Wang Xizhi and the Ink Pond

A small wine cup is floating on the water.

It drifts very slowly along a narrow, winding stream between flat stones, under bamboo just putting out new leaves. The early spring water is still cold, so clear that every pebble on the bottom shows. Along both banks, about 40 people sit on the grass in complete silence. Every eye follows that cup.

That day the game had a rule. If the cup came to rest in front of someone's knees, that person had to make up a poem on the spot. Succeed, and the whole group clapped. Fail, and the cup of wine had to be drained.

The cup bumps gently against a rock, turns half a circle, and stands still. A man glances up at the sky in a hurry, his lips moving, then bursts out laughing and gives up. The laughter runs along the bank.

The place was called Lanting, the Orchid Pavilion. It lay in Shanyin, in the old commandery of Kuaiji, which is now Shaoxing in Zhejiang province. It was the third day of the third lunar month, the day when people went down to the water to wash their hands and faces, so that the bad luck of winter would float away with the current. The year was 353.

Some guests found a poem at once. Others sat and sat without finding a single word, and took their penalty in wine.

The man who had invited the whole group was Wang Xizhi. He lived around the 4th century, and scholars still do not agree on the year he was born or the year he died. As a child he learned to write from a woman teacher, Lady Wei. His youngest son later became famous for his writing too, so famous that people spoke of father and son together as the Two Wangs. As for Wang Xizhi himself, from about the Tang dynasty onward he was honored as the Sage of Calligraphy.

That afternoon, the poems made during the day were gathered into a collection. The collection needed a preface, and Wang Xizhi picked up his brush.

The preface runs to 324 characters, set out in 28 lines. He wrote it in running script, a quick style where each stroke still carries a breath of the one before, like a person talking while walking.

And among those characters lies something strange that later generations have never tired of studying.

There is one very small character, zhi. It is a linking word, the kind of humble character that anyone writing Chinese has to write dozens of times a day, so familiar that the hand barely notices it anymore. In the Orchid Pavilion Preface, people have counted the character zhi 20 times. And no two of them are written the same way.

Twenty zhi characters, twenty different shapes. One is neat, like a nod. One opens wide, its last stroke drawn out like a breath of relief. One leans a little, as if it were walking. The brush followed the breathing of the person who held it. So those twenty characters are twenty different breaths of one man, on one afternoon beside a stream.

As for the man himself, old books record a story that children remember after a single hearing.

Wang Xizhi loved geese. Not to eat, but to watch. He liked to see a flock swimming, and he liked their long necks bending this way and that over the water, supple yet firm. When he heard that a Taoist priest kept a fine flock of geese, he rowed over to ask to buy them. The priest would not sell. He said his only wish was a copy of the Tao Te Ching written by the calligrapher's own hand. The silk had been ready for a long time, but he had never found anyone to ask. So Wang Xizhi sat down and copied two chapters of the book, which took him half a day. When he finished, he packed more than ten geese into cages, carried them down to his boat, and took them home in high spirits.

There is one more story, and this one needs a plain word first. It is a legend, passed down by later generations, and no one ever witnessed it. People say that he practiced writing beside a pond. After each page, he went out to the pond to rinse his brush and inkstone, then came back to write again. Day after day the ink dissolved into the water, until the whole pond turned black. From then on, people in the area called it the ink pond.

The story is best heard as a figure of speech. To make your hand obey you, you have to grind the ink long enough and often enough that even the pond water changes color.

Several hundred years later, Emperor Taizong of the Tang dynasty loved Wang Xizhi's writing so much that he sent people everywhere to gather every last piece that survived. Tang palace records later listed more than 2,000 works under Wang Xizhi's name. Of them all, the emperor treasured the Orchid Pavilion Preface most. Legend says that when the emperor died, the original was buried with him in his tomb.

Not one original by Wang Xizhi survives today. Every scroll hanging in a museum, every page printed in a copybook, is a copy. Some were made by Tang craftsmen who laid very thin paper over the original and traced it stroke by stroke. Some are rubbings taken from stone. Then later people copied from those copies, generation after generation. The copy thought to be closest to the original is said to have been traced by Feng Chengsu. It is called the Shenlong copy. It is kept today in the Palace Museum in Beijing.

The preface was written more than 1,600 years ago. From the Tang dynasty on, no one has seen the original again. Everything since then has been a story of shadows, copied by hand.

The story sounds far away, yet it is really very close.

The writing brush, the ink stick, the red paper and the habit of honoring a fine hand belong to a whole wide region. Vietnam, China, Korea and Japan each held the same brush and wrote in their own way, and they learned from one another over many generations. The Vietnamese went one step further. From about the 10th century, they used that same set of characters as raw material. They combined them, invented new ones, and made a new script that wrote down the Vietnamese language just as it was spoken. That was Nôm, an old character script for writing Vietnamese. The Tale of Kiều was written in it.

So a little of that afternoon by the stream still comes back to Hanoi every Tết, the Lunar New Year festival in Vietnam. At the Temple of Literature, the old-style calligraphers wear gauze tunics and pleated turbans, as custom requires. They sit behind their mats, inkstones at hand, red paper spread before them. People line up to ask for a written character to start the year. Some ask for Bình An, peace, to hang at home. Some ask for Đăng Khoa, success in the exams, for a child about to sit them. The calligrapher asks the person's name, age and hopes, and only then sets brush to paper. The brush runs in one unbroken flow.

A Vietnamese saying holds that a person's handwriting shows the person. Writing is not only for reading. It also reveals whether the one holding the brush that day was at ease or in a hurry, happy or lost in thought.

Anyone who stands and watches a calligrapher at Tết will notice one thing. The same character, written twice, never comes out in two identical strokes. That is not because the calligrapher made a mistake. It is because a human hand is a human hand.

As for the wine cup at Lanting, it floated to the end of that stream long, long ago. In Shaoxing today there is still a winding stream, rebuilt to look like the old scene. The preface survives only as its shadow, copied again and again by countless hands. And yet the twenty zhi characters, in every one of those shadows, still refuse to look alike.