A Normal Anomaly Yang Ningshi’s Chive Flowers Letter and the Tampered Narrative of Chinese Calligraphy

Abstract

In the eleventh century Yang Ningshi 楊凝式 (873–954) was simultaneously praised as a supreme master of cursive script and dismissed as utterly incompetent with regular script. This article demonstrates that the Chive Flowers Letter (Jiuhua tie 韭花帖), the only one among Yang’s five surviving works written in regular script, is the key to solving this historical paradox. It argues that the Chive Flowers Letter followed the popular guides to letter writing (shuyi 書儀) in the epistolary culture of the late Tang and Five Dynasties and represents the tamed side of Yang’s calligraphy that was rejected by Huang Tingjian and many Northern Song “classical prose” (guwen 古文) scholar-officials for an ideological rather than aesthetic reason. This study also reveals how the traditional Chinese historiography on calligraphy and beyond might have been manipulated to serve ideological agendas.