Title: Ancient Chinese Writing History: Facts, Characters & Styles | Learn Chinese History
Headings: Ancient Chinese Writing History: Facts, Characters & Styles
Ancient Chinese Writing History: Facts, Characters & Styles
Ancient Chinese Writing: History of How It Began
Ancient Chinese Writing History: Characters and Symbols
History of Ancient Chinese Writing Styles
Oracle Bone
Great Seal
Small Seal
Cursive Style
Clerical Style
Regular Style
Running Style

Content: When you think of rain, it often looks just like the character. The drops of water are not one continuous line, but have gaps between them. Great Seal
The Great Seal (Dazhuan) style used different stroke thicknesses to form characters and the corners of the characters were rounded rather than coming to a “squared-off” point. The characters remained representations of objects and although the thickness of the lines blurs the picture representation, when looking at the Great Seal character style, it is still clear that a character was the object it represented. This style of forming characters became popular in the Chou or Zhou dynasty from 1122-221 BCE. Most representations from this era in Ancient Chinese writing history are found on bronze vessels. Small Seal
The first Chinese emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, the founder of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE, recognized a need for standardization in how characters were formed and their meaning. He required that the characters be uniform across the Chinese empire. Emperor Qin Shihuangdi chose the writing style that was popular in his state of Qin (Ch’in) as the style the empire would use. While the characters used in the state of Qin closely resembled those of the Great Seal style, each stroke of the Small Seal (Lesser or Xiaozhuan) style was the same.