Twice a week in a courtyard at 456 Huang Hoa Tham Street, in west central Ha Noi, you can join a class of people engaged in learning the ancient skill of Chinese calligraphy adopted to their modern language.

The calligraphy class in Ha Noi devoted to the use of brush calligraphy for Roman script

The class is lead by Khanh who divides his life between teaching calligraphy, writing beautiful exhibits and pages for people, and helping house owners and architects ensure that homes are laid out in accordance with the best Feng Shui principles. Lower down the page you can see him on film where he is writing the poem that is shown further down on the left. He is a master of the art, the ink lays itself effortlessly in the right place. Us lesser mortals shake and judder round what should be smooth curves. But this is what the classes are about, they last for three hours on Wednesday and Sunday and are largely devoted to practicing the shapes and forms that compose our Roman alphabet.



All the materials needed are easily available, for they are the same as for Chinese calligraphy, and can all be bought from the little supplier at 19 Nguyen Khuyen Street just before the Temple of Literature. But to return to the new calligraphy. Khanh's class is very special, in fact it may be unique for at present there seems to be nowhere else to learn how to apply these old skills to our alphabetical language.

Khanh demonstrating a key brush stroke - to be repeated endlessly as pupils try to master the technique

In the West, Calligraphy, although well regarded, is at most a marginal art. It is neither widely practiced nor a focus of cultural attention. In the Orient the matter is very different, it is a central cultural feature, traditionally one of the key component skills possessed by a well educated person. This difference between east and west rests on the fundamentally different nature of our written languages. Our alphabetical system is functional and sound oriented. It concentrates on conveying what we hear, whereas in the far east, most written languages concentrate on meaning, sometimes with additional indicators of relavant sounds.

In Vietnam the written language was called Nôm. ( Click here to go to the 'Nôm' article also in this Section of the Site.) This is basically a form of Chinese with added markers which often show the sounds used by the Vietnamese language. But the basic characters of any of the Chinese family of languages are mostly concerned with meaning. Looking at a character it is primarily the meaning that is conveyed; what we voice to ourselves, or say to our interlocutors, depends on where we live. If we live in the south of China we might say the Cantonese word, if we live in Japan (and happen to also use that character) we would say the Japanese word, if we wanted to communicate with the largest number of people we would utter the Mandarin for that Character, and if we had been in Vietnam we would have said the Vietnamese for that concept. This concern with meaning radically changes the nature of calligraphy in the east.

This is the scroll that you can see Khanh working on in the film clip. It is a poem in Vietnamese about the delights of drinking tea - Tra being the Vietnamese for tea; it is pronounced Cha (a good cup of cha)

This is a section in English of Wordsworth's poem 'Yarrow Revisited'. It starts 'A gracious welcome shall be thine such looks of...'

Add to this that easterners have adopted the brush as their preferred tool for writing, rather than the pen. It is the free hand of an artist that brings the word to life, and not the ability to create beauty out of the limited movements of a pen. Given the freedom of hand and the concentration on meaning we can understand why calligraphy in the east has become so important. Sadly for most of us it remains an obscure art in which we are dependent on parallel texts and interpretation, although we can still enjoy the abstract design and form. This can be seen at its most abstract in works such as those of Ozowa Ransetsu in her recent exhibition at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere. You can go to the exhibition notice. Or there is more on her work at her own site. Here the characters have been so transformed by connotations and sense that Japanese readers only recognise a proportion of them. Such excursions of this high cultural form into the west, are few for these reasons.

But there is an alternative available to us and it comes from Vietnam. In the last decade or so a number of calligraphers have developed a fascinating cross fertilisation of our two cultures. The Vietnamese converted to Roman script a hundred years ago and so to the vast majority of the population the Chinese characters mean little more than they do to us.

By the Temple of Literature calligraphers of the Chinese script often offer their services - note the list, from which customers can select, that is being held

However, they do still use them for special occasions, such as weddings, and for good wishes, as can be seen beside the outer walls of the Temple of Literature where calligraphers of Chinese regularly gather, offering to write for you greetings of the type shown in the image to the right. So the ability to enjoy Chinese calligraphic brush work does still remain available to the Vietnamese. Accordingly there are many people who have a fine hand and in a typically Vietnamese way this talent was not to be wasted. Instead of writing the Chinese or ancient Nom characters, artists started to use the brush technique on the Roman alphabet. Signs, adverts, displays and communications have proliferated using this hybrid script. It allows the freedom and expression associated with the Chinese system, but can be intelligible to the reader who knows nothing of the characters.

Nearly all this work has been conducted in Vietnamese so the benefit to the English reader is zero, but some enterprising souls in the US have begun to produce works that we all can read, and which are capable of supporting a range of emotions and ambiguity that are undreamt of in our more restricted pen calligraphy. So far this is an esoteric art. The one site which did demonstrate the potential is at present "suspended", its author was Vu Dang Hoc and you can read the introduction to him on the general cultural website Look at Vietnam.

The group watches as Khanh demonstrates at his class

He christened this way of writing "W.E.Calligraphy" and produced the book 'Thu Phap Viet' (Vietnamese Calligraphy) in 2008 - sadly only in Vietnamese! You can appreciate the idea by visiting Vietnamese sites which use the technique, such as the site of the famous Ha Noi tea shop chain where you can see the use of Roman script executed with a brush to make a background of information. The lettering in the background of that page is in Roman script, although somewhat abstracted, you can clearly see Ts, Rs, and Cs in the righthand margin.

Learning this way of writing gives us westerners a much greater pleasure, for at once, (well as soon as we have mastered the technique in the 10 years or so it takes), we can write what we wish and make it as abstract or literal as the case demands. Around the world classes for Chinese calligraphy flourish, but for brush calligraphy of Roman script at present you have no choice but to get yourself to Ha Noi and the classes of Mr Khanh!

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