Chinese calligraphy 🖌️

A series of chinese characters being painted on gridded xuan paper.

A sheet of basic chinese characters on gridded xuan paper

Chinese characters printed inversely in neat columsn in a book

Chinese characters done in a loose calligraphy style on gridded xuan paper. Visible are the characters 福，满 and 常

The chinese character 舞 drawn in a blocky script

Chinese calligraphy, known as 书法, is a script as well as an artform. Each Chinese character is made of a sequence of eight different strokes, which combine to not only make thousands of unique characters, but also beautiful paintings. The eight strokes are:

Dot stroke
Horizontal stroke
Vertical stroke
Left-falling stroke
Right-falling stroke
Raising stroke
Turning stroke
Hook stroke

📖 Find out more about the history of calligraphy.