Chinese Calligraphy
李丹丹
Introduction The scripts Tools
Introduction
Chinese calligraphy is a form of calligraphy widely practiced in China
and revered in the Chinese cultural sphere, which often includes Japan,
techniques.
styles of calligraphy
Chinese
甲骨文
English oracle bone script
金文
bronze script
篆书
seal script
隶书
clerical or offical script
草书
cursive or grass script
Oracle bone script was the form of Chinese characters used on oracle bones—animal bones or turtle plastrons used in pyromantic divination—in the late 2nd millennium BCE, and is the earliest known form of Chinese writing.
Today, this style of Chinese writing is used predominantly in seals, hence the English name is seal script.
Most people today cannot read the seal script, so it is considered an ‘ancient’ script, generally not used outside the fields of calligraphy and carved seals.
bronze script
bronze script
Chinese bronze inscriptions, also commonly referred to as Bronzeare writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on Chinese ritual bronzes such as zhōng bells and dǐng tripodal cauldrons from the Shang dynasty to the Zhou dynasty and even later.
As the majority of oracle bones bearing writing date to the late Shang dynasty, oracle bone script essentially refers to a Shang script. People believed that the shells told powers of their gods, so that is why it is called "Oracle Bone Script".
楷书
regular or standard script
ቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱ行书
running or semi-cursive script
oracle bone script
Oracle bone script
Because turtle shells as well as bones were used, the oracle bone script is also sometimes called shell and bone script.
The archaic clerical script of the Chinese Warring States period to Qín Dynasty and early Hàn Dynasty can often be difficult to read for a modern East Asian person, but the mature clerical script of the middle to late Hàn dynasty is generally legible.
seal script
seal script
The seal script is the formal script of the Qín system of writing, which evolved during the Eastern Zhōu dynasty in the state of Qín and was imposed as the standard in areas Qín gradually conquered.
clerical or offical script
clerical or offical script
The clerical script is popularly thought to have developed in the Hàn dynasty and to have come directly from seal script.
Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam. The calligraphic tradition of East Asia originated
and developed from China. Chinese calligraphy and ink and wash painting
are closely related, since they are accomplished using similar tools and
Early bronze inscriptions were almost always cast (that is, the writing was done with a stylus in the wet clay of the piece-mold from which the bronze was then cast), while later inscriptions were often engraved after the bronze was cast.