quoting because it is what Chinese viewers are actually seeing: "heavy as collapsing clouds, light as a cicada's wing; lead it and it runs like a spring, stop it and it settles like a mountain." If a character does none of that, however correct, it is a dictionary entry.

The sheet

Columns run top to bottom and the columns run right to left, so the piece begins in the upper right corner and ends in the lower left, where the writer signs and stamps. The red marks are seals, pressed in cinnabar paste, and they are the provenance record: the writer's name seal first, sometimes a studio seal, and then, on anything famous, the seals of every collector who owned it afterward, emperors very much included. Around and after the text you will often find other people's handwriting. These are colophons, comments by later owners and admirers, and on the great scrolls they can run longer than the work itself. On Su Shi's Cold Food scroll, Huang Tingjian's colophon of 1100 is written in characters larger than Su's own poem, which was either a tribute or a dare, and the museum's catalogue diplomatically notes that "both beauties are present."

The day

Sun Guoting also wrote down the conditions under which writing goes well or badly, five of each. It goes well when the mind is at ease and the body unhurried, when there is someone to write for, when the weather is mild and the air moist, when "paper and ink answer each other," and when the wish to write comes of its own accord. It goes badly in the reverse cases, and he lists "wind, dryness and a blazing sun" and "the mind tired and the hand reluctant" among them. Then the ranking, which is the most useful sentence in the treatise for anyone buying supplies: "a good day is worth less than good tools, and good tools are worth less than the wish to write."

The learner

If you ever try it yourself, the arc is also in the Shupu, and it is the arc of learning anything. "At the start, in laying out the strokes, seek only the level and correct. Having found the level, pursue the perilous. Having mastered the perilous, return to the level." He adds that at the end of that road "the person and the writing grow old together," and that Wang Xizhi's late work is his best for exactly that reason.

Later tradition likes to rank three running-script works above all others, and the ranking is a late convention rather than anything the Tang or Song said. But the three are the right three to know, because between them they show what the art values: an afternoon's improvisation, a grief-stricken draft, and a poem written in a leaking house.

An afternoon by a stream, 353

In the spring of 353, an official named Wang Xizhi held a purification party at a place called the Orchid Pavilion, near modern Shaoxing. A Tang account by He Yanzhi, who got the story from a ninety-two-year-old monk with a direct line back to Wang's descendants, gives the guest list: forty-one people, including Wang's three sons. They sat along a winding stream, floated cups of wine down the water, and whoever the cup stopped beside had to compose a poem. Afterward, on "silkworm-cocoon paper with a rat-whisker brush," Wang wrote a preface for the collection: twenty-eight lines, three hundred and twenty-four characters, on the pleasure of a fine day and the fact that everyone at the party would die.

He Yanzhi is precise about what makes the piece remarkable, and it is not the prose. Where a character repeats, "each was constructed in a different form," and the character 之, a little grammatical particle that turns up constantly, appears "some twenty times, every one transformed, with no two the same." Wang wrote it drunk, and "after he sobered up, on other days he wrote it out again dozens and hundreds of times, and none matched the one written at the purification." That is the whole art in a sentence: the thing that cannot be repeated is the thing that is valued.

The Book of Jin adds the personality. Wang loved geese, and once copied out the entire Daodejing for a Taoist priest in exchange for his flock. An old woman selling bamboo fans was annoyed when he wrote five characters on each; he told her to say they were by General Wang of the Right Army and ask a hundred coins, and people fought to buy them. He rated himself, in his own words, "on a level with Zhong Yao, and just behind Zhang Zhi in cursive." The Tang emperor Taizong, who wrote the appraisal at the end of the biography, thought that too modest: he called Wang's writing "entirely good and entirely beautiful," like "mist curling and dew forming, seeming to break and yet still joined."

Taizong's admiration is why nobody alive has seen the original. He Yanzhi tells how the preface passed down seven generations to a monk named Zhiyong, who practiced calligraphy for thirty years in a tower and filled five large baskets with worn-out brush tips, and then to Zhiyong's disciple Bian Cai, who hid it in a hollow he cut into the roof beam over his bed. Taizong summoned Bian Cai three times and got nothing, so he sent a censor named Xiao Yi disguised as a traveling scholar, who befriended the old monk over weeks, talked him into producing the scroll to compare with some lesser Wangs, and walked out with it. Bian Cai fainted when he found out and was dead little more than a year later. In 649, dying at the Yuhua palace, Taizong asked his son for one thing: "What I want is the Orchid Pavilion. Let me take it with me." He Yanzhi's four words for what happened are that it "entered the dark palace with the immortal carriage." The four court copyists Taizong had set to tracing it, Feng Chengsu among them, are the reason you can see anything at all.

A draft in a dead man's hand, 758

The second piece is not fair copy at all. During the An Lushan rebellion, Yan Zhenqing's cousin Yan Gaoqing was holding the city of Changshan when the general who should have relieved him sat on his hands; the city fell and Gaoqing and his son Jiming were killed. The National Palace Museum's catalogue entry records what Yan Zhenqing's nephew, sent to collect the bodies, actually recovered: "only Gaoqing's foot and Jiming's skull." Yan, then fifty, sat down to draft the funeral text for the boy, and the draft is what survives: a single sheet, 29.2 by 59.6 centimeters, on which the sentence "the traitorous minister did not come to the rescue; the lone city was hemmed in; the father fell and the son died; the nest overturned and the eggs were smashed" is written in a hand that visibly loses its temper.

The museum's description of the brushwork is the thing to take to the glass case: "the whole piece is written with a single, slightly worn brush," the ink "dries and is re-dipped" so that it runs from black to gray to scratched, and the text is "deleted, revised and blotted" as Yan changed his mind mid-sentence. Fair copies of the text existed; nobody kept them. The tradition kept the one with the crossings-out, because that is the one where you can watch a man think. Yan himself died in 785, sent to negotiate with a rebel and executed for refusing to bend.

A poem in the rain, 1082

The third is by Su Shi, the poet, in political exile in Huangzhou in 1082, during the Cold Food festival when fires were traditionally put out. The two poems he wrote are about a leaking hut "like a fishing boat" in endless rain, cooking cold vegetables on wet reeds, and realizing what day it is only because he sees a crow carrying a scrap of paper money from a grave. The National Palace Museum, which owns the scroll (34.2 centimeters high, nearly two meters long), transcribes it with two small marks that tell you what you are looking at: in the first poem the character for "rain" is "dotted out," and later a stray "son" is "dotted out" too. Su wrote it, made a mistake, put a dot beside it, and kept going, and the mistakes were left in for nine hundred years.

What people look at is the size of the characters, which swell and shrink with the poem's mood; the museum points to the last strokes of "year," "middle," "reed" and "paper," each dragged straight down into a long vertical that opens a column of empty space. Su said of his own hand that "short and long, fat and thin, each has its own bearing," which is a defense as much as a description. Eighteen years later Huang Tingjian, the other great calligrapher of the age, added the colophon, writing bigger than Su had, and remarking that he was only "playing the master where there is no Buddha around." He was in the same room as the Cold Food poems when he wrote it.

Brush, ink, paper, inkstone. The first book to treat the four as a set was Su Yijian's Wenfang Sipu, the Four Treatises of the Study, in the tenth century, and the preface by his friend Xu Xuan describes Su's room: "books all around, brush, inkstone, paper and ink, and nothing else of value, since these four are what learning rests on and cannot be missing for a moment." The classic set today pairs each with a place, a Hu brush from Huzhou, Hui ink from Anhui, Xuan paper from Xuancheng, a Duan inkstone from Guangdong, and a serious calligrapher will have opinions about all four.

The brush is a bundle of animal hair in a bamboo or wood handle, tapering to a point that can lay down a hairline or a stroke a hand wide depending on pressure, which is the reason a single script can look so different in two hands. The Bizhentu specifies rabbit hair "from the high mountains and sheer cliffs, gathered in the eighth and ninth months," a head one inch long and a handle five. Ink comes as a hard stick, made of soot bound with glue; the same text wants pine soot and deer-horn glue "aged ten years or more, until it is hard as stone," and the writer grinds it with water on the stone each time, which is the slow part of the morning that the five good conditions are really about.

Paper is the youngest treasure. Before it, the Book of the Later Han says, "documents were mostly bound bamboo slips, and those written on silk were called paper; but silk was expensive and slips were heavy, and neither was convenient." Cai Lun, a palace official, "conceived the idea of making paper from tree bark, hemp ends, old rags and fishing nets," and presented it to the emperor in 105 CE, after which "everyone used it and the whole world called it Marquis Cai's paper." Calligraphy as we know it, the fast absorbent sheet that records every hesitation of the brush, is downstream of that one memo. The inkstone, a slab of fine-grained stone with a shallow well, is the only one of the four you can inherit; good ones have been passed down for five hundred years, and the well is worn into a hollow by the grinding.