Chinese Calligraphy in Han Dynasty

The History of Chinese Calligraphy

Han Dynasty 202 BC - 220 AD

In 206 BC the entire Qin royal family was murdered, and soon afterward a new dynasty Han took over. After surviving a usurpation in 25 AD, the Han moved its capital east to Luoyang from Xian, which divided it into two periods - Western and Eastern Han.

“Modern” Chinese writing is thought to have begun with the Han. During this period clerical script which superseded seal script as the normal script for general documents went through a radical reform. By fabricating character elements, or radicals, and by reorganizing characters with the newly developed elements, the last pictographic vestige in small seal script was eliminated - the design of Chinese written language was finalized. A overwhelming majority of clerical characters have continued into modern times. To this day, the Chinese still refer to their characters as “han zi”, or Han characters, an echo of remote glory.

Official documents of Juyan, 102 BC - 30 AD
ink on wood, 23 cm

Wang Xi, the head of the 13th Squad, picked up 300 pounds of grain on January 18th.

Cursive script. Rashness and stylistic indetermination of developing clerical script invited a hastier style: cursive script, the third style of Chinese calligraphy. In its due course of development, which took a span of seven centuries, this style owned three sub-classes: draft, modern and wild cursive script.

Draft cursive script. Draft script is a fully cursive script, developed originally as a quick form of clerical script. In this style an individual character remains independent with its flat contour while the strokes run together and are frequently abbreviated. However, only standard, recognized abbreviations are permitted. The speed and the continuous flow with which draft script could be written were widely exploited for their expressive qualities.

Huang Xiang ( - )
Quick method reading primer
ink rubbing on rice paper

The perfection of clerical script. Later Han period saw many stone steles. Stele was originally a monolith served as a sundial in front of Zhou's ancestral temples. Han adopted Zhou's patriarchal clan system, and the use of stele was expanded to record events, declare official merits, perpetuate the memory of individuals in their epitaph tablets, and preserve the canons of Confucian and Taoist texts. These steles were inscribed in clerical script. Finalized clerical script was formal in composition, regular in stroke placement, and dignified in expression. In next five hundred years, clerical script remained the official script through successive dynasties.

	Ode to Stone Gate, 148
	Yi Ying Stele, 153
	Ritual Implements Stele, 156
	Cao Quan Stele, 185
	Zhang Qian Stele, 186

Modern cursive script. Completely leaving out the brushwork of clerical script, this style was developed from draft cursive script for speed. One of specific qualities of this style is that the characters are drawn in a continuous flow without abrupt hitches or breaks. Thus, they are difficult to decipher.

Zhang Zhi ( - c. 192)
Rebruary Eighth

Semi-cursive script. More convenient and practical than clerical script and more legible than cursive script, this style, the fourth style in Chinese calligraphy and the most popular Chinese script in everyday use today, is characterized by its refinement and lightness, especially in the curved strokes. This script has many different schools devoted to it, and each of them differs in style from others. Tradition has it that Liu Desheng, active around 168 AD, initiated this style, but none of his handwriting survived.

Chinese calligraphy

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