Chinese Script Styles - Clerical Script

Clerical Script

The clerical script (often simply termed lìshū; and sometimes called "official", "draft", or "scribal" script) is popularly thought to have developed in the Hàn dynasty and to have come directly from seal script, but recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship indicate that it instead developed from a roughly executed and rectilinear popular or ‘vulgar’ variant of the seal script as well as from seal script itself, resulting first in a ‘proto-clerical’ version in the Warring States period to Qín Dynasty, which then developed into clerical script in the early Western Hàn dynasty, and matured stylistically thereafter.

Clerical script characters are often "flat" in appearance, being wider than the preceding seal script and the modern standard script, both of which tend to be taller than they are wide; some versions of clerical are square, and others are wider. Compared with the preceding seal script, forms are strikingly rectilinear; however, some curvature and some seal script influence often remains. Seal script tended towards uniformity of stroke width, but clerical script gave the brush freer rein, returning to the variations in width seen in early Zhōu brushwork. Most noticeable is the dramatically flared tail of one dominant horizontal or downward-diagonal stroke, especially that to the lower right. This characteristic stroke has famously been called 'silkworm head and wild goose tail' (蠶頭雁尾 cántóu yànwěi）in Chinese) due to its distinctive shape.

The archaic clerical script or ‘proto-clerical’ of the Chinese Warring States period to Qín Dynasty and early Hàn Dynasty can often be difficult to read for a modern East Asian person, but the mature clerical script of the middle to late Hàn dynasty is generally legible. Modern calligraphic works and practical applications (e.g., advertisements) in the clerical script tend to use the mature, late Hàn style, and may also use modernized character structures, resulting in a form as transparent and legible as regular (or standard) script. The clerical script remains common as a typeface used for decorative purposes (for example, in displays), but other than in artistic calligraphy, adverts and signage, it is not commonly written.