Calligraphic painting, or the _literary style_, has its origin in the studies of Wang Wei when, renouncing the aid of colour, he strove by harmony of shading and by tone values, to reproduce the vast reaches of space and all the shifting subtlety of atmospheric perspective. The exclusive use of Chinese ink necessitated special studies since thus calligraphy was directly approached. The different styles of writing are almost drawing in themselves. Each style of writing has its own rules for dissecting the written character and making the stroke. Now, as is known, the Chinese painters attached supreme importance to the line and to the brush-stroke. This was due in part to their equipment and in part to the fact that the amateurs of art were prepared by their classical studies to appreciate the strength or the delicacy of a line judged for itself, quite independently of the forms represented. We must also bear in mind that all of the Chinese painters were scholars, belonging to the class of the literati.[14] Writers, poets, statesmen, soldiers, Buddhist or Taoist priests, and philosophers have all furnished the greatest names in art. Under such conditions the technical relationship between the line of the painter and that of the calligraphist was closer, since painter and calligraphist were frequently united in one and the same person. Thence came the early tendency to use monochrome and to represent forms in the abstract, rendering them more and more as mere themes, thus reducing the subject to a few simple calligraphic strokes. [14] The literati, or lettered class, were the aristocracy in what was the most democratic of absolute monarchies. No matter how humble his origin, anyone of the male sex was eligible to compete in the examinations which were based upon literary knowledge and memory of the classics. Proficiency in handwriting was a natural result. The successful candidate might aspire to any post in the empire, as official positions were bestowed through literary merit. During three days and two nights at the time of examination the candidate was not allowed to leave his tiny box-like cell, lacking even space to lie down. Cases of death during the examinations were not infrequent. The examination halls in Peking are now destroyed and those in Nanking with 20,000 cells are crumbling away.--TRANSLATOR.