What is the order of evolution of Chinese fonts and dynasties?

The subsequent evolution of Chinese characters has gone through a long process of several thousand years, through the stages of oracle bone inscriptions, gold inscriptions, seal scripts, official scripts, regular scripts, cursive scripts and running scripts, and up to now the regular scripts are commonly used, but they are still not completely finalized.

1, Oracle Bone Script: Oracle Bone Script mainly refers to the Yinxu Oracle Bone Script, which is the script carved (or written) on tortoise shell and animal bones by the royal family in the late Shang Dynasty of China (14th to 11th centuries before the Shang Dynasty) for the purpose of divination and record-keeping. Chinese Shang Dynasty and early Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 16th to 10th centuries BC) texts on tortoise shell and animal bones.

2, Jinwen: Jinwen application of the age, from the early Shang Dynasty, down to the Qin destruction of the six countries, about 1200 years. The number of words in Jinwen, according to Ronggeng, "Jinwen editing" records, *** counted 3722, of which 2420 words can be recognized.

3. Big Seal Script: Big Seal Script started in the late Western Zhou Dynasty, and was popularized in Qin during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods. The font is similar to that of the Qin seal script, but the glyphs have overlapping configurations. It is represented by the Stone Drum Script, which was written by Shi Zhou at the time of King Xuan of the Zhou Dynasty, and was named after him. He reformed the original script, which was named after the stone drums on which it was carved. It is the earliest stone-carved script that has been handed down to the present day, and is the ancestor of stone carvings.

4, Small Seal Script: The Small Seal Script is also called "Qin Seal Script". It is also known as the "Qin Seal". Li Si was appointed to unify the script of the Qin Dynasty, and this script is the Small Seal. It was popularized in the Qin Dynasty. It is long and rounded, and is derived from the Big Seal Script.

5. Clerical Script: Clerical Script is basically an evolution of Seal Script, mainly changing the rounded strokes of Seal Script to square folds, which makes writing faster, and makes it difficult to draw rounded strokes on wooden slips by writing with lacquer. Clerical Script flourished during the Han Dynasty and became the main calligraphic style. The Qin Clerical Script, which was the first to be created, retained many of the seal script meanings, which were later developed and processed.

6. Regular Script: Regular Script, also known as Zhengshu, or True Script, began in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

7. Cursive Script: Cursive Script was formed in the Han Dynasty and evolved on the basis of Clerical Script for the sake of simplicity of writing.

8, Running Script: Running Script was produced around the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, is between the Regular Script, Cursive Script, a font, can be said to be the Regular Script of the Cursive or Cursive Script of the Regular.

Expanded Information:

With the development of machine printing, two other common fonts appeared:

1. Bold:

Historical product of machine printing. It has been at least one hundred years, the black type Chinese character erased all the man-made imprints of the handwritten form of Chinese characters and its origins, there is no handwritten start and finish; it establishes the basic structure of the Chinese character geometrically (which is constructive rather than written), and its uniform width of strokes and smooth stroke curvature show a stable, machine-implicative feature of the no-timer and the ****timer.

2, imitation Song:

As the name implies is a variant of Song, but also print. One of the printing typeface, modeled after the font engraved on the Song version of the book, the strokes are uniformly thick and thin, there are long, square, flat three bodies. Also called imitation Song font, imitation Song characters.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia - Chinese Characters