When a large amount of bronzeware was excavated in the Song period, the emperor ordered that the pieces  be collected and systems and characters be studied in order to restore ancient li for political reasons. Emperors in the late Beisong and early Nansong periods had replicas of the bronzeware made to give to their trusted vassals. Meanwhile, the literati began to collect bronzeware and identify the characters on the pieces (zhong ding wen).

  For example, Xia Song focused on gu wen zi (paleography) and compiled Gu Wen Si Sheng Yun in 1044 (the fourth year of the Qing Li era) to study bronze inscriptions. This is the origin of Chinese paleography, which was later taken over by Yang Nanzhong, Ouyang Xiu, Liu Chang, Lu Dalin, Wang Fu, Zhao Jiucheng, Xue Shanggong, Wang Qiu, Wang Chu, Dai Dong and others, establishing the trend to study gu wen zi. In the same period, various dictionaries and texts regarding jin shi (metal and stone inscriptions) were published. These pioneering works influenced the kao zheng (evidential) scholarship in the Qing period.

  The study of jin shi originated, and that of gu wen zi prospered, in the Song period, but ink writing in “gu wen zhuan shu” (yun chao gu wen [copies of paleography] and zhong ding wen) was extremely rare then and previous studies on such texts are scarce. In the present study, as an example of ink writing, I compare the forms of the characters in a piece of rare ink writing in the seal script from the Nansong period stored in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan ― a transcript of Pan Gu Xu by Chang Biao in “gu wen zhuan shu” ― with “gu wen zi” in order to reveal the contents of texts dealing with “gu wen zhuan shu” at that time and to analyze the background of their production; to identify the texts that were available then; and to consider the viewpoint of the literati regarding the study of Chinese characters. Thus, I reveal several important details of gu wen zhuan shu in the Song period.