The Orchid Pavilion Gathering: Wang Xizhi writes the Lanting Preface

Wang Xizhi (c. 303 – c. 361; by another dating, 321–379) belonged to the Wang clan of Langya, which had fled south after the fall of the Western Jin and helped to found the Eastern Jin. He had learned calligraphy from Lady Wei (Wei Shuo), received the title of General of the Right Army and served as administrator of Kuaiji. On the third day of the third month of the ninth year of Yonghe — 22 April 353 — he and his guests, among them the statesman Xie An, the poet Sun Chuo and his own sons, held the spring purification rite by a stream at the Orchid Pavilion in Shanyin county of Kuaiji. Cups of wine were floated on the winding water; whoever the cup stopped by had to compose a poem or drink it. Twenty-six of the forty-two men wrote thirty-seven poems, later collected as the Lanting Poems.

Wang Xizhi’s preface — 324 characters in 28 columns of running script — describes the gathering, the clear sky and the gentle breeze, then turns to the brevity of joy and of life and to the thought that later readers will feel as he feels reading the ancients. Tradition says that he wrote it slightly drunk and could never equal it afterwards. The original passed to Emperor Taizong of Tang, an admirer of Wang’s calligraphy, and is said to have been buried with him in 649; the work survives in Tang tracing copies — the most prized, the Shenlong copy attributed to Feng Chengsu, is in the Palace Museum in Beijing — and in stone rubbings. Chinese tradition calls it “the finest running script under heaven”. In the 1960s Guo Moruo argued that the preface was a later forgery, but the view that Wang Xizhi wrote it has since prevailed.