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Of Rhythm and Harmony - Official Style
Intro ~ Styles ~ People ~ Snippets ~ My Work ~ Other Sites
Origins
Qin Shihuang (the first Qin Emperor) was an easy man to offend, especially when he got old [246-207 BCE]. Cheng Miao, the inventor of Official Style, discovered this when he was given an enormous quantity of work to copy out overnight. Predictably he couldn't finish it and the Emperor threw him into jail.
Cheng Miao was not best pleased. He blamed it all on Seal Style, which is a bit of a pain to write for too long. The worthy minister therefore created Official Style, a simplified and otherwise modified script, thereby securing a pardon. Official / Clerical Style became the style for clerks to write in, and was also known as Slave Style due to its origins.
It looks like this ...
Perhaps Cheng Miao simply had a grudge against Seal style, but he gave the Chinese language a script of enormous artistic potential in his prison sulk.
It's not just that Official Style tends to be short and wide, that makes it different. It had a rhythm and bounce that made it almost a pleasure for scribes to write all day. Strokes go from thick to thin to thick, all in one pass of the brush (unlike former single-thickness strokes).
Two characteristic features of Official Style:
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Brahm's Hungarian Dance No. 5