I want to tell you that Song Ti didn't come out in the Song Dynasty. If you like, I also want to tell you that there are no pigs in rice rolls and no fish in eggplant.
For this anti-intellectual society, how many absurd and bizarre things are encountered every day, and how many are silently accepted and taken for granted. These absurdities include the "Song Style" that we will talk about, that is, the Song Style is "thin and thick horizontally, like a knife, like melon seeds, like a sweep, with a small triangle at the end of the horizontal pen", which is most suitable for printing.
When it comes to genre, it is bound to be associated with the "Ming style" that Japanese and Hongkong Taiwan Province people often say. According to Wikipedia entries, it is probably what we know as "Song Style" which prevailed in the Ming Dynasty. /kloc-in the 0/9th century, Japanese fonts imported from Presbyterian Church Publishing House in the United States were copied from the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, so they were called "Ming Style".
By the middle of the 20th century, Taiwan Province Province had imported phototypesetting and related fonts from Japan, so Japanese names such as "Ishii Akira" and "Ben Lan Ming" also entered the market in Taiwan Province Province. Unconsciously, the word "Ming style" penetrated into the market of Taiwan Province Province. Therefore, "Song Style" and "Ming Style" are originally the same thing. Due to cultural differences, their names are also different. The origin of "Ming style" can be traced back, but why is Song Ti called Song Ti?
Zhang Xiumin, the author of China Printing History, talked about the font called Song Style in Chinese character printing, which did not exist in Song books, but gradually formed in the middle of Ming Dynasty after three or four hundred years.
If we want to trace the origin of the name Song Ti, we must trace the causal relationship from the evolution of Chinese characters and the development of printing technology. The following picture is made by Li, from which we can see the development of calligraphy and printing in the Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming Dynasties.
Song Ti is a font that appeared in China Song Dynasty (960- 1279). In the Song Dynasty, literati used to imitate the fonts used by famous brush to print books and periodicals. At that time, the printing industry prevailed in Zhejiang, Sichuan and Fujian, among which Zhejiang's characters were mostly European; Sichuan characters imitate the richness of Yan style; Fujian figures are all modeled after the bones of Liu Ti.
Why did the font of printed books and periodicals in Song Dynasty take imitating the brush of the previous generation as a fashion? This may be traced back to the development of printing technology and calligraphy art. In the era of copying books when block printing technology was not popular, there appeared a group who copied books for a living. Most of them copied religious classics and were called "Jing Sheng".
With the development of regular script into a mature calligraphy font in the Tang Dynasty, and the emergence of calligraphers such as Ou Yangxun, Yan Zhenqing and Liu Gongquan, it is necessary for students to follow their ancestors in font in order to make their copies acceptable to the public.
After the war in the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, the Song Dynasty ushered in the rapid development of printing technology, including the four major inventions "movable type printing" often mentioned in junior high school textbooks, and of course the Song Dynasty, which was not mentioned, died because of the addiction to printing banknotes and hyperinflation. Out of the era of copying, Song Jingsheng (according to the jargon of block printing, he should be called a writer) has no calligraphy fonts of contemporary calligraphers to imitate, so it is natural to imitate the calligraphy masters of the previous generation.
Zhang Ming Wen Ying wrote Mi Qing Cang, describing the lettering of block printing in the Song Dynasty:
This is why Song Ti is mostly printed and printed with the brush of famous calligraphers in Tang Dynasty. At the same time, it is also what teacher Zhang Xiumin said, "Song style and true Song version have nothing in common." The author has consulted nearly 400 existing books of the Song Dynasty, and never found such plain square characters to provide evidence.
Ming style is the font that appeared in China in the Ming Dynasty (1368- 1644), and it is also the embryonic form of "Song Style" recognized by the public today. With the development of history, the demand for books in society is increasing day by day, which promotes the commercial printing in Ming Dynasty, and the division of labor in printing industry is more detailed and professional.
In order to meet the needs of printing, the engraver's workload has increased, and the font looks roughly similar to Song Ti, but the strokes are horizontal and vertical, which makes it convenient to carve a knife. The triangle decoration replaced the last momentum and lost the original charm of the brush, which was later called "leather outline character" or "craftsman character"
A Qing dynasty Qian Dayong, also described in Wen Ming zai:
Although the Ming style gradually lost its unique style in Song Dynasty, it developed because it was easy to engrave and cut fonts, which could meet the printing operation at that time. At the same time, in the Ming Dynasty, Chinese characters were drawn horizontally more than vertically, and the vertical strokes with fewer strokes were thicker and the horizontal strokes were thinner, which solved the problems of easy identification and poor readability caused by small stroke gap, uneven stroke width and inking.
At present, we have combed the development of Song Style and Ming Style, but we still don't understand why Ming Style is called Song Style. We might as well try to bring the time axis of history closer. In the 12th year of Kangxi (A.D. 1673), Emperor Kangxi made the following provisions in the Preface to General Examination of Documents:
At this point, we finally understand why "Ming style" is wrongly called "Song style". As the saying goes, the imperial edict is hard to violate. Since then, China literati called "Ming Style" Song Style, while Japanese living far away in East Asia still called it "Ming Style", which also influenced Japan and Taiwan Province in the future.
Generally speaking, today's cognition of "Song Style" is generally "Ming Style", but there is no such thing as Song Style in Song Dynasty. The northern song dynasty is regular script printing, and the southern song dynasty is imitation writing. In the Ming dynasty, the horizontal and vertical, thin and thick "Ming style" is the embryonic form of today's "Song Style".
The part about the evolution of the Song Dynasty has been written. It's a pity that I didn't spend more time and energy reading historical materials. I can only sort out the works and papers of my predecessors and talk about the evolution of the surname Song. However, the evolution of Song names is closely related to the influence of printing technology, humanities, art and politics, which cannot be fully explained by an article. I hope I can continue to study in the future.
For work reasons, the second half of the history of pine evolution will talk about the application of fonts on electronic screens. This is also the feedback that a front-end engineer should give to the community.
Extended reading:
[1]: An analysis of the reasons why the printed form appeared in the Ming Dynasty was called "Song Style"
[2]. Changes of Song Style and Ming Style-History of Chinese Character Fonts
[3]. Republic of China font copyright dispute case
[4]: Ming body? Song dynasty? Stupid and confused ...
[5]: Song is not Song.
[6]: Dragon Claw
[7]: Song Ti-Wikipedia
Extended view:
[1]: Author
[2]: The past life of Tibetan woodblock printing.
Unexplained pictures are provided by "Happy Hall" and "Book Carving".