Orchid Pavilion Preface.

Orchid Pavilion Books is the literary imprint of Asia 2000 Ltd., Hong Kong publishers of quality books since 1980. The imprint is inspired by the Orchid Pavilion Preface, a treatise on life penned by Wang Xizhi, China’s most famous calligrapher.

To quote from Behind the Brushstrokes, an Asia 2000 book by Khoo Seow Hwa and Nancy L. Penrose:

By 352 A.D., Wang Xizhi was 50 years old, his reputation as a calligrapher was well established, and he had served as a court minister for many years. In the late spring of that year Wang Xizhi invited 41 calligraphers, poets, relatives and friends to accompany him on an outing to Lan Ting, the Orchid Pavilion, in the city of Shaoxing, Zhejiang province. It was the time of the year for the purification ceremony, when hands and bodies were cleansed with stream water to wash away any bad luck. The group of friends and scholars sat on each side of a flowing stream, and a little cup made out of a lotus leaf, full of wine, was floated down the stream. Whenever it floated in front of someone, that person was obliged to either compose a poem on the spot or to drink the wine as forfeit if he failed to come up with a poem.

By the end of the day, 37 poems had been composed by 25 scholars. Wang Xizhi, as the head of this happy occasion, picked up a brush made out of rat whiskers and hairs and wrote on the spot the greatest masterpiece of Chinese calligraphy, the Lan Ting Xu, or the Orchid Pavilion Preface. Written on silk in the outstanding style of Xing Shu (Walking Style), the composition contains 28 vertical rows and 324 words. It is a philosophical discourse on the meaning of life. Wang Xizhi’s calligraphy in this work is full of a natural energy, inspired by the happiness and grace of the moment, brimming with refinement and elegance. The Orchid Pavilion Preface became the greatest piece of Xing Shu and, although Wang Xizhi later tried more than 100 times to reproduce the work, he was never able to match the quality of the original.

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