The history of Chinese characters is really the history of East Asian calligraphy, and there was little difference between the two until movable wooden type was developed in 11 th century China. The history of calligraphy is not a linear story and there have been many periods of redaction, re-stylization, simplification, and abstraction from Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s (秦始皇 221 BCE) destruction of texts bearing older writing styles to Mao Tse-tung’s 1956 push for greater literacy in the countryside, which resulted in the National Standard Character Set (国家标准) of 1980. His discovery filled in missing parts of the history of the development of these characters, and it dramatically increased our understanding of how they progressed from representative pictographs to highly abstracted modern characters. It wasn’t until 1895 that politician and scholar Wang Yirong recognized these glyphs as proto-Chinese characters. For most of this time they were mistakenly sold as “dragon bones” in traditional Chinese medicine shops. For hundreds of years, farmers have been unearthing these bones from a pit outside the city of Anyang in Henan province, China. 4 These omens were typically related to royal questions about crops, warfare, or fortune. Soothsayers were said to throw the inscribed “oracle bones” into a fire and read omens from the way the bones splintered or cracked. The progression of the character for “horse.” 2015.Īnyone who practices calligraphy inherits a tradition that spans 5,000 years, when the first pictographic Chinese glyphs were scratched onto the shoulder blades of oxen or turtle shells during the Shang dynasty (1600-1046 BCE). In the last eight years of my own research, I heard adults describe these courses as “torturous.” Yet, they also speak of a nostalgia for the smell of ink and starched white paper and the sound of ink sticks rubbing against stones.įigure 1. In Japan, for example, middle school children fulfill a minimum two years of practice in class. Calligraphy is a part of the primary school experience for many students. 3 In countries that have developed their own calligraphy traditions such as Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, it not only represents an artistic practice but a philosophy embedded in thriving communities that have developed unique approaches to character design. Today as in the past, calligraphy is enjoyed as a form of meditation, relaxation, and mind-body practice. Today Huai Su’s writing is used as a classical example for calligraphers around the world who wish to deepen their understanding of this style. 江嶺之間。 From the Long River to the Five Mountain Ranges 積有歲時。 Collecting many years of experience, 精心草聖。 A dedicated sage of the cursive style. 小宗伯張正言。 and the minor ritual official Zhang Zheng Yan 1 In the 25-foot-long scroll, he describes his many exploits and achievements with monk-like humility: He eventually impressed important officials of his age and gained fame for an especially gestural abstracted form of Chinese hand writing called tsao-shu (草書), which literally means “grass writing.” His autobiography is one of the only surviving examples of his writing left. Born in Changsha, he traveled to the western capital in search of knowledge and advanced calligraphy training. The monk Huai Su (懷素, 737-799 CE) grew 10,000 banana trees outside his home so he could use the leaves for calligraphy practice in place of rice paper which was rare and expensive in Tang dynasty China (618-907 AD).
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