The Ten Stone Drums, Shi Gu, 十石鼓, are a group of inscribed drum-shaped stones. They were discovered in the 7th century CE, but are estimated to have been carved in the 5th Century BCE (although there are no exact records of when and where they were found in China). The stones are kept in the Palace Museum, Beijing, which attests to their great cultural importance.
The Ten Stone Drums provide the aesthetic standards for early ideograms. The strokes of each word are largely of even width. Look at the negative spaces (the spaces between the strokes). They balance the black strokes. (29.00 will also deal with negative space.) The writing on these drums became the models for later calligraphy and particularly influenced one of the earliest styles of Chinese writing called the “seal script” (zhuanshu).
You can see why I would be interested in negative space: a woodcut artist works by cutting away rather than adding. The ink is rolled onto the wood left after carving to make an impression on a sheet of paper.
Unfortunately, the Ten Stone Drums are badly worn and damaged. (In the same way, woodblocks break down during the printing process.) The stones were carelessly handled, and repeated impressions taken by rubbing (using paper and ink to make images)* wore them down further. The stones originally had about 700 characters. They had only 501 legible ideograms by the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE). The rubbings mounted as a scroll in the collection of the TheMet date from the 17th century.
The inscriptions consist of poetic lines regarding royal hunting and fishing. However, the meaning of some ideographs has been lost. Whether for the form of writing itself or the history of language, scholars continue to study—and revere these drums.
The previous post discussed the Taihu rocks (17.0). They are also the product of “carving.” They are admired both for their positive space (the rock forms) and their negative space (their holes). They are admired because they have lasted for centuries. The Ten Stone Drums have lasted too, but the years have taken a greater toll on them. Whether out of carelessness or admiration, human beings foolishly degrade our environment and the things we love.
Nevertheless, the ideograms speak of something else: faith in the future. Why else carve your message in stone? The carvers, those who composed the messages, and the subjects of the stories are long dead. But they left us their thoughts and actions. Just as calligraphers study each word stroke by stroke, we shape ourselves by the deeds of those who came before us.
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Inscriptions on the Stone Drums (Eastern Zhou dynasty, 5th century BCE). Unidentified artist
Ming dynasty (1368–1644). 17th century. China. Set of rubbings in ten sections mounted as a pair of handscrolls; ink on paper. Image (scroll a): 16 1/2 × 257 1/4 in. (41.9 × 653.4 cm)/ Image (scroll b): 16 3/4 × 265 5/8 in. (42.5 × 674.7 cm). TheMet
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/39890
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Drums_of_Qin
http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Poetry/shigushi.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_rubbing