Lishu is a Chinese font, including Qin Lishu and Han Li. It is generally believed that it is developed from seal script, with wide and flat font, long horizontal painting and short vertical painting, and pays attention to "swallow tail of silkworm head" and "twists and turns". According to the unearthed bamboo slips, Lishu was founded in Qin Dynasty, and it is said that Cheng Miao was an official, and Han Li reached its peak in the Eastern Han Dynasty, inheriting the tradition of seal script and opening the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties.
It has a great influence on later calligraphy, and the calligraphy circle is known as "Han Li Tang Kai". After careful parallel research, Mr. Wu has come to such a scientific argument, which is naturally worthy of attention as an academic division of different names of seals and official seals. However, I still have two questions to ask, that is: first, seal script can't be all pictographs, and there are many characters other than pictographs from the beginning.
Therefore, it seems that it is not enough to just lose the "pictographic original intention". What I mean is that Li's destruction of ancient Chinese ("pictograph" is the general name of a font, but the facts are not all "pictograph", and there are many examples, so I don't need to list them one by one) is not just the destruction of pictograph. Secondly, today's Qin bamboo slips unearthed in Yunmeng, Hubei Province and bamboo slips unearthed in Mawangdui Tomb in Changsha, Hunan Province, found that the structure of characters has become seal script.
There are also pens that haven't changed, some are round and some are rectangular. What was that word called at that time? This kind of "semi-seal script and semi-official script" still existed from the time of Zhao Xiang, King of Qin, to the early years of the Western Han Dynasty (bamboo slips of Qin Yunmeng to silk scripts of Wang Dun in Han Dynasty, which Wu Wenyou can refer to in detail). Before the first emperor, there was no difference between the word "Ti" and the word "Ti", but in the early Han Dynasty, it is certain that this word has been classified as official script, and both of them are considered together.
So, is there any contradiction between Mr. Wu's distinction between the names of seal characters? In fact, the change of structure, just saying that pictographs are not pictographs, is definitely not comprehensive enough. I estimate that the problem of distinguishing at that time-when the font was just changed, most people would definitely not be too strict, and the "bat-shaped" font was mostly named after a new name-was also called Li, and it was possible to keep some old structures.
So I think it is not surprising that if we put ourselves in the position at that time to speculate on naming, there is a certain distance from the naming distinguished by academic research today. Specifically, in addition to changing images into symbols, there are also differences in brushwork changes, such as: Sheng (seal), Shang (changing brushwork without changing structure) and Zhi (completely changing brushwork structure).