In the process of the formation and development of Chinese characters, there have been five main fonts, which are commonly known as: Zhen, Xing, Cao, Li, and Zhuan. These five fonts all occupy an important position in the history of Chinese calligraphy.
Zhenshu, also known as Zhengshu, is also known as regular script and regular script. Among the five fonts of Zhen, Xing, Cao, Li and Zhuan, Zhenshu is the latest one to be produced, and people are still using it today. The emergence of real script began during the period of use of official script and cursive script in the Han Dynasty. Its advantages: First, it is convenient for writing, and its simplicity changes the style of official script; second, it corrects the shortcomings of cursive script's lack of fixed standards and loose structure. In short, when real script appeared at the end of the Han Dynasty, the circular style of seal script and official script was gradually abandoned. Its shape is square, its strokes are straight, and it is easy to recognize. It is accepted by people and has become a model for writing, so it is also called regular script. Due to the wide range of applications of real scripts, they can be large or small when written, and have different functions and titles such as small regular script, medium regular script, large regular script, and Bang script.
Xingshu is a font between real script and cursive script. It is faster to write than real script and easier to understand than cursive script. It is widely used in daily applications and calligraphy activities. In running script, according to its writing form, those that prefer regular script are called "Xing Kai", and those that use more cursive script are called "Xing Cao".
Cursive script was created by people in pursuit of convenience and speed in writing practice. Later, in calligraphy art activities, it was valued by calligraphers of all ages and continued to develop. Cursive script appeared at the same time as official script. It was produced approximately at the intersection of the Qin and Han dynasties. It is called "Cao Li", which is a scrawled official script. Later, it developed from "Cao Li" to "Zhang Cao" with a more mature character shape where each character is independent and not connected. It is said that at the end of the Han Dynasty, the calligrapher Zhang Zhi abandoned the official script style of the character "Zhangcao" and borrowed from each other. When writing, the strokes of the upper and lower characters were connected, creating the "Jincao" style that is still popular today. ". The commonly known cursive script generally refers to the font "Jincao". In the process of writing "Jincao", the calligraphers Zhang Xu and Huaisu of the Tang Dynasty even indulged in cursive characters. When writing, the strokes were continuous, and connected numbers were written in one stroke. The size of the fonts varied and varied, forming a "Crazy grass".
Clerical script is a font that evolved from seal script. It simplifies the complicated glyphs of seal script, and changes the round strokes of seal script into close to square folds. It completes the evolution from pictographic to stroke-like in the structure of the glyphs. It is more convenient to write than seal script and provides a good foundation for the future development of real calligraphy. The foundation was laid. The emergence of official script was at the end of the Warring States Period. The early official script still had traces of seal script. By the Eastern Han Dynasty, it was fully mature and widely used. Before the Sui and Tang Dynasties, official script was called the official script. In the Tang Dynasty, there was the "Jinli" font, which refers to the real script.
Seal script generally refers to two fonts: large seal script and small seal script. Dazhuan is an early type of seal script, also known as Zhou script. It mainly refers to the ancient characters on bronze vessels and stone drums. Dazhuan has a broad meaning and includes oracle bone characters. It can be seen that Dazhuan is a font with inconsistent glyphs. Small seal script, also known as "Qin seal script", is the result of Qin Shi Huang's promotion of unified writing after he unified China. In the Qin Dynasty, Xiaozhuan was used as the orthographic character, which ended the chaotic writing situation before Qin. The standardization of Chinese characters also began after the emergence of Xiaozhuan.