From Past to Now, Still Popular

Nowadays the learning style and method are modern and multifarious, especially the usage of internet. When we recall Chinese history we can find that every scholar learns and strives to excel in four art forms. Fine points of these arts are taught as part of one’s formal education; and skills in these arts are diligently honed and improved upon all one’s life. We often see these arts illustrated and mentioned in paintings and poems. The Four Arts of the Chinese Scholar, otherwise known as siyi (四艺)  is a term used to describe four main accomplishments required of the Chinese scholar gentleman. They are qin (琴qín), qi (棋qí), shu  (书shū) and hua (画huà).

Although the individual elements of the concept have very long histories indeed as activities befitting a learned person, the earliest written source putting the four together is Zhang Yanyuan’s Fashu Yaolu (张彦远《法书要录》) (618—907) from the Tang Dynasty, and as “the four arts” the concept is first found in the Xianqing Ouji by Li Yu (李渔《闲情偶寄》) (1610—1680).

In China to be a scholar is to be an artist. Chinese culture insists that an educated and ‘proper’ individual’s classical training has components of what in Chinese are called qin, qi, shu, and hua. These are translated roughly into “Musical Instruments, Board Games, Calligraphy, and Painting”. For one to be considered scholarly, or a man of the arts, then those are in fact the arts in which to immerse oneself. The Chinese ideals of an educated man are a test and demonstration of the individual’s strength in reason, creation, expression and dexterity, and thus rate highly in China both today and in ancient times.

All of these arts combined made for a platform by which scholars could compete against each other in creativity, expression, ideas, and thinking power. They created a means by which men would judge each other beyond the worth of their possessions. These four arts created a culture in which art flourished freely among the populace.