So who created "Eight Points"? Zhang Huaiguan of the Tang Dynasty quoted a legend in Preface to the Immortals at the Book End: A man named Wang Cizhong changed an eight-part book according to Cang Xie's book before he was twenty years old.
At that time, his official business was very heavy, and Wang Cizhong changed the words simply and used them quickly. Qin Shihuang was shocked and wanted to summon him, but he didn't come three times. In a rage, the first emperor tied him up with a sill car.
Who knows that Wang Cizhong turned into a god bird and flew away on the road, so there was the legend of "God Bird Eight Points". In order to prove the truth of this legend, there is another detail in the story: Wang Ci fell down the mountain when he flew away as a god bird. These two mountains are called large mountains and small mountains.
In fact, how can the creation of a calligraphy style be done by one person alone? From the early Warring States to the Qin and Han Dynasties, the maturity of official script took a long time. Although this legend cannot tell us who founded stereotyped writing, it illustrates two important things in the development of calligraphy.
First of all, it is said in the legend that the bureaucracy is strict and junior officials need to record a lot of things. "Houshu" and "Mengshu in Wenxian County" unearthed in the Qin Dynasty all show that secretaries at that time had a great demand for writing, and the traditional Chinese seal script may not be suitable for daily records, but the official script was simplified from seal script, and the curved pen of seal script was changed to straight pen, which shortened the writing time and met the needs of officials to write quickly.
Secondly, this legend also reflects people's awe of words. Wang Cizhong was endowed with some mythical colors, which also showed that people at that time were more willing to believe that the change of characters must not be made by mortals. Using "silkworm head" and "swallow tail" to decorate the strokes of characters in stereotyped writing is the psychological embodiment of people worshiping characters.