The faces of Cao Zhuan and Xiao Zhuan are very different, and they look like seals and officials. Later, there were more and more elements in official script, but it did not reach the standard of official script, so later people called it ancient script.
In the process of further deconstructing seal script, the rule of uniform line thickness and length is increasingly broken by various attempts to write freely. Some people even tried a new type of horizontal painting called "Silkworm Head and Goose Tail": when there is only one horizontal painting in the word, the head is particularly thick, like a silkworm head; At the same time, the end of this horizontal painting is inclined upward, like a goose's tail. If there are two or three horizontal drawings of a word, use "Silkworm Head and Wild Goose Tail" in the horizontal direction below, and write the other horizontal directions slightly shorter, without changing the original shape of the head and tail. This kind of attempt is increasingly appreciated by many writers, and eventually becomes a new style of writing different from ancient Chinese characters. Officially called official script, Shi Chenbei is one of the models. Its forming time was in the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 1 century). It is the second basic word after seal script.
The evolution of the above-mentioned "seal script-ancient official script-official script" was not clear until recent decades. In the two thousand years before this, people didn't find any transitional connection between seal script and Han Li later carved on the stone tablet. How the former became the completely different latter has always been a mystery. This situation is just like the lack of intermediate connection between the carvings and graphic symbols on painted pottery in Yangshao culture period 5000-7000 years ago and Oracle Bone Inscriptions and bronze inscriptions that appeared 2000-3000 years later, even like how our ancient ancestors split from apes and became blank due to the lack of sufficient fossil records.
Fortunately, since the turn of the19th century, a large number of bamboo slips and wooden slips have been found in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, Hunan, Hubei, Shandong, Henan and other provinces. This is a part of the calligraphy legacy written by Suo Jing Cao Zhang on bamboo or wood chips. It is about 20-30 cm long and about 1-5 cm wide, totaling 654.38+10,000 pieces. We have seen all kinds of ancient official scripts, which are different from those of the Eastern Han Dynasty that we saw on stone tablets. It is a typical transitional form between the two. The mystery was finally solved.
After the official script, people will write all kinds of new cursive scripts or vulgar styles with a formal official script out of the requirements of simplicity, beauty and novelty. It took too much effort to write the horizontal picture of the silkworm head and goose tail, so I gave up, but I still wrote a heavy wave. This cursive brushwork is simple, loose, fluent and colorful, and the strokes are often Lian Bi, but it still maintains the independence of the characters. It is called Cao Zhang, which prevailed in the 3rd-4th century. Not many people wrote later.
Today, grass appeared after or at the same time as Cao Zhang, but it did not directly evolve from Cao Zhang, and ancient and official books were its parents. The main differences between Materia Medica and Cao Zhang are: Cao Zhang has independent figures, while the upper and lower figures in Materia Medica are implicated and reflected; Cao Zhang is a little lost, but this grass is not; Cao Zhang stresses technology, but today grass stresses nature.
Running script is another descendant of official script, which is most convenient for daily writing, such as letters, manuscripts and official documents. Easy to identify, simple and flexible, full of energy. In the process of development and maturity, it also absorbs nutrition from the strokes of regular script and cursive script.
Almost at the same time as the above new style appeared, regular script was born. When people write official script on bamboo slips, they think that it is not simple enough to redraw the silkworm head and goose tail, so they don't need it, just add and subtract some stroke forms. I also learned some brushwork from the running script and completed the form of regular script. Although it also began in the Han Dynasty, it was finalized in the Tang Dynasty in the early 7th century A.D. and became the third generation of basic characters, which lasted more than 1300 years. After it, no other font can replace its position as a matrix word.
The official script and several new book styles brought by it are introduced above. In addition, some calligraphy styles were later derived, such as cursive script between running script and cursive script, running script between regular script and running script, and crazy cursive script which was extremely indulgent, exaggerated and dynamic. According to generations, these are the grandchildren of Lishu.
Some people say that official script is the black sheep of seal script because it destroys the stroke and glyph structure of seal script. This is a terrible statement. In all fairness, on the contrary, inheriting the past, entrepreneurship is a good boy. It is its revolutionary evolution that has made Chinese characters and calligraphy families popular in the world for hundreds of generations and soared in art.
There is also a need to explain the changes of simplified Chinese characters and the arrangement of Chinese characters today. For half a century, in order to facilitate writing and reading, the government has stipulated that simplified characters should be used in daily writing and printing. If there are several ways to write a word, use one. At the same time, the old arrangement of Chinese characters is changed to horizontally arrange words from left to right and vertically arrange rows from top to bottom. But the art of writing calligraphy still follows the traditional style and does not change.