Unit 4 Amazing Art Using language Chinese Calligraphy学案 -2022-2023学年高中英语外研版（2019）必修第三册

Passage one Chinese Calligraphy  The history of Chinese calligraphy is as long as that of China itself. Calligraphy is a special category in China's world of fine arts and one of the most challenging Chinese art forms for a foreigner to appreciate or master. Calligraphy, or shufa, is one of the four basic skills and disciplines of the Chinese literati, together with painting (hua), stringed musical instruments (qin) and board games (qi). Studying Chinese calligraphy, one must learn something about the origins of Chinese characters, which can be traced to inscriptions on bones, tortoise shells and bronzeware. Through the centuries, Chinese characters have changed constantly and are mainly divided into five categories today: the seal script (zhuan shu), official script (li shu), regular script (kai shu), running script (xing shu) and cursive script (cao shu). Chinese calligraphy, like script itself, has developed the above-mentioned styles according to various schools. Seal characters, which were developed in the Western Zhou Dynasty (11th century-711BC) and are the earliest form of writing after oracle inscriptions, were the first unified and standardized characters of the nation. Official script is a simplified form of script since seal characters were too complicated for ancient officials to use when copying documents. Official script led to the emergence of regular script, which was square in form, non-cursive and architectural in style, in the third century. Official script also gave birth to cursive script where characters are often joined with the last stroke of the first that merges into the initial stroke of the next character, which made the writing process much faster. Running script falls somewhere between regular and cursive scripts. Calligraphy is an art form that involves a great deal of theory and requires many skills; therefore, there are only a few calligraphers that have reached the highest realm of calligraphy. Among the most outstanding calligr