Background

Examples of the main styles of Chinese calligraphy with a brief history and bibliography can be found at Styles of Calligraphy.

Chinese Texts

Chinese transcriptions and translations courtesy of Daniel von Brighoff unless otherwise noted. Some transcriptions may use the simpfied form of Chinese rather than the traditional form.

Chinese characters in the following pages are coded in Unicode and use fonts such as MingLiU, Arial Unicode MS, Verdana, etc. for display. If you can see the following characters for xing shu (semicursive script) then you are enabled for CJK display: 行 書.

Access and Metadata

For a list of poets and poems with links to the calligraphy see List of Poets and Poems. This list does not include couplets, mottos, single characters, etc.

Clicking each calligrapher's entry below will access their work(s) complete with metadata and translations/transcriptions when available. Metadata for each piece in the collection uses the Visual Resources Association's metadata scheme. The Type element in this implementation of the VRA scheme uses Library of Congress genre terms.

• VRA metadata scheme (version 3.0);
• Thesaurus for Graphic Materials II: Genre and Physical Characteristic Terms (TGM II).

In all cases the metadata describes the original work, not the digital reproduction.

Collections

Calligraphers

Unidentified Calligraphers