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The development of Chinese characters from Oracle Bone Inscriptions to today has a history of more than 3,000 years. The development of Chinese characters has gone through several stages, such as inscriptions on bronze, big seal script, small seal script, official script, cursive script, regular script and running script. The passage time of these fonts is sometimes not completely divided, but parallel or cross.
Bronze inscriptions, also known as Zhong Dingwen and inscriptions, are written on bronzes. It appeared on bronzes in the late Shang Dynasty and developed in the Western Zhou Dynasty.
Generally speaking, the inscriptions on bronzes in the late Shang Dynasty are no more than 50 words, and the characters cast on Mao in the late Western Zhou Dynasty are as long as 497 words. The shape of bronze inscriptions is very similar to that of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, which is basically a glyph.
In the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the economy and culture flourished and the application of characters became more and more extensive. The ancient prose of the Six Kingdoms is also a kind of "seal script", which is more closely related to the bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou Dynasty than the Qin script. The meaning of seal script is to lengthen the strokes and become a soft long line.
In 22 1 year BC, Qin Shihuang unified China, unified the national writing, currency and weights and measures, and stipulated the national standard font. Let the whole country write in their simplified Chinese characters. This is Xiao Zhuan.
Xiao Zhuan was gradually replaced by a more convenient and simplified official script. By the Han Dynasty, Xiao Zhuan had become a formal style in the whole country. This is the official script handed down from the Han Dynasty.
Official script later evolved into cursive script. This is a fast style of official script, which has developed into an independent font since the Eastern Han Dynasty. At the same time, cursive script appeared in regular script, also known as "official script" or "original script", which matured in the Eastern Han Dynasty and prevailed in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties.
A font that finally appeared at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty is running script, which basically looks like regular script and can be said to be a tribe of regular script. Regular script, running script and cursive script have been handed down to this day.
References:
Baidu Encyclopedia-History of Chinese Characters in China