Preface to Lanting is praised as "the best running script in the world" by calligraphy circles. On the third day of March in the ninth year of Yonghe in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (AD 353), Wang Xizhi invited scholars such as Xie An to meet in Lanting in Huiji mountains and rivers, drinking and writing poems.
Wang Xizhi was full of wine and rice, and began to write freely on silkworm paper in one go. The preface narrates the beauty of the landscape around Lanting and the joy of gathering, and expresses the author's feelings of impermanence of life and death. The next day, Wang Xizhi woke up with a hangover. He squatted on the table and rewrote the preface on the paper, but he felt that it was not as exquisite as the original.
He doesn't believe it. He repeated the book several times in succession, but he still didn't understand the essence of the original text. Only then did he realize that this preface was the pinnacle of his life, and his calligraphy art was fully developed in this preface.
Wang Xizhi's greatest achievement is to change the simple calligraphy style in the Han and Wei Dynasties into exquisite and beautiful calligraphy style, which created a precedent for elegant and beautiful calligraphy. In particular, the running script "Preface to Lanting" is like flowing water, elegant and smart, with delicate bones, beautiful stippling, alternating density and white cloth, which contains extremely rich artistic beauty within the scale. Regardless of horizontal, vertical, point, skimming, hooking, folding and pressing, it can be said that the pen is extremely wonderful.
Every word has a different posture, and the circle starts from itself. Superb, not only in the abnormity of different words, but also in the abnormity of heavy words.