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  Calligraphy

Shi Zhou's lexicon had long been lost. Yet it is generally agreed that the inscriptions on the drum-shaped Qin stone blocks were basically of the same style as the old zhuan script.

In 221 B. C., Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the whole of China under one central government. During that time, he ordered his Prime Minister Li Si to collect and sort out all the different systems of writing hitherto prevalent in different parts of the country in a great effort to unify the written language under one system. What Li did, in effect, was to simplify the ancient zhuan (small seal) script.

Today we have a most valuable relic of this ancient writing in the creator Li Si's own hand engraved on a stele standing in the Temple to the God of Taishan Mountain in Shandong. The 2,200 year old stele, worn by age and weather has only nine and a half characters left on it.

2) The lishu (official script) came in the wake of the xiaozhuan in the same short lived Qin Dynasty (221-207 B.C.). This was because the xiaozhuan, though a simplified form of script, was still too complicated for the scribers in the various government offices who had to copy an increasing amount of documents. Cheng Miao, a prison warden, made a further simplification of the xiaozhuan by changing the curly strokes into straight and angular ones making writing much easier. A further step away from the pictographs, it was named lishu because li in classical Chinese meant "clerk" or "scriber".

3) The lishu was already very close to and led to the adoption of, kaishu which is regular script. The oldest existing example of this dates from the Wei (220-265) and the script developed under the Jin (265-420).

 
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