The Within aCharacter Character

What happens when the strength of a coursing river rushes through the structure of Chinese calligraphy? Here’s what Jameson Yap has to say

- Koyyi Chin

Somewhere along the way, what started out as an ancient art form became a vital element in Chinese academic institutions, either as an elective or a core subject. Shū fà ( ), which is Mandarin for Chinese calligraphy, is a visual and literary art form with a millennia’s worth of history and is one of China’s many cultural treasures.

It was a skill regarded highly among royalty and scholars especially. During the period between the Sui Dynasty (581–619 AD) and the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911 AD), calligraphy was a requisite for civil service candidates who took part in the Imperial civil service examination system.

Using only four tools: brush, ink, paper and inkstone, Chinese calligraphy could be found on scrolls, paintings, or inscribed on the plaques of statues as well as the tablets in temples. The aforementioned tools were dubbed the Four Treasures of the Study, which is an epithet that, according to an archived Mandarin site called the International Daily News, seems to have been coined during the period of the Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589 AD).

There are five main categories of traditional Chinese calligraphy: seal script (zhuàn shū), clerical script (lì shū), regular script (kai shu), running script (xíng shū), and cursive script (cao shū).