Lanting Xu

The Lantingji Xu (simplified Chinese: 兰亭集序; traditional Chinese: 蘭亭集序; literally: "Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion") or Lanting Xu, is a piece of Chinese calligraphy work generally considered to be written by the well-known calligrapher Wang Xizhi (303? – 361?) from the East Jin Dynasty (317 – 420).

In the ninth year of the Emperor Yonghe (353 CE), a Spring Purification Ceremony was held at Lanting, Kuaiji Prefecture (today’s Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province) where Wang was appointed as the governor at the time. During the event, forty-two literati gathered along the banks of a coursing stream and engaged in a drinking contest - cups of wine were drifting down from the upstream, and whenever a cup stopped in front of a guest, he had to compose a poem or otherwise drink the wine. At the end of the day, twenty-six literati composed thirty-seven poems in total and the Lantingji Xu, as a preface to the collection was produced by Wang on the spot. The original preface was long lost, but multiple copies with ink on papers or stone inscriptions remain until today.

The Lantingji Xu was written in the Running (or Semi-Cursive) Style on a cocoon paper with a weasel-whisker brush. It consists of three-hundred and twenty-four characters in twenty-eight columns. The script of the Lantingji Xu was often celebrated as the high point of the Running Style in the history of Chinese calligraphy. The improvisational work demonstrated Wang’s extraordinary calligraphy skill with the elegant and fluent strokes in a coherent spirit throughout the entire preface. The character Zhi (“之”) also appeared twenty times but was never repeated to be the same.

Not only the aesthetic form of the manuscript is highly appreciated but also the transcendent sentiments expressed in the preface about life and death is a timeless classic. The preface starts off with a delightful description of the pleasant surroundings and the joyful Ceremony, but carries on to reveal melancholy feelings towards how the transient delights brought by the vast universe would soon turn into retrospection. Wang reckoned the same emotion would be shared by the ancestors and his future generations even though the world and circumstances would be different. The scholars, who study Wang, refer to his ideology expressed in the preface as a fusion of the Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

The original of the Lantingji Xu was told to be completed by Wang in the state of insobriety. Wang tried to rewrite the preface but failed to create the same sublime beauty as the first time. When it came to the reign of the first Emperor from the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), Emperor Taizong (598? – 649) was an admirer of Wang’s calligraphy and he had collected approximately two-thousand pieces of Wang’s works. His tracking of the original Lantingji Xu became a widely circulated anecdote – the Emperor’s senior court official Xiao Yi was tasked to acquire the original from Bian Cai, a monk who inherited Wang’s Lantingji Xu from the friar Zhi Yong, the seventh grandson of Wang. Xiao managed to gain the trust from the monk and successfully spirited away the original work (Figure 1). The overjoyed Emperor shortly requested several court officials and calligraphers to copy the Lantingji Xu and upon Taizong’s death, the original was said to have been buried together in his mausoleum in Shaanxi Province.

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