Because of the regular and even structure of the eal Script, writing it requires tremendous efforts and time. Political and military exchanges between the warring states in the late Eastern Zhou Dynasty rendered a lot of written work for officials who were under pressure to do their written work speedily. Apart from formal commemorative documents, most written work was done on wooden or bamboo strips. Less attention was paid to the regular structure of the characters and there are characters written with some strokes joined by a thin line. A cursive style of seal script was developed and this was used until the Eastern Han Dynasty (25 AD to 220 AD).
When writing the Seal Script quickly, the strokes and the characters could not be written as evenly as the standard Seal Script, with the result that the beginning of a stroke might be heavier and the end of a stroke might be thicker than an ordinary Seal Script stroke. From this was developed the Li Shu, or Clerical Script. A sample of a passage written in Clerical Script is shown on the right.
It can be seen that Clerical Script strokes are in general thicker than those of the Seal Script and they are more stylish, with more variations than Seal Script strokes.
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