Passage from the Memorial Stele for Qiao Min in clerical script

On reviewing the times and taking stock of his age, the gentleman withdrew himself and rejected power, preserving his tranquility and minimizing his affairs. He covered his light and concealed his jade to keep himself from regretting error, and was reluctant to jostle for rank and position with the common herd.

A native of Qiantang (modern Hangzhou) in Zhejiang province, Zhao Zhichen is best known as a versatile and prolific seal carver, and is numbered among the Eight Masters of Xiling. As a calligrapher, Zhao was proficient in all script types, but he is particularly admired for his calligraphy in clerical script, as seen in this scroll, which he studied largely through rubbings of the carved texts on ancient stone monuments. In writing this passage on paper with brush and ink, Zhao was not seeking to reproduce the inert formal qualities of an inscription chiseled in stone, but to creatively reinterpret the inherent particularities of Han dynasty clerical script by means of a different artistic medium. The result is a direct expression of Zhao's personal aesthetic that is also very much in accord with the prevailing antiquarian tastes of his era, exhibiting a deliberate awkwardness which is both consciously archaic and decidedly contemporary at the same time.

The subject of this text, Qiao Min (129-185), was a low-ranking eunuch who served at the imperial court of the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220). In 187, Qiao's relatives had a memorial stele carved and erected for him, which went unremarked by history until almost nine hundred years later, when scholars first recorded and made rubbings of it. The original stone was subsequently lost and no rubbings directly from it are extant today, but the text was re-cut at some point and new rubbings were produced. In the late eighteenth century, one undated rubbing of this re-cut text circulated among scholars and epigraphers and an outline copy was published, which probably served as Zhao's source. For this scroll Zhao selected only a short, generally applicable philosophical passage from the much longer text.