Small seal script

Small Seal Script (Chinese: 小篆, xiǎozhuàn), formerly romanized as Hsiao-chuan and also known as Seal Script, Lesser Seal Script and Qin Script (秦篆, Qínzhuàn), is an archaic form of Chinese calligraphy. It was standardized and promulgated as a national standard by Li Si, prime minister under Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor of Qin.

Small Seal Script
Type
LanguagesOld Chinese
Time period
Bronze Age China
Parent systems
(Proto-writing)
  • Oracle Bone Script
    • Bronze script
      • Large Seal Script
        • Small Seal Script
Child systems
Clerical script
Kaishu
Kanji
Kana
Hanja
Zhuyin
Simplified Chinese
Chu Nom
Khitan script
Jurchen script
Tangut script
Engraving referring to standard weights for balance

Before the Qin conquest of the six other major warring states of Zhou China, local styles of characters had evolved independently of one another for centuries, producing what are called the "Scripts of the Six States" (六國文字), all of which are included under the general term "Great Seal Script". Under one unified government, however, the diversity was deemed undesirable as it hindered timely communication, trade, taxation, and transportation, and as independent scripts might be used to represent dissenting political ideas.

Hence, Emperor Qin Shi Huang mandated the systematic unification of weights, measures, currencies, etc., and the use of a standard writing script. Characters which were different from those found in Qin were discarded, and the Qin's small seal characters became the standard for all regions within the empire. This policy came in about 220 BC, the year after Qin's unification of the Chinese states.[1]

The standardized use of small seal characters was promulgated via the Cangjiepian, a primer compiled by Li Si and two other ministers. This compilation, stated to contain 3,300 characters, is no longer extant, and is known only through Chinese commentaries through the centuries. Several hundred characters from fragmented commentaries were collected during the Qing period, and recent archeological excavations in Anhui, China, have uncovered several hundred more on bamboo strips, showing the order of the characters; however, the script found is not the small seal script, as the discovery dates from Han times.

Unicode

Small Seal Script has been proposed for inclusion in Unicode.[2]

gollark: Then make it uncrazy at it or stop using varargs.
gollark: Oh, that'd be nice and useless.
gollark: But if you just set `_ENV.something` that should also work.
gollark: No, I mean, you can use the power of setmetatable to effectively add a key to a table without changing it.
gollark: You can muck with setmetatable and `__index` to do that, except it has the slight issue of making `pairs` not work as expected.

See also

References
  1. Diringer, David. [1982] (1982). The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval, and Oriental. Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-24243-9.
  2. "L2/15-281: Proposal to encode Small Seal Script in UCS" (PDF). Working Group Document, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC. 2015-10-20. Retrieved 2016-01-23.
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