Ten Eastern Jin Tomb Inscriptions

Author: Zhuang Xingxing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-07-01
Features: The Great Series of Chinese Folk Calligraphy. Starting from the Western Jin Dynasty, due to the standardization of stele inscriptions, the function of steles began to be replaced by epitaphs. Therefore, the custom of epitaphs in the Eastern Jin Dynasty far surpassed that of contemporary steles. Influenced by traditional burial customs since the Han Dynasty, most epitaphs from the Eastern Jin period used old-style and regular script to convey solemnity. As such, due to the profound influence of the major shift from clerical script to regular script during the Eastern Jin Dynasty, pure clerical script became rare, and instead, a fusion of clerical and regular script was more common. Since it is difficult to quantitatively analyze the proportion of these two scripts in a single epitaph, we categorize them into two major types. One is "primarily clerical script," referring to epitaphs where the dominant script remains clerical, while "primarily regular script influence" means that some strokes have been regularized, some structures have been regularized, or the overall layout has adopted the style of regular script. When combined, if clerical script is more prominent, it is classified as "clerical-regular," and vice versa, as "regular-clerical." From epitaphs across East Asia, it is evident that the carving techniques since the Han Dynasty remained quite persistent. Often, the scribes had already adopted regularized brushwork, while the carvers continued to use the cutting techniques of the clerical script era. This reflects not only the immaturity of regular script cutting techniques during the Eastern Jin Dynasty but also the complete disconnect between the calligraphic achievements of Eastern Jin epitaph carvers and those of scholar-officials and literati of the same period. Eastern Jin literati calligraphers focused on the aesthetic refinement of regular script and the beauty of cursive and grass scripts in correspondence, yet paid almost no attention to using the new script to study epitaphs. In recent decades, the continuous discovery of Eastern Jin epitaphs has deepened our understanding of the calligraphic practices of that era. We believe that Eastern Jin epitaphs were primarily created by craftsmen and lower-level calligraphers. Even the meticulously carved epitaphs resembling exquisite clerical script in the Wang family epitaphs were certainly not written by calligraphers from the Wang family. Without understanding this, one might, like Guo Moruo in the Orchid Pavilion Debate, deduce the absurd logic that if Wang Xizhi truly had authentic works, they would necessarily resemble the two Cai steles.