fyeahasianhistory:

Learning Asian History Through Avatar: The Last Airbender [Chinese Calligraphy Edition]
[Image: A poster of The Ember Island Players &ldquo;The Boy in the Iceberg&rdquo; propaganda play. The text reads in Chinese Calligraphy -&nbsp;&nbsp; 冰山上的男孩. 土國著名劇作家浦安添新作搜集全球有関降世神通資料由南極冰山至土國首都．資料来自牧民歌手海盜戰犯和菜販． 由餘烬島演員主演. In english this translates to - &ldquo;The Boy in the Iceberg: The famous Earth Kingdom playwright Pu-On Tim&rsquo;s new work has collected information about the Avatar from around the globe, from the icebergs of the South Pole to the Earth Kingdom capital. Information came from nomad singers, pirates, prisoners of war and a knowledgeable merchant of cabbage. Starring the Ember Island Players.&rdquo; ]
I&rsquo;ve been asked to recommend places for research on Chinese Calligraphy, but I found myself wanting to combine this with another A:TLA post and a brief overview of what Chinese Calligraphy is. Avatar: The Last Airbender makes a perfect example of Chinese Calligraphy for one major reason - every line of text in the series is written in either Classical or Ancient Chinese calligraphy by cultural consultant Dr. Siu-Leung Lee who is an expert in a variety of styles.
So about Chinese Calligraphy? What&rsquo;s the deal?
Chinese Calligraphy (the artistic creation of Chinese characters) dates back to Ancient China (BCE) and it is still used, practiced, and created today. It covers a long period of time, and is a huge formative influence even beyond China, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Calligraphy serves as both a discipline, and an artform, and has several rules that govern its practice. Generally speaking, characters must be: written correctly (with the right stroke order), written legibly for those who are familiar with the style being used, they must be concise, they must match the context they are serving in, and they must be &lsquo;aesthetically pleasing&rsquo;.

The tools of the trade&hellip;

The ink brush, ink, paper, and inkstone are essential implements of East Asian calligraphy: they are known together as the Four Treasures of the Study (T: 文房四寶 / S: 文房四宝) in China, and as the Four Friends of the Study (HG: 문방사우 / HJ: 文房四友) in Korea. In addition to these four tools, desk pads and paperweights are also used by calligraphers.

Early Chinese Calligraphy


The earliest known examples of Chinese writing are inscriptions on animal bones and tortoise shells dating from the 13th century B.C. during the Shang dynasty. These inscriptions were the records of divinations made by heating the bones or shells over a fire until cracks appeared on them. Predictions were read form the pattern of the cracks and recorded directly on the bone or shell. The figure below shows an oracle carved on the plastron of a tortoise. Note that the characters are composed of fairly straight lines with sharp endings.



The Great Seal Style This term covers a broad range of styles which came into use during the Chou dynasty (1122-221&nbsp;B.C.). Compared to the Oracle Style, these characters are more rounded at the corners and show a mixture of thick and thin strokes. Many of the surviving examples of this style, such as the one below, come from inscriptions that were cast on bronze vessels. At the bottom of the first column is the pictograph (picture-word) for &ldquo;house.&rdquo; The first word in the second column is also a pictograph. It shows &ldquo;carriage&rdquo; from a bird&rsquo;s eye view &mdash; a compartment with two wheels on either side, joined by an axle.



The seal script (often called &ldquo;small seal&rdquo; script) is the formal script of the Q&iacute;n system of writing, which evolved during the Eastern Zhōu dynasty in the state of Q&iacute;n and was imposed as the standard in areas Q&iacute;n gradually conquered. Although some modern calligraphers practice the most ancient oracle bone script as well as various other scripts older than seal script found on Zhōu dynasty bronze inscriptions, seal script is the oldest style that continues to be widely practiced.


Then came later styles -

This image compares Traditional and Clerical styles, with the Clerical style being the right hand side.

The clerical script (often simply termed l&igrave;shū; and sometimes called &ldquo;official&rdquo;, &ldquo;draft&rdquo;, or &ldquo;scribal&rdquo; script) is popularly thought to have developed in the H&agrave;n dynasty and to have come directly from seal script, but recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship indicate that it instead developed from a roughly executed and rectilinear popular or &lsquo;vulgar&rsquo; variant of the seal script as well as from seal script itself, resulting first in a &lsquo;proto-clerical&rsquo; version in the Warring States period to Q&iacute;n Dynasty [1], which then developed into clerical script in the early Western H&agrave;n dynasty, and matured stylistically thereafter.
Clerical script char