The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

1. Some Chinese person writes two or three characters with a brush.
   

[...]In step 1, there are several possibilities for what the characters could have been and what they meant.  They could have been the title of the book of which the VMS was extracted from. 

We are in China in the 1400s so the source book is almost certainly printed, and the first presses that specialized in Clerical Script are 3 and a half centuries away. Getting Clerical Script done meant finding an artist (and he would be seen as first an artist) to do specialized work based on Han Dynasty inscriptions. Such a person would still do most of their work in Regular Script, and if engaged to demonstrate the characters for some hapless foreigner who did not know up from down would almost certainly show them the expected forms. Indeed, if you were to hire a specialist for this work, the great majority of them would not know Clerical Script in this era. I also do not know that "fancy" is the sense the few Ming artists who used it were going for as much as "archaic" and "deeply Han", but art criticism is not my forte

There is an outside possibility as it certainly wasn't a totally lost art, but the set of circumstances that would lead to it being in the VMS are weird, expensive, and as far as I can tell pointless