First of all, I would like to announce to you that I don't know much about calligraphy, but I just rely on intuitive feelings, especially Wang Xizhi's "Orchid Pavilion Preface", compared with other calligraphy, I always feel that the words are not so good-looking. I always feel that Wang Xizhi, who is known as the "Sage of Books", wrote "Orchid Pavilion Preface" seems to be in vain?
Wang Xizhi was a great calligrapher during the Jin Dynasty, and his luck was very good. It is said that at the age of 13, he accompanied his father to the home of a certain minister, and was treated with special courtesy, and has since become famous all over the world. At the age of 20, when he was selecting officials in the imperial court, he was bare-chested in the east bed, without the demeanor of a literati, but he was recruited as an official. He studied the inscription carefully and created a precedent for writing in his own family. In the ninth year of Yonghe (353), on the third day of the third lunar month, Wang Xizhi, Xie An, Sun Sui and other 42 people were repairing at the Lanting Pavilion in Huiji Shanyin (now Shaoxing City, Zhejiang Province). In the end, 26 people left a poem of "Lanting", and Wang Xizhi wrote a poem of four words and a poem of five words. The poems of "Lanting" were collected into a collection of poems, and Wang Xizhi improvised a preface to this collection of poems, describing the scene of the literati's elegant collection at that time. This is the famous "Orchid Pavilion Collection Preface". Looking at the authentic handwriting of the Lanting prologue, the glyphs on it are of different sizes, especially the word "year" in the first few words "Yonghe Nine Years", which is neither like a book nor a regular script, which makes people feel ugly and abnormal.
Compared to other calligraphy, it is not as beautiful as other calligraphy.
Later, some authors believed that Wang Xizhi's writing was not necessarily good-looking, but he was the first person to write through the ages, and the fundamental reason for the transition from regular script to line script was that with the increase in the amount of writing, the number of words in line can be completed quickly, while the regular script is stable and stable, and it is difficult to complete the work in a short time. Wang Xizhi's works were especially admired by Li Shimin, Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, when the emperor was a golden-mouthed jade, and the calligrapher recognized by the emperor would of course be recognized by the whole people. Some authors also believe that if there is no Wang Xizhi's "Orchid Pavilion Preface", then the mainland will lag behind by hundreds of years, which shows that Wang Xizhi's "Orchid Pavilion Preface" is the foundation of the mainland's calligraphy. This may be the reason why he is called the "saint of books" and the first person to practice books.