Chinese Calligraphy
Enter your Chinese text here and our tool will create a calligraphy for you.
The scripts, and what changed between them
Chinese calligraphy is not handwriting made pretty. It is a sequence of historical scripts, each of which was once the ordinary way of writing, and each of which survives as a style with its own rules and its own uses.
Seal script is the oldest still in use, angular and archaic, and it is what you see on the red stamps in the corner of a painting. Clerical script, from the Han dynasty, is where the modern shapes begin: strokes flatten out and the brush starts to lift at the end of a horizontal. Regular script is the one taught in schools and the one printed in books, where every stroke is separate and complete. Running script joins some of them, as a fluent hand naturally does. Cursive script joins nearly all of them, and is beautiful and largely unreadable to anyone who has not studied it.
This tool renders your text in the script you choose, so you can see the same characters change shape across two thousand years. It is a good way to understand why a character you know looks unfamiliar on a shop sign, on a scroll, or on a stamp.