What a fourth-century drinking game tells you about contemporary China

Some time in the fourth century, a politician called Wang Xizhi gathered 42 friends at the beautiful Orchid Pavilion on Mount Kuaiji in what is now eastern Zhejiang province in China. The men floated lotus-leaf cups filled with rice wine down a stream. When a goblet stopped, the nearest guest had to drink and write a poem. The drunken Wang was delighted at the ensuing literary outpouring. So he wrote a preface to the collection. In 324 characters Wang, who was acclaimed for his skill in calligraphy, expressed joy at the ensemble and melancholy at such fleeting happiness.

Calligraphy has for two millennia been considered the highest form of art in China. Wang’s screed is one of the finest and most famous examples. The original, completed in 353ad, is long vanished. But Wang inspired others, as he was inspired. Many duplicated his preface, imitating his brushstrokes precisely. One came up at an auction at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in October, consisting of copies by Emperors Renzong and Gaozong, Song dynasty rulers from the 11th and 12th centuries. The endless iterations of the Orchid Pavilion preface are both an emblem of Chinese culture, and a lens through which China views its past.

In imperial China, prowess with a brush was a mark of refinement, like piano-playing in Victorian Britain. But it was also a sign of moral strength. “Beware a man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind,” Confucius, China’s most famous philosopher, cautioned in 500bc. But the test was not just of one’s handling of a brush, but of imitating the master. In this, as Robert Harrist junior of Columbia University puts it, Chinese calligraphy is “copies, all the way down”.

Replicating classic works showed your allegiance to Confucian values, key among them accordance with hierarchy, at the top of which sat the emperor. Brush work was part of the imperial exams for prospective government officials. The Orchid Pavilion preface was often the subject. Its use as a symbol of loyalty extended to the highest office. In the scroll being auctioned, Gaozong’s work was a gift to a senior minister, to show that, even as the Song dynasty crumbled and his territory shrank, he was the legitimate heir to its history.

Each successive owner of the scroll stamped their possession on the front of the artwork with a crimson seal. What might be considered vandalism on a Western painting merely adds to the price of this one. The value ascribed to having a visible chain of owners is a further indication that, when it comes to calligraphy, continuity and conformity are prized over originality.

Many artefacts and practices of imperial rule were destroyed after the communists came to power in 1949, but calligraphy endured. Mao Zedong was proud of his own hand. His four-character calligraphy still stands at the masthead for People’s Daily, the flagship party mouthpiece. He weighed in on academic debates about Wang’s Orchid Pavilion preface. In fact, the Cultural Revolution was arguably the heyday of popular calligraphy. Red guards plastered city streets with posters daubed with characters denouncing fellow citizens, and brush shops thrived.

Strokes of fortune

The importance of calligraphy has only grown, even beyond the mainland, where China is eager to enhance its soft power. When Erin Chan was growing up in Hong Kong, in the 1980s, learning English was the passport to success. Ms Chan says she “did not dare” to tell her friends that she loved drawing characters. These days her passion stands her in good stead. She runs classes for students of all ages at the Pinzi Calligraphy Studio, and teaches in schools. Why is the craft in fashion now? Parents are “very realistic”, she says.

The revival or invention of traditions often reveals much about the anxieties of the present. As China’s leader since 2012, Xi Jinping has transformed calligraphy from an art form to a cultural practice that conforms to and boosts the version of the country’s history promoted by the Chinese Communist Party (ccp).

Today children in Chinese schools must study calligraphy from age six to fifteen. Lessons are called art classes, but self-expression and creativity are discouraged. In 2018 students taking the gaokao, China’s competitive university-entrance exam, stopped getting bonus points for maths, sports and science. They get extra credit only for art, which includes calligraphy.

The elevation of calligraphy is part of a wider government-backed drive to build what Mr Xi labels “cultural confidence”: a pride in being Chinese that unites people and presents the ccp as the ultimate defender of China’s unique qualities. The state broadcaster launched a popular national programme, “Chinese Spelling Hero”, in which children paint complex characters. An adult version also aired. Government-sponsored “art” competitions offer cash prizes.

Calligraphy is used to promote unity outside mainland China, too. In September the ccp staged a mass calligraphy event in Hong Kong for people to express their “heartfelt blessings…for the great motherland”. In a brazen denial of the ccp’s destructive history, Mr Xi is reigniting Chinese traditions to secure the party’s role as “faithful heir” to China’s glorious past and as a protector of its uniqueness against “foreign forces”.

The ccp presents calligraphy as an enduring sign of nationhood. After the fall of the Qing, China’s final dynasty, in the early 20th century, some intellectuals proposed abandoning pictographic writing, saying that it held the new nation back from advancing in science and logic. They failed. The 8,000 characters used in mainland China have been simplified since 1949, but have stuck. Students still practise the first character of Wang’s preface, yong, “forever” (pictured). .

And at the Man Luen Choon art-supply shop in Hong Kong, many items would be familiar to Wang. They include the “four treasures” of Chinese calligraphy: brush, paper, inkstone and ink. Most of the ink on sale is still black, as in the fourth century. Beside brushes made from goat-beard, rabbit hair and “auspicious dragon wolf” sit hard, weasel-hair wands like the one Renzong would have used a thousand years ago.

But the ccp’s insistence that calligraphy reflects Chinese unity is a revision of the past. For most of their history, those who live in today’s China spoke hundreds of mutually incomprehensible dialects and languages. Steven Zuo, an expert on Chinese paintings at Sotheby’s, notes that Wang’s preface, if recited by someone in Song territory, would have been unintelligible to someone from elsewhere in the empire.

Chinese script was used by scholars to communicate because they would otherwise have been unable to understand each other. Until the mid-20th century, the written language, including all forms of calligraphy, replaced a shared spoken tongue, as Latin did in medieval Europe. And like Latin, calligraphy was inaccessible to most. When Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic, only 20% of people in the country were literate, maybe less, at a time when 97% of Americans and Britons were, and 49% of Brazilians.

The presentation of writing as culture in China has led to an unusual emphasis on its importance to claims about national heritage. Mr Xi boasts of “5,000 years of unbroken Chinese civilisation”. Yet the earliest inscriptions date from the Shang dynasty, around 1600bc. Trying to find the oldest records, the state has ploughed money into archaeology, particularly in the past decade. No such traces have been uncovered.

That has left the ccp with two problems. First, the accolade for the oldest writing goes to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq), where cuneiform script was used in around 3200bc. The second, deeper problem, is that writing is considered a fundamental part of what denotes a civilisation: without earlier records, the party’s claim of 5,000 years looks wobbly.

The answer has been to change the definition of civilisation. The ccp has done this before. “Democracy” means the party, which perfectly represents the people. “Human rights” means economic development, not freedom. “Civilisation” has been given the same treatment. In September a ccp-sponsored exhibition entitled “The Origins of Chinese Civilisation” opened in Hong Kong. “What is civilisation?” asks the opening text. Its answer rejects the “international academic criteria” based on “writing, metallurgy and cities”. Instead it offers “the Chinese criteria for defining civilisation”, which includes population, social stratification and the emergence of class. Chinese academics have made similar arguments.

In Hong Kong bids for the Song-dynasty scroll reached HK$95m but it did not make its reserve price. A private buyer may nab it. Across the city the m+ gallery is showing the work of Qiu Zhijie, an artist from Fujian, replicating the Orchid Pavilion preface in a video installation. He copies it a thousand times on a single sheet of rice paper. As Mr Qiu’s brush progresses, the text becomes illegible, “losing meaning and historical significance”: a true character statement.