Ｐｈｏｅｎｉｘ Ｍｏｕｎｔａｉｎ ａｎｄ Ｃａｌｌｉｇｒａｐｈｙ

Ｑｉ　Ｙｏｎｇｙｅ

At the east end of the long corridor of the General Yue Fei Mausoleum on the West Lake is a stone stele on which is a copy of an imperial decree issued in 1136 by Emperor Gaozong to summon General Yue Fei back from his long mourning session to take military command and retrieve the lost territory. The decree is in the handwriting of the emperor, famed for his “slender gold script” in history of Chinese calligraphy. The original was in the mausoleum for more than 700 years before it disappeared in the chaotic years of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the late Qing Dynasty. In 2009, a copy of the inscription appeared at an auction in Hangzhou and auctioned off at a whopping amount of 8.3 million yuan.

The emperor handwrote the decree at his palace situated at the foot of Phoenix Mountain in the southern edge of the downtown Hangzhou. During the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279), the Phoenix Mountain was the center of the national politics and culture, but the mountain was famous long before the emperor fled south and settled down in Hangzhou.

Cui Hu, a Tang poet, wrote a short poem in memory of his brief encounter with a girl in one spring when peach blossoms were fully blooming. The 28-character verse describes the poet coming back to a roadside house where he asked for a drink of water from a young girl and the girl was nowhere to be seen in another year when peach blossoms were in bloom again. It is one of the best known Tang poems. Legend has it that the encounter happened in the lakeside Wu Hill near the Phoenix Mountain. Centuries later, Su Dongpo, a great poet of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) who served as the chief executive of the city twice, wrote a poem in the same format in memory of the poet and his encounter and his sentiment about “where is the girl today”.

The person that had something to do with the calligraphy of the Southern Song Dynasty, however, was a man named Cai Jing. Though Cai is widely believed to have been the very grave digger of the Northern Song Dynasty, his calligraphy matured at the phoenix hill while he was in exile. Cai Jing was a high-ranking minister at the court of the North Song Dynasty. For a long while, the opportunist minister clung to his position by swinging to those in favor of the emperor. He finally fell out of favor after the queen mother was offended by his political inconsistency and his easily changed loyalty. Cai was demoted and exiled to Hangzhou as a minor official.

Cai built a house at the foot of the Phoenix Mountain and devoted a lot of time to the art of calligraphy. It was here that he became the best calligrapher since Liu Gongquan of the Tang Dynasty. When Emperor Huizong came to throne and sent his eunuch on a mission to find the best calligraphy artworks, the eunuch came to Cai. Cai rose to power again. What he did at the court finally brought down the dynasty. Some people wondered what if he had stayed in Hangzhou as a minor official and a great calligrapher, what if he hadnt appointed treacherous court officials, but history accepts no what ifs.

The Emperor Huizong loved the calligraphy of Cai. While he was still a prince, he bought two fans from two attendants of Cai Jing. The attendants had used fans to cool the minister and, very pleased, Cai inscribed the fans for the two attendants. A few days later the minister found the attendants became rich and inquired. It turned out that the prince had bought the fans for 20,000 from the two attendants.

In Chinese history, Emperor Huizong was the most famous emperor for his great passion for and accomplishment in art and for his loss of his dynasty. The slender gold script was created by this emperor. The style matured and became influential for hundreds of years in the hand of his son Zhao Gou, the founding emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty.

Zhao Gou in his younger years was not in the favor of his father. In the dying years of the Northern Song Dynasty, the prince was sent as a hostage to Jin Kingdom in the north as a condition for a jointly military campaign against the Liao Kingdom. The Jin people soon suspected that the young Zhao Gou was not a prince at all, for the young man was both an excellent artist and an excellent archer and rider. So Zhao Gou was sent back to the Song Dynasty. When the Northern Song Dynasty fell and two emperors and other princes were all captured by the invading Jin army, Zhao Gou was the only prince who managed to escape. He fled south and passed Hangzhou several times on his way of fleeing. When things finally stabilized and he came back to Hangzhou to set up his new dynasty, he chose the Phoenix Mountain as the site for his forbidden city.

The emperor was not only the man who founded a dynasty. He was also the man who started a new era of calligraphy in Chinese history. The slender gold script matured in his hands. When the emperor loved calligraphy, many of his subjects developed the same passion. He practiced and studied the art for every day of the last fifty years of his life. Qin Gui, a prime minister who framed General Yue Fei and had the general executed, was also a famed calligrapher. One legend says that the script he developed has been widely used as a mainstream font for printing books since the Song Dynasty up to today. A modified script based on that style has also been a mainstream font still in use today. Qin Gui is still hated by all the Chinese. Thats why his script is not named after him whereas other styles are all named after respective artists. The script is known as the Song font in connection with the dynasty when the prime minister lived. □