Chinese Typography

CHINESE TYPOGRAPHY About the History of Chinese Characters

CHINESE TYPOGRAPHY

CHINESE TYPOGRAPHY About the History of Chinese Characters

Written By Yu Qiu

Blurb, Australia

First published 2014 by Blurb, Australia Offices also in San Francisco and London.

Typeset in 10/14 pt QT font.

Yu Qiu 2014 Chinese Typography: about the History of Chinese Characters All rights reserve. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prrior permission of the publisher.

Printed in Australia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to thank those who helped me with the topic, layouts and contents.

I am particularly to thank to two people, who gave me much supports through the whole semester: Dominique and Frank Yuan.

Quorra

C

hinese is one of the most ancient written languages in the world and it has been used among Chinese till now. This book will show you the evolution of Chinese characters according to a timeline from 14th century to morden society. You will see how chinese people created their characters and different textures they used to write on.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Oracle Bone Script .............................. 10 Chapter 2: Big Seal Script ...................................... 14 Chapter 3: Small Seal Script ................................... 18 Chapter 4: Official Script ........................................ 20 Chapter 5: Cursive Script ........................................ 24 Chapter 6: Regular Script ....................................... 28 Biliography .................................................................. 32

Oracle Bone Script 14th -11th Centuries B. C

ORACLE BONE SCRIPT

Oracle Bone Script refers to incised ancient Chinese characters found on oracle bones, which were animal bones or turtle shells used in divination in Bronze Age China from 14th -11th centuries B.C to 1200 -1050 B.C.

T

he oracle bone script of the late Shang appears pictographic, as does its contemporary, the Shang writing on bronzes.

The earliest oracle bone script appears even more so than examples from late in the period. Comparing oracle bone script to both Shang and early Western Zhou period writing on bronzes, oracle bone script is clearly greatly simplified, and rounded forms are often converted to rectilinear ones; this is thought to be due to the difficulty of e ngraving the hard, bony surfaces, compared with the ease of writing them in the wet clay of the molds the bronzes were cast from.

The more detailed and more pictorial style of the bronze graphs is thus thought to be more representative of typical Shang writing than the oracle bone script forms, and this typical style continued to evolve into the Zhou period writing and then into the seal script of the Qin Dynasty in the late Zhou period.

D

espite the relatively pictorial appearance of the oracle bone script, it is in fact a fully functional and fairly mature writing system which is able to record the Old Chinese language in its entirety and not just isolated kinds of meaning. This level of maturity clearly implies an earlier period of development of at least several hundred years. From their presumed origins as pictographs and signs, most graphs were already conventionalized in such a simplified fashion that the meanings of many pictographs are not immediately apparent by the Shang Dynasty.

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CUL 52 recto (left); verso (right)

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Chinese Oracle Bone Script is the earliest evidence of the Chinese writing system. Chinese writing has evolved so little from its origins, contemporary Chinese are able to read texts that are 3,000 or more years old.

15

Great Seal Script 11th century BC - 711 BC

Great (or Large) Seal Script is a traditional reference to Chinese writing from before the Qin Dynasty, and is now popularly understood to refer narrowly to the writing of the Western and early Eastern Zhou Dynasties, and more broadly to also include the Oracle Bone Script.

GREAT SEAL SCRIPT

It

is only more recently that the term Greater Seal Script has been extended to refer to Western Zhou forms or even oracle bone script, of which the Han Dynasty coiners of this term were unaware. The term Large Seal Script is also sometimes traditionally identified with a group of characters from a book 800 B.C entitled Shizhoupian, preserved by their inclusion in the Han Dynasty lexicon, the Shuowen Jiezi. Xu Shen, the author of Shuowen, included these when they differed from the structures of the Small Seal Script, and labelled the examples. This name comes from the name of the book and not the name of a script. It is not correct to refer to the 800 B.C Zhou Dynasty Script as Zhouwen. Similarly, the Zhou graphs are merely examples of Large Seal Script when that term is used in a broad sense.

Large seal script widely used in many vassal states in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Period was more regular and symmetrical than bronze ware script in writing.

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Fragment of the Stone drum inscription, the earliest known text in Great Seal Script carved on stones ever found, dated between the late Western Zhou, i.e. 8th century B.C, and the late Warring States period, i.e. the late 3rd century B.C. The Palace Museum in The Forbidden City, Beijing 18

Originally, Great Seal Script must have been written with a brush and ink or lacquer on wood or bamboo tablets or silk.

The style is characterized by an austere balance of straight and curvilinear lines of uniform thickness ending in blunt stops.

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Small Seal Script 221 BC - 8 AD

SMALL SEAL SCRIPT Small Seal Script, romanized as Hsiao-chuan and also known as Seal Script, Lesser Seal Script and Qin Script, is an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy. It was standardized and promulgated as a national standard

by Li Si, prime minister under Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of Qin Dynasty.

H

ence coaches, roads, currency, laws, weights, measures, and writing were to be unified systematically. Characters which were different from those found in Qin were discarded and Li Si’ s small seal characters became the standard for all regions within the empire. This policy came in about 220 B.C, the year after Qin’s unification of the Chinese states, and was

introduced by Li Si and two ministers. The small cursive form clerical script came after the small script.

L

i Si’ s compilation is known only through Chinese commentaries through the centuries.

It is purported to contain 3,300 characters. Several hundred characters from fragmentary commentaries have been collected during the Qing period, and recent archeological excavations in Anhui, China, have uncovered several hundred more on bamboo strips to show the order of the characters; unfortunately, the script employed is not the small seal script as the discovery dates from Han.

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Clerical Script 221 BC - 220AD

CLERICAL SCRIPT Clerical Script is one of the styles of Chinese calligraphy.

It is developed from seal carving style that is characterized by round and smooth strokes, changing to square turning strokes. The character structure of official script is flat and square as opposed to the slim and long structures of seal carving style. the slow movement in seal carving style. Its character is constrained in both the upper and lower parts, yet somewhat expanded on the left and right. The pen movement is short and fast, against the slow movement in seal carving style. The strokes of official script are more likely to tilt to the lower right. Generally speaking, official script is a lively and diverse calligraphy style.

The emergence of Clerical Script helped Chinese characters become square.

As it originally derived from pre-Qin Dynasty seal carving style, the early-stage official script had noticeable features of seal carving style and gradually attained perfection between the middle of the Western Han Dynasty and the Eastern Han Dynasty. In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Official Script became a standard calligraphy style with high aesthetic value.

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Though somewhat square and angular, with strong emphasis on the horizontal strokes, Clerical Script is a truly calligraphic script type, making full use of the flexible brush to modulate the thickness of the line.

24

Ink rubbing of a lishu inscription on the stele of Shichen, ad 169, Han Dynasty; in the collection of Wan-go H.C. Weng, New York City.

Courtesy of Wan-go H.C. Weng, New York

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Cursive Script 202 BC - 1234 AD

SCRIPT

CRUSIVE

Cursive Script, often mistranslated as Grass Script, is a style of Chinese calligraphy. Cursive Script is faster to write than other styles, but difficult to read for those unfamiliar with it. It functions primarily as a kind of shorthand script or calligraphic style. People who can read standard or printed forms of Chinese may not be able to comprehend this script at all. ◊HISTORY ◊ Cursive script originated in China during the Han Dynasty through the Jin period, in two phases. First, an early form of cursive developed as a cursory way to write the popular and not yet mature clerical script. Faster ways to write characters developed through four mechanisms: omitting part of a graph, merging strokes together, replacing portions with abbreviated forms, or modifying stroke styles. This evolution can best be seen on extant bamboo and wooden slats from the period, on which the use of early cursive and immature clerical forms is intermingled. This early form of cursive script, based on clerical script, and variously also termed ancient cursive, draft cursive or clerical cursive in English, to differentiate it from modern cursive.

Modern cursive evolved from this older

cursive in the Wei Kingdom to Jin dynasty with influence from the semi-cursive and standard styles.

◊STYLE ◊ Beside Zhangcao and the Modern Cursive, there is the Wild Cursive which is even more cursive and difficult to read. When it was developed by Zhang Xu and Huai Su in the Tang dynasty, they were called Dian Zhang Zui Su. Cursive, in this style, is no longer significant in legibility but rather in artistry.

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Cursive Script is not bound by rules for even spacing, and characters need not be of the same approximate size; the calligrapher thus has the fullest freedom of expressive movement of line.

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28

Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei

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Regular Script 151AD - Now

REGULAR SCRIPT

Regular Script is also known as True Script and Standard Script. Regular means model, namely, this type of script can be deemed as a model or standard script. There was a saying about calligraphy learning in ancient times, Regular Script is a must when learning calligraphy.

R

egular Script is a sort of chirography arising following official script in the developmental course of Chinese chirographies. The creator and exact period in which he lived are not clear. However, in the opinion of most of calligraphists in the past generations, the originator is Wang Cizhong in the late Han. The Wei Regular Script appeared on stone stele of the Northern Wei Dynasty in the Southern and Northern Period is the initial form of Regular Script.

By the Tang Dynasty, Regular Script had been developed into a mature and independent chirography. It is at that time that a number of Regular Script calligraphists came into being. They include Yu Shinan, Ouyang Xun and Chu Suiliang in the early Tang Dynasty as well as Yan Zhenqing in

the mid-Tang Dynasty and Liu Gongquan in the late Tang Dynasty. Their regular-script works were valued by later generations and elevated into models of calligraphy. Regular Script is classified in line with the size into small, medium and large ones.

Also, it is an evolving anabranch of these two types of Chinese characters: Cursive Script and Running Script. Chinese character was basically finalized after the formation of Regular Script. Evolving from ancient writing, it could fulfill people’ s requirements for character standardization.

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Regular Script conforms to the requirements for character standardization by typography invention and thus became an of ficial chirography used in China over thousands ofyears.

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Regular Script calligraphy, written by the emperor Huizong, Bei Song Dynasty, China National Palace Museum, Taipei

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BILIOGRAPHY Aylmer, C 1981, Origins of the Chinese Script, London Moruo, G 1978, Portfolio of Oracle Bone Script, Beijing Ponte, R 2013, Great Seal Script Part 1, viewed 8 May 2014, http://www.ink-treasures.com/history/calligraphy/chinese-calligraphy/ calligraphy-scripts/seal-script/great-seal-script/ Ponte, R 2013, Small Seal Script, viewed 8 May 2014, http://www.ink-treasures.com/history/calligraphy/chinese-calligraphy/ calligraphy-scripts/small-seal-script/ Official Script, viewed 8 May 2014, http://arts.cultural-china.com/en/62Arts896.html Regular Script, viewed 8 May 2014, http://arts.cultural-china.com/en/62Arts896.html Xigui, Q 2000, Chinese Writing, California