> A note on what this is: an essay built on a single idea — that calligraphy is a portrait of the person who holds the brush — traced across the emperors and princes of the Qing dynasty. It begins with a scroll I saw in Shimonoseki, Japan, and ends with Kawashima Yoshiko’s father. Related pieces: [Li Hongzhang — The Scroll at Shimonoseki], [Prince Su (Shanqi) — The Qing Royal Who Chose Japan], [Kawashima Yoshiko], [Pujie and Saga Hiro — The Manchukuo Series].
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The Brush Was the Man: Reading the Qing Dynasty in Its Emperors’ Calligraphy
It started with a single scroll
A while ago, I wrote about standing before a piece of calligraphy by Li Hongzhang in the Shimonoseki Treaty Memorial Hall in Japan, and thinking, on instinct, *this man is no ordinary person*. When I looked into it afterward, that instinct turned out to rest on something solid: his whole life as a Confucian scholar-official.
Recently I watched a CNN segment asking why people still practice calligraphy in the age of computers. Its answer: that copying scripture by brush brings peace of mind. Calligraphy as a form of meditation — a very Western way to frame it. And it isn’t wrong. But I thought: *that’s not all it is.* For those of us raised in the Japanese tradition, the brush means something else besides.
Following that small discomfort, I began calling to mind the calligraphy of the Qing emperors and princes, one by one. And I realized that a single family’s brush had traced the entire life of a dynasty.
“The brush is the person” — a yardstick China itself invented
Let me start with the yardstick.
The idea that “your writing *is* you” is, in fact, Chinese in origin. The Han-dynasty scholar Yang Xiong wrote that *writing is the picture of the mind*. And the late-Qing scholar Liu Xizai, in his *Yigai* (“Outline of the Arts”), put it flatly:
> Calligraphy is likeness. It is like one’s learning, like one’s talent, like one’s will — in short, it is simply like the person.
Handwriting resembles the writer’s learning, gifts, and character — the whole person. Liu Xizai was himself a Qing insider, a *jinshi* (top-tier examination graduate) who tutored the sons of the Xianfeng Emperor.
One more figure: Fu Shan, of the late Ming and early Qing, a loyalist who refused to serve the new Manchu dynasty. He said, *to make characters, first make the man*, and he set out an ideal for calligraphy in four “rathers”:
> Rather clumsy than clever; rather ugly than fawning.
Better honest and rough than slick and ingratiating. What Fu Shan attacked by name was the *pretty-but-soft* style of masters like Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang — technically lovely, but weak. With these two yardsticks in hand, let me line up the Qing emperors’ brushes.
The beginning — Hong Taiji and the beauty of the “clumsy”
Hong Taiji, the second Qing ruler, who renamed the Later Jin state “Great Qing” and built the dynasty’s skeleton.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** I’ll be honest — the first time I saw his calligraphy, my gut reaction was *this looks like a child wrote it*. It is not a polished, accomplished hand. And yet — that raw strength surpassed the calligraphy of every Qing emperor who came after him.
I don’t think that’s a baseless impression. Hong Taiji’s generation had only just finished devising a Manchu script and had barely begun adopting Chinese institutions; they were not yet steeped in the Chinese tradition of the brush. So by the standard of the scholar-official, his Chinese characters look unschooled. But underneath that roughness there is something not yet smoothed down by anyone — raw bone. It is exactly the “clumsy” that Fu Shan meant when he said *rather clumsy than clever*. It isn’t skillful. But it is real. The arc of Qing calligraphy begins with this raw force.
The summit — Kangxi, where cultivation and strength meet
The arc reaches its peak with the Kangxi Emperor.
Kangxi studied under Shen Quan, a follower of Dong Qichang, and mastered the elegant *tie* tradition — the school of learning by copying the model works of the old masters. Refined, sure-handed writing. That is the *cultivation* side. But he also copied Mi Fu, not only Dong Qichang, and his brush is described as carrying Dong’s grace while remaining thick, solid, and rounded, with a bearing that is calm and self-assured. That solidity and confidence is the *strength* side.
> **The *tie* tradition:** learning calligraphy by copying the model letters and scrolls of past masters like Wang Xizhi — elegant and orthodox. It stands opposite the *bei* (“stele”) school, which prizes the rough, forceful writing carved on ancient stone.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** What I feel in Kangxi’s calligraphy is the scholar-official’s cultivation and the warrior’s strength living together in a single sheet. Of all twelve Qing emperors, his is the best-balanced. As it happens, some critics rank Kangxi first among the emperors as a calligrapher — so my instinct turned out to match the experts’.
And this, I think, is the top of the arc. The Hong Taiji before him has force but not yet cultivation. The Qianlong after him has cultivation but the force drains away. Right in the middle, at Kangxi, force and cultivation balance for a single moment. The arc crests at Kangxi and slopes downhill on both sides.
The brush of control — Yongzheng, and the shadow of Li Si
His son, the Yongzheng Emperor.
Yongzheng governed with relentless personal diligence, ruthless and decisive; he tightened imperial power through the secret-memorial system and the Grand Council. He was the most controlling, most system-building emperor of the Qing. As a writer he was skilled enough to be praised by his father, and he copied Dong Qichang widely.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** Even so, Yongzheng’s calligraphy strikes me as *deadly earnest* — and, more precisely, as resembling the hand of Li Si. Li Si is the man who standardized the *small seal script*, that writing of pure order and uniformity. A Legalist chancellor who forced the empire’s characters into a single regulation shape. That sense of *airless, over-perfected order* is what I see in Yongzheng’s brush. This isn’t about the script style; I’m reading the man from his writing. It’s Liu Xizai’s “the brush is the person,” happening before my eyes. What balanced at Kangxi tilts, at Yongzheng, quietly toward *severity*.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** In fairness, on that one point — orderly and without a single gap — Li Si’s own brush outdoes Yongzheng’s. Yongzheng’s “severity” still smells faintly of a human being trying hard; Li Si’s small seal script is *finished*. The order is complete. There is no gap at all.
And this Li Si script standardized by the First Emperor’s chancellor is not distant from us at all. Look at the cover of a Japanese passport: the five characters reading *Nihon-koku Ryoken* (“Passport of Japan”) are set in seal script, a direct descendant of Li Si’s order. According to Japan’s Foreign Ministry, Japanese travel documents have carried this seal script on their covers ever since the very first ones, in 1866. The brush of a Legalist chancellor from two thousand years ago is still, today, the official face of a nation sitting in our desk drawers. It was chosen to be that face precisely because it is so perfectly upright.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** I’ll confess: I keep a magnet of Li Si’s script on my refrigerator, as a rebuke to myself. My own tendency to be scattered and to dawdle gets nudged, just a little, every day, by that gapless order. They say the brush reflects the person — but perhaps, in reverse, an orderly brush can also help set a person straight.
The hollow — Qianlong’s imitation, and his vanity
Then the Qianlong Emperor, at the very zenith of the Qing.
Qianlong’s calligraphy is a rounded, tidy hand modeled on Zhao Mengfu and Dong Qichang. It has an imperial air of wealth and ease. But under the influence of the standardized “cabinet style,” it is thin on variation and flavor — monotonous. Critics have long pointed to this weakness with the phrase *sinew but no bone* — a judgment that Mao Zedong is said to have shared.
This is exactly the *pretty-but-fawning* writing that Fu Shan attacked by name: skillful but ingratiating, soft and merely lovely. By Fu Shan’s yardstick, Qianlong is that kind of writer.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** To me, Qianlong’s calligraphy is imitation with no essence underneath. However skillfully he scatters his brush across famous models, there is no heart in it — only vanity. And that vanity was proven, in the most complete way imaginable, by one incident: the mix-up over Huang Gongwang’s masterpiece, *Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains*.
There were two versions of the painting: the genuine one (the “Wuyongshi scroll”) and a very good Ming-dynasty copy (the “Ziming scroll”). Qianlong convinced himself the copy — the fake — that he had acquired first was authentic. He inscribed more than fifty comments in its margins, stamped his seals, and on his tours would take it out to compare it against the actual scenery. Then, when the real one surfaced the next year, he pronounced *it* the forgery. Unable to tell true from false, he buried a masterpiece under his own poems and seals.
The irony is what became of the real one. Because Qianlong dismissed it as a fake, it received none of his inscriptions or seals, and so it survived with a “clean body,” passing the original down to us intact. In the 1970s, the connoisseur Xu Bangda exposed the reversal and stunned the art world.
He couldn’t tell true from false before a great work, and still couldn’t stop himself from covering it in his own brush. It stopped being appreciation and became possession and display. That is what I mean by vanity. In Qianlong’s generation, the strength that Kangxi had is entirely gone; the cultivation has hollowed out; only imitation and vanity remain.
The end — Pujie, graceful and without force
At the far end of the arc I place Pujie, the younger brother of Puyi, the last emperor — a man famous as a calligrapher even within the artistic Aisin-Gioro clan.
Pujie’s writing is described as flowing, like running water — a distinctive, graceful hand, and much loved. Cultivated, delicate, elegant.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** But to me, there is no longer any force in it. Graceful and fine, yes — but the raw bone that founder Hong Taiji had has, by the time we reach this last scion of the house, drained completely away. *Is this really Hong Taiji’s descendant?* — I couldn’t help thinking it.
Pujie married Saga Hiro, a distant relative of the Shōwa Emperor, served as an officer of Manchukuo, was later imprisoned in China, and lived a long life of exile and wandering. And here the story of the brush builds a bridge — to Manchukuo, and to one last person.
A hand you’d follow — Prince Su, Shanqi, and his backbone
Last, Prince Su — Shanqi. The father of Kawashima Yoshiko, and, for me, a man who connects back to where my whole interest began, in Matsumoto.
Shanqi studied calligraphy as a boy under Prince Cheng — a son of Qianlong and one of the finest brushes of the Qing — and held to the *tie* tradition all his life. His hand inherited the imperial house’s own line of calligraphy directly: a technically sure, refined *tie*-school writing. The foundation is solid.
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** But what draws me to Shanqi’s calligraphy is not only the technique. More than that, there is force in the writing itself. The House of Prince Su begins with Hooge, the eldest son of Hong Taiji — which makes Shanqi a direct descendant of that same Hong Taiji whose brush I called strong. And that inherited force is plainly visible in his strokes. For all its *tie*-school refinement, the hand is not the least bit soft. There is backbone in it.
Let me be clear: this is not *hangan-biiki*, the reflexive Japanese sympathy for a noble loser. I am not drawn to him out of pity for a man who lost. The writing itself makes me think, *I would follow this man.* The strength is there on the page.
His life, of course, does not contradict the writing. He refused to sign the edict of abdication, fled to Japanese-controlled Lüshun, entrusted his hope of restoring the dynasty to his children, and died in exile. The posthumous name the last emperor gave him was a single character: *Loyal.* But that loyalty is not the reason I am drawn to the brush; it is the confirmation of what the brush had already said. The backbone in the writing and the loyalty of the life were, from the start, one and the same thing.
And there is a reason Chinese calligraphers have never rated him: his calligraphy has barely survived in China at all. As far as I know, it remains on a stone monument in Matsumoto. His brush, like his memory, survived only in Japan — only in Matsumoto — the very same asymmetry by which Kawashima Yoshiko’s story fell out of the Chinese record and lived on only in a memorial gathering in Nagano.
And so the arc that began with founder Hong Taiji’s raw force is closed by a man of the same bloodline — not through story or through pity, but through the backbone plainly visible on the page. One family’s brush traced the whole life of a dynasty, and the force of its founding rose up one last time, real and unmistakable, in the writing.
Two arcs — the Manchu house, and the Han strongmen
✦ **Satoe’s Take:** Here I notice one more thing.
In my essay on Li Hongzhang, I traced how the Han-Chinese strongmen declined from *the man of cultivation* (Li Hongzhang) toward *the man of raw power* (Yuan Shikai). The Manchu emperors, meanwhile, decline in the opposite direction — from *the man of force* (Hong Taiji) toward *the man of grace* (Pujie).
The two arcs cross, somewhere in the life of the dynasty. At the moment of collapse, the Han side has regained raw force (Yuan Shikai) while the imperial side has dissolved into powerless grace (Pujie). It is almost as if, over the dynasty’s whole lifespan, the force migrated from the Manchu founders to the Han warlords.
In closing — my reply to CNN
CNN summed up calligraphy as “peace of mind through copying scripture.” But what the East Asian classics actually saw in the brush was the person entire. The reason Japan still practices calligraphy in the computer age is that a piece of writing carries across the writer’s learning, their character — and their heart.
I have called to mind the calligraphy of the Qing emperors, one after another. Hong Taiji’s raw force; Kangxi’s balance of force and cultivation; Yongzheng’s control; Qianlong’s imitation and vanity; Pujie’s graceful strengthlessness; and Shanqi’s loyalty unto a fallen house. One family’s brush had mirrored the rise and fall of a dynasty. Calligraphy reflects, honestly and against the writer’s will, the life of a dynasty and the heart of a person.
So this is my reply to CNN. Calligraphy is not only for peace of mind. The brush *was* the person.
— I have also seen the calligraphy of Xi Jinping, and of Mao Zedong’s grandson. What happens when you hold this same yardstick up to a modern brush? That, I will save for another time.
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◀ Related: [Li Hongzhang — The Scroll at Shimonoseki] | [Prince Su (Shanqi)] | [Kawashima Yoshiko] | [Pujie and Saga Hiro]
◀ Series index: The Late Qing — Complete Guide