Chinese Stele Classics -- The Fragments of the Stele of Xiao Zhou, the Younger

Author: Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2001-06-01
Features: The Han Dynasty was the golden age of Chinese calligraphy history. The Han Dynasty inherited the system of the Qin Dynasty, with official documents primarily written in seal script, while the common script used by the populace and lower-ranking officials was clerical script. Due to its simplicity and ease of writing, clerical script was widely adopted by the ruling class in imperial decrees, inscriptions on stone and metal, and official documents. This promoted the development of writing and made clerical script the dominant script of the Han Dynasty. The clerical script that has survived from the Han Dynasty is mainly divided into two categories: one is ink rubbings, written on silk, bamboo, and wooden slips, spanning the entire Western and Eastern Han periods. Examples include the silk manuscript of the Laozi unearthed from the Mawangdui tombs in Changsha, Hunan, the Sun Bin’s Art of War unearthed from the Yinque Mountain in Linyi, Shandong, wooden slips from Fenghuang Mountain in Jiangling, Hubei, and tens of thousands of characters in bamboo and wooden slips from Juyan, Wuwei, and Dunhuang in Gansu. The other category is stele inscriptions, including works such as the Yi Ying Stele, Shi Chen Stele, Li Qi Stele, Zhang Qian Stele, Hua Shan Stele, Cao Quan Stele, and Shimen Song. Before 1900, as ink rubbings of Han bamboo slips had not yet been unearthed, the stele inscriptions of the Eastern Han Dynasty were the best representatives of clerical script achievements. The Qing scholar Wu Shu once remarked: "The Han Dynasty reached its peak, with each stele presenting a unique charm, none being the same."
The Remains of the Young Marquis (also known as the Remains of the Little Marquis). No inscription of its establishment date exists. It contains fifteen lines of clerical script, with fifteen characters per line, and ten characters remain on the back of the stele. It was unearthed in Chang’an, Shaanxi, in the 30th year of the Xuantong era of the Qing Dynasty (1911). This stele was once owned by Zhou Jin and is now housed in the Palace Museum in Beijing. The stele is fragmented, and due to the presence of the characters "Chao Hou Xiao Shi" (Young Marquis of Chao), it is named the Remains of the Young Marquis or simply the Little Marquis. Qin Wenjin wrote in his postscript: "The script style falls between the Kong Hou and Shi Chen steles, less robust but sharper, and it is also a masterful carving." The stele primarily uses round brushwork, with minimal variation in line thickness, resembling seal script techniques. The structure is square but slightly oblong, with expansive brush strokes. Characters like "yi" and "xiang" in the stele are entirely in seal script style. Among the multi-stroke horizontal characters such as "ci," "zhen," "zai," "yan," "lao," "jin," and "yue," two to three "swallow tails" appear, which differs from the "swallows do not fly in pairs" phenomenon found in many Eastern Han steles but aligns more closely with the clerical script of bamboo and wooden slips from the late Western Han and early Eastern Han periods. The style of Han steles is distinctive, and one can draw inspiration from their essence. This edition is published using the first rubbing, to delight the readers.