The Five Script Styles

This page describes each style, explains how to recognise it, and sets out what each is used for and what order they are usually learned in.

Seal script

Seal script is the oldest of the five and divides into an earlier and a later form. Great seal script is a loose label covering the bronze inscriptions and regional variants of the Zhou and Warring States. Small seal script is the standardised form imposed under Qin.

Its visual character is unmistakable. The characters are taller than they are wide, the strokes are of nearly uniform thickness, curves are smooth and often symmetrical, and the whole has a balanced, architectural quality. There are no flared endings and very little variation in pressure. Writing it well requires holding the brush upright and moving slowly and evenly, which is why it is sometimes taught as a discipline for controlling the brush tip.

Today it survives mainly in seal carving, in the formal headings of stelae, on shop signs wanting an antique air, and in the hands of specialists. If you see Chinese characters that look symmetrical, elongated and evenly drawn, and you cannot read them although you read modern Chinese, they are probably seal script.

Clerical script

Clerical script is the pivot of the whole history. It emerged in the Qin and matured in the Han, driven by the need to write official documents quickly.

Its proportions are the opposite of seal script: characters are wider than they are tall, sitting in a flattened rectangle. Curves become straight lines and angles. Most distinctively, one horizontal or diagonal stroke in a character is often given a heavy start and a flared, rising finish, a shape traditionally described as a silkworm's head and a wild goose's tail. Only one such stroke is permitted per character, which is a rule beginners regularly break.

The great models are Han stelae, and clerical script is often the second style a student learns because it teaches the fundamental brush movements of pressing and lifting without the structural complexity of regular script.

Regular script

Regular script is the standard model form and what most people mean by Chinese handwriting. It developed after the Han, matured in the Wei and Jin, and reached its definitive versions in the Tang.

Every stroke is separate, fully formed and clearly begun and ended. The character sits in a notional square. It is the most legible of the styles and the slowest to write. Because each stroke is exposed, it hides nothing: a weak stroke in regular script is immediately visible, which is exactly why it is the beginner's script.

Students are traditionally introduced to it through the character for eternity, which is held to contain eight basic stroke types in one character. Whether that claim is exactly true is arguable, but as a teaching device it works, and the eight strokes remain the standard vocabulary for describing what a brush is doing.

Running script

Running script is the everyday hand of educated Chinese for most of the last fifteen hundred years, and it sits between regular and cursive.

Strokes are simplified and begin to connect. The brush is often not lifted between strokes, leaving a thin trailing line that shows the path it took through the air. Some components are abbreviated. The result is faster to write and still readable by anyone literate, which is the practical balance it exists to strike.

It is also where the most admired works in the tradition sit, including the Orchid Pavilion preface and Yan Zhenqing's draft eulogy. There is a reason for that. Running script is fast enough to record the movement and mood of the hand but controlled enough that the writing remains fully present. It is the style in which the tradition's central claim, that writing reveals the writer, is most clearly demonstrable.

Cursive script

Cursive is the fastest and most abbreviated style, and it is not simply running script written more quickly. It uses its own conventional abbreviations, in which whole components are replaced by a single gesture. These abbreviations are standardised, which means cursive must be learned as a separate system; you cannot deduce a cursive character from knowing the regular form.

There are three broad kinds. Draft cursive, the earliest, is a fast version of clerical script and keeps characters separate. Modern cursive links strokes within a character and sometimes between characters. Wild cursive, associated with Zhang Xu and Huaisu in the Tang, links long sequences into continuous sweeps, varies size dramatically, and abandons legibility as a priority.

An honest point: most literate Chinese cannot read wild cursive. This is not a failure of education. The style operates closer to abstract drawing than to writing, and it is looked at more than it is read, including by native viewers.

Telling them apart quickly

A rough practical guide. If the characters are tall, symmetrical and evenly thick, it is seal script. If they are wide and flat with one prominent flared stroke, it is clerical. If every stroke is separate and clearly ended, it is regular. If strokes connect within characters but you can still identify them, it is running. If characters are radically reduced and sometimes joined to each other, it is cursive.

Ambiguous cases are common, because writers mix registers freely, and a single piece may drift from regular toward running as it proceeds. That drift is often deliberate and is itself something viewers notice.

What order to learn them in

The standard sequence is regular first, then clerical, then running, then cursive, with seal script taken up at whatever point the student becomes interested in it. The reasoning is that regular script builds stroke control and structural understanding with nothing hidden, and that attempting running or cursive before that produces speed without foundation, which the tradition regards as the characteristic fault of the impatient.

There is a dissenting view worth mentioning. Some teachers argue for starting with clerical, on the grounds that its brush movements are simpler and its structures more forgiving, and that Tang regular script is so highly refined that it sets an intimidating standard. Both approaches produce good calligraphers.

How the styles are studied through models

Each style is learned through a small number of canonical models, and knowing which model a person copied tells you a great deal about how their hand will look. For regular script the usual choices are Ouyang Xun's tight, narrow structures, Yan Zhenqing's broad and weighty forms, Liu Gongquan's bony precision, or Zhao Mengfu's smooth elegance. Students often spend years on one before touching another.

For clerical script the models are Han stelae, each with a distinct character: some austere and even, some rough and irregular, some carved with unusual precision. For running script the Wang Xizhi tradition dominates. For cursive there are standard model books that set out the accepted abbreviated forms, which function as much as reference works as as artistic models.

The practical consequence is that "learning calligraphy" is never generic. You are always learning a particular hand in a particular style, and switching models is a significant decision rather than a matter of variety.

Choosing a script is a statement

Script choice carries meaning, and reading it is part of understanding a piece. Seal and clerical signal antiquity, formality and gravity, which is why they appear on stelae and official titles. Regular signals correctness, respect and clarity, and is used for anything that should look proper, including copied scriptures. Running signals ease and cultivation and is the register of letters and personal exchange. Cursive signals intensity, spontaneity or self-assertion.

A calligrapher writing a Buddhist sutra in wild cursive would be making a point, and probably an unwelcome one. Matching script to occasion is a basic competence, and mismatching it deliberately is an advanced move.

The scripts and the simplification question

Mainland China simplified many characters in the 1950s. Calligraphy is generally practised in traditional forms regardless, because the classical models are in traditional characters and the structural balance of many characters was designed around those forms.

This creates a mild oddity: a mainland student learns simplified characters for daily life and traditional ones for calligraphy. In practice this is accepted without much difficulty, and it is worth knowing if you are looking at contemporary work and wondering why the characters do not match what you learned. Some calligraphers do write simplified forms deliberately, and opinion about that is divided.

Key points

• The five styles are not successive stages; all remain in use and trained calligraphers write in several.
• Seal script is tall, symmetrical and evenly thick, and survives mainly in seals and formal headings.
• Clerical script is wide and flat with one flared stroke per character, and it introduced the brush-formed stroke that later styles depend on.
• Regular script exposes every stroke and hides nothing, which is why it is the beginner's script and the standard model.
• Running script is the practical everyday hand and holds most of the tradition's most admired works.
• Cursive uses standardised abbreviations that must be learned separately, and wild cursive is unreadable to most native readers and is looked at rather than read.