Running script is the rapid writing of regular script, which is said to have started at the end of Han Dynasty. It is not so neat as regular script, nor so scrawled as cursive script. The most famous masterpiece is Preface to Lanting written by Wang Xizhi, a calligrapher in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Predecessors described it as "a dragon descending from heaven, a tiger lying in a phoenix pavilion" and praised it as "the best running script in the world". Tang Yan Zhenqing's book "Sacrificing a Nephew" is very bold, and the ancients rated it as "the second running script in the world".
Running script font is one of the five major fonts, namely seal script font, official script font, cursive script font, regular script font and running script font. Running script font is a writing style after regular script, which came into being in Han Dynasty. Running script reached its peak when Wang Xizhi of the Eastern Jin Dynasty matured, and it didn't appear until about two thousand years later. Zhang Huai, a theorist in the Tang Dynasty, said in the Book End that "calligraphers were created by Liu Desheng in Yingchuan, the later Han Dynasty, that is, small mistakes in books and simple work are called calligraphy."
Liu Desheng changed the regular script and created the running script, so he was called "the master of running script". Running script is more important than regular script. There will be many intersections in the production of calligraphy, but there are traces to follow in order. Zhang Huai wrote a book to prove that there were running scripts in the Tang Dynasty, and the running scripts certainly came into being before the Tang Dynasty. The Han Dynasty was the heyday of China's calligraphy development, and almost all official script cursive script and regular script were formed at the same time in the Han Dynasty. Social productive forces have developed to a certain scale and have good conditions for inheritance and dissemination. We infer that Zhang's theory of the origin of running script must have historical data and basis.
The development of running script is neither as stable as regular script nor as changeable as cursive script. Judging from the characteristics of running script, it is tepid and orderly. The characteristics of fonts limit the development of running script fonts. Since the running script came into being, copying books basically started from Wang Xizhi. Even if there is a change, the change is not big. Most of the later calligraphers came from Wang Xizhi. Even the second running script in the world, Yan Zhenqing's "Sacrificing a Nephew", is no exception.