1, Oracle Bone Inscriptions. In the late Shang Dynasty, "ideographic symbol" evolved into a relatively stereotyped "Oracle Bone Inscriptions", which was immediately written on animal bones and tortoise shells. This is the first stage of "Chinese characters" and the ancestor of "modern Chinese characters". Oracle Bone Inscriptions has thin strokes, many straight strokes and many twists.
2. Jinwen. During the Western Zhou Dynasty, bronzes began to be widely used, and the words engraved on bronze Zhong Ding and stone drums appeared-"Bronze inscriptions", also known as Zhong Dingwen and Shi Guwen. Jinwen's brushwork is very rough, with a lot of bending pens and a lot of lumps.
3. seal script. In the Qin dynasty, the characters were unified and measured. Li Si, the prime minister, collected, simplified and beautified the characters at that time, forming a "seal script", also known as "Qin Zhuan", which is a combination of small seal script and big seal script. Chinese characters developed to the stage of seal script, and gradually began to shape in outline, strokes and structure, weakening the pictographic meaning and making the characters more symbolic.
The official script that became popular in the Western Han Dynasty was called "Han Li". Lishu has played the writing characteristics of brush, and there are twists and turns of "silkworm head and goose tail", which is convenient for writing.
5. Regular script. During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, Wang Xizhi and Wang Xianzhi created regular script. Regular script draws lessons from the round strokes of seal script, and retains the square and straight of official script, and removes the "silkworm head swallow tail". The structure of Chinese characters was basically fixed, and it was called "real book" at that time. Later generations used this font as a model for learning calligraphy and changed it to regular script.
6, cursive script. From the early Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty, Chinese characters appeared in cursive forms such as "Cao Zhang", "Today Grass" and "Crazy Grass". Cursive script is characterized by fast writing speed, fluency, rhythm and artistic appeal.
7. Run the script. Since the Jin Dynasty, there has been a Chinese character between regular script and cursive script, which is called "running script". Running script is not as standard and serious as regular script, nor as bold and unrestrained as cursive script. It is elegant, cheerful and flexible, so it is still the most popular and commonly used Chinese font.