During the Song Dynasty, when movable type printing was prevalent in China (A.D. 1045), Chinese characters were mostly printed in straight lines because it was much easier to carve straight lines into wooden blocks than curves. Taught by thousand years of ink brush calligraphy culture, the scribes despised it. Because ink brush handwritten calligraphy contained a large number of curved strokes, they believed that straight-line print destroyed the context of calligraphy (Ke, Su, 78). However, the legibility afforded by the standardized straight lines was far superior to that of unbridled handwriting. By the early Ming Dynasty, the original printing script had evolved into a typeface called Song Style (also known as "Ming Style"), which is still in use today.

At the end of the last century when the “Boya Song” font was designed by Zhu, the font industry in China was still immature. As one of the first Chinese typographers after World War II, Zhu changed and innovated on the old and obsolete Song font, taking the principle of making Chinese characters comfortable for readers to read, focusing on industrial value, modernity, and readability to develop a font more suitable for modern printed readers. Zhu took the learnings from history and advanced the field of typography in China, catching up to the west in a short amount of time, whilst applying similarly advanced techniques but on a much larger scale for all Chinese characters. This was a good start for the modern Chinese character look and typeface design and served as a fundamental template for numerous predecessors.


*Picture: The process to design a Chinese typeface using handwritting.

Works Cited

Ke, Zhijie, and Su, Weixiang. A Chinese Font Walk. Lian Pu Publishing, 2019.