The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

the first presses that specialized in Clerical Script are 3 and a half centuries away.

First, again, neither the 大 nor the Clerical Script are essential for the UHT. They are just among many, many possibilties.

You know that printing was not done with moveable type, but with full-page carved wood blocks, right? 

That was one of the things that Matteo Ricci felt worth putting in his first reports to Rome.  As he describes it, a calligrapher wrote one page of text on a sheet of very thin paper.  The sheet was then glued onto a flat smooth wood block, and a specialized worker carved away all the blank areas.  The remains of the paper were then washed off.  Matteo was quite impressed by the speed and accuracy of these carvers.

Thus any printer could print a book with any font or artwork that the client could draw on the paper master.  The three pages of the ZHB that I posted a few days ago included line drawings of several varieties of "aconite" from different regions, as well as two "font" sizes and some negative (white-on-black) characters (namely, the quoted SBJ text).   

Calligraphy ("nice writing") presumably was an essential part of education at the time, as it was recently before the invention of the laser printer.  Any Chinese calligrapher must have been familiar with various styles of characters, including Clerical and Oracle, and could produce a more or less acceptable result in any style.  Just like a Western calligrapher worth his ink should be able to write a passable Chancery, Old English, Fraktur, etc.  It is not like Clerical was a precisely defined set of shapes.

(By the way, I recently spent a couple of days fighting with my laptop, trying to get my Postscript generation library to produce figures with Chinese text.  I found that there are now three main styles of Chinese fonts -- "sans-serif" like Helvetica for Latin letters, "flowing" that look like painted with curved brush strokes, and "squarish" where the strokes are mostly straight (but still with the "serifs"as would be created by a brush) and fill the allotted square space more completely.  The latter apparently were developed for use by printers, since the straight strokes made for faster carving.)

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.

As I wrote, if the Author copied the characters from the source book, they would have been the book title or the name of the author, on the cover or on the first pages.  Those could be on any "font", independently from the "fonts" used in the rest of the book.  Just like a print of Les Miserables or The Sermons of St. Francis may have the title stamped in gilded letters on the cover...

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"

Well, as I wrote, I found photos of modern buildings with their names in big Clerical-style letters on the facade.  Like the railway station on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

All the best, --stolfi