LI-SHU

Pinyin Lishu (Chinese: clerical script, or chancery script), in Chinese calligraphy, a style that may have originated in the brush writing of the later Chou and Ch'in dynasties (c. 300200 BC); it represents a more informal tradition than the chuan-shu (seal script), which was more suitable for inscriptions cast in the ritual bronzes. While examples of li-shu from the 3rd century BC have been discovered, the style was most widely used in the Han dynasty (206 BCad 220). Though somewhat square and angular, with strong emphasis on the horizontal strokes, the li-shu is a truly calligraphic style, making full use of the flexible brush to modulate the thickness of the line. Many Han examples survive, written with a brush on bamboo slips or carved in stone. Characters were approximately uniform in size and evenly spaced within a composition, but the construction of characters and individual strokes varied greatly. At the end of the Han dynasty the li-shu developed into the more supple and fluent k'ai-shu.