The Calligrapher — Sū Shì 苏轼

Song literatus whose spontaneous running script shaped the literati ideal.

Song calligrapher (1037–1101), master of running script/regular script — Song poet-statesman and polymath whose expressive running script made personality, not rules, the point. Song dynasty

Cultural Story

句 was a sentence, and in old texts there was no punctuation: students marked 句读, the full stop and the pause, by hand. A 名句 was a line worth carrying -- Du Fu's "the nation broken, the hills remain". To 造句 was to build a first sentence. The word named the unit of sense, bounded and taught, long before the printed period.

Common words & phrases

• 句子 sentence · clause
• 语句 sentence · phrase · words
• 词句 words and phrases · phrasing
• 名句 famous line · well-known sentence
• 造句 make a sentence · sentence-making
• 句号 period · full stop

Read the story behind the character

A pupil 造句 with the new word; the 句号 ends the note. A poster quotes a 名句 from the old poet; the 词句 of a pop song stick in the head. The 语句 of the contract are read twice. The word runs through the classroom and the office -- the sentence made, the line famous, the period placed, the phrasing that will not leave the reader alone.