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Transcript

Evolution of Chinese Calligraphy

The Small Seal Script

The Simplified Script

The End

The Standard Script

The small seal script came after the large seal script during the Qin Dynasty, which dated from 221 B.C. to 207 B.C. This style and the large seal script had very few variations. One can tell that these two scripts are somehow related in a way or another. This script was the last that actually looked like the picture of what it meant. The current emperor was the one that reformed the system of writing that was used. This meant that legal documents, and many other things had to be written in this style, and therefore, many things had to be changed. This caused a lot of people to get to work, and many schools to start teaching this in schools.

Last, but not least, there is the simplified script, or simplified Chinese. This script was adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Many other countries around the world, including Singapore, are changing to this script in an effort to increase literacy. Other countries are staying with Traditional Chinese, like Malaysia and Taiwan. About two thousand characters have been simplified, which is a lot to work with. The main difference between Traditional and Simplified Chinese is the difficulty level of writing more strokes or less strokes. Generally, people would want the easy way out and find a condensed way of writing something.

This script is widely known and recognized in many places. It is also sometimes called Traditional Chinese. It has been used, and is still in used today, since the fall of the Han Dynasty. It was perfected during the Tang Dynasty. Today, it is the style of Chinese writing taught to school kids in China. This style of writing is the one we are learning. One would rather learn this style known as Traditional Chinese because if one knows this, they are bound to understand the even newer Simplified Chinese that is being taught at schools now. This script is considered to be very sophisticated and at the same time kind of complicated. It is composed of simple stokes, dots, and lines.

The Running Script

Video: Evolution of the Word Horse

The running script actually looks the point of your pencil or pen are running across the page. This sort of look like cursive, but leans more towards normal writing. The running script has been used since the Han Dynasty, like the standard and clerical scripts, which is why they look very similar to each other. However, they do all have a few differences. The time period affected them a little. The most similarities are found between the standard script and the running script, but this only occurs with some characters, so it completely depends on the words they mean. The running script also looks a lot like the draft script. They sort of both look like cursive, but one is neater and the other is a little bit sloppier. This shows that they are closely connected.

The Clerical Script

Courtesy of Naomi

The Draft Script

This has been used since the Han Dynasty, and is not widely used in many parts of China anymore. This is the style that led to the style we used to day, which makes it one of the newer, although not the most modern, style of Chinese writing. Although it is not the newest, it was written on bamboo slips, which again, shows a sign of development in terms of where this writing was found. Although the creator of this script is not known, there is a theory that proves that Cheng Miao, a prison inmate who offended an emperor, created the characters of the clerical script.

The draft script, as mentioned before, looks sort of like Chinese cursive writing. This makes it look very modern as opposed to classical, nevertheless, kind of fancy. The

Draft script, however, tends to look a little bit sloppier than the running script. Because some parts of the characters are omitted, it is quick to write, and the writing utensil is not picked up from the paper. Other parts are being taken out, strokes are merged, some are modified to simpler alternatives, and some are changed to a different place. This makes the script very difficult to read and understand.

The Large Seal Script

This script was used during the Zhou Dynasty as well. This, however, does not necessarily mean that its characters were the same as the bronze script. They were a little similar, but not nearly as similar as the oracle bone script was to the bronze script. This type of style of writing was also known as Pre-Qin, which was another dynasty in China. The large seal script was found written on cloth, wood, and jade. This shows that as time went by, more things were being written on. It went from oracle bones to metal vases and vessels to cloth and wood.

The Oracle Bone Script

The Bronze Script

The bronze script was very similar to the oracle bone script, but there were a few variations. For one thing, this style was used during the Zhou Dynasty, a different time period dating from 1100 B.C. to 256 B.C. This script has an obvious relation to bronze, as it was written on bronze, and many other metals. Not only was this script used on metal, but on jars and metallic pots. The bronze script in Chinese literally means “text on metal.” Bronze vessels with this script on them were a tribute to ancestors, or just simply a nice gift from one leader to another.

The oldest Chinese writing style was the oracle bone script, dating back to the Shang Dynasty in 1300 B.C. Much of this style was found in Anyang, the capital of the Shang Dynasty. Chinese characters looked like pictures of what they meant, in other words, they were pictographic. An example of this style would be the word ‘horse’, which actually looked like an animal, with a head and legs. The oracle bone script is actually called this because people used to use bronze pins to write, or rather, engrave, pictographs onto turtle shells, or oracle bones. Most of the characters written on oracle bones involved hunting, warfare, and weather.

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