The Calligraphy in Su Manor 苏宅书法
Calligraphy is one of the highest Chinese art forms, and displaying calligraphy in your house is a common thing to do whether you’re an ancient scholar or modern Chinese person with disposable income. As both art and writing, calligraphy simultaneously expresses the meaning of its text and the spirit of the one wielding the brush; as decoration, it imbues the surrounding space with its style and helps you project a certain image of yourself to visitors. Let’s take a close look at all the Su Manor calligraphy in Nirvana in Fire.
Though the calligraphy shown above is probably the most memorable, there are actually a total of five pairs (ten total) of hanging scrolls of calligraphy in the main room of Su Manor, plus the entrance calligraphy to your right as you enter. Here’s a floor plan of the room that I’ve redrawn based on a Chinese fan-made floorplan to highlight where the calligraphy are located, pair A being the main pair (arrows indicate the side you view them from):
Let’s start with the simplest, the four-character entrance calligraphy mounted to the wall, as seen here in wide view relative to the right scroll of Pair A and as a close-up:
If you’re unfamiliar with ancient Chinese writing, it’s read top-to-bottom then right-to-left (Mainland China writing is nearly all left-to-right, top-to-down now, while Taiwanese and Hong Kong print are still mostly in the original orientation). These four characters, 上善若水, is a quote from Laozi, the founder of Daoism, in the foundational text Dao De Jing. The literal meaning is “Water is the highest form of being.” This is meant as an adage for how one should conduct oneself. The next few lines in the Dao De Jing explains it further: water provides for every living thing but doesn’t fight with any; water settles in places disliked by people, so it is close to the way of Dao. One should strive to be like water, content to be humble, to be of reserved character, to be kind to your friends, to speak as honestly as water is, to govern as orderly as water flows, to be as capable as water is, and to wait for the correct opportunity to make one’s move, like water. Only those who are non-confrontational like water will be free of worries (水善利万物而不争，处众人之所恶，故几于道。居善地，心善渊，与善仁，言善信，政善治，事善能，动善时。夫唯不争，故无尤). Mei Changsu is projecting an image of himself as a scholar striving toward Daoist and Confucian ideals, so it definitely makes sense that he would have something like this on his wall (not saying that he wasn’t actually striving for some of those ideals himself, either, but that’s more of a topic for another time).
Now, for the writing itself. This is a good time to mention that there are multiple distinct scripts in Chinese history (more on this later), and these four characters are written in a hybrid style borrowing from seal script (篆书; seal meaning engraving and not the animal) and clerical script (隶书), two of the oldest styles after the very ancient oracle bones script. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which NiF is loosely set in, seal script had already been largely reduced to ceremonial and decorative purposes (like all the overhead building signs you see in the show), and clerical script was a popular style of writing (many street banners and writing samples in the show were in this).
So here are the four characters compared to typical seal and clerical script characters from fonts (I say typical because these renderings have been popularized enough to become standard font sets in these scripts, but there are many variations and no one “true” way to write these characters), plus real samples of ancient handwriting that show some of the many extant variants:
These samples are from shufa.supfree.net and humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf, two great sites for ancient calligraphy. Some things to note:
Good/善 and water/水 are relatively closer to clerical script while the other two characters are closer to seal script, but because clerical script evolved from seal script, there is a lot of overlap in its early forms with seal script, and the transition isn’t sharply defined.
Clerical script looks so much wider and shorter than seal script (and other scripts, too): that’s not me stretching pictures for no good reason—a popular explanation is that it was due to clerical script originating from writing seal script quickly with a brush on bamboo slips, and the texture of bamboo fibers led to the distinctive head and tails of the horizontal strokes as well as shorter vertical strokes.
Though I’m by no means an expert, I agree with the author of an excellent blog post on NiF calligraphy [1] that this calligraphy really doesn’t look very good. The strokes are crooked and sloppy in unsatisfying ways and the widths vary for no apparent reason. They’re neither like standard clerical script strokes, with the classic rounded and strong head and tapering flared tail (蚕头雁尾), nor standard seal script strokes, which should be balanced and of uniform width and strength. Most of the real samples look noticeably better to me.
Of course, rules are made to be broken, but when you’ve seen enough you get a sense of what’s convincing as a personal style, and what’s not. I have to imagine that Feiliu wrote this while Mei Changsu held his hand or something, and maybe that’s why Su-gege would prominently display this writing.
