A total of 52 texts written on silk fabrics have been excavated from the Han Dynasty tombs at Mawangdui in Changsha City, Hunan Province. How to bring to life these 2,000-year-old characters, a new script between the well-known seal and clerical scripts? The staff of the Hunan Provincial Museum and the Hunan Malanshan Innovation Center for Culture Digitalization collectively realized it.
By collecting high-resolution data of the characters on the silk manuscripts, technicians at the museum created a database consisting of 228,700 images and 3,400 3D models. Based on this data, a team of young technicians from the innovation center analyzed the writing style of this ancient script with the aim of making it into a computer font.
Characters on silk fabrics excavated from the Han Dynasty tombs at Mawangdui are a new script between the well-known seal and clerical scripts. /CMG
"The designers were able to clearly observe the characters in detail from different angles by zooming in and rotating them. After accurately capturing their form and structure and analyzing their style, we transformed them into a digital font that computers can recognize," said Zhang Zhun, head of the Hunan Malanshan Innovation Center for Culture Digitalization.
With the help of AI generation models and vectorization techniques, a group of calligraphy experts, philologists, and font designers from the museum and innovation center created a new font called Mawangdui New Han Clerical, which contains around 5,000 characters. The font will later be made available to the public for free.
Zhang Zhun expressed her hope that the digitization of ancient characters can help bring relics to life, not only making Mawangdui New Han Clerical available for widespread public use, but also to reawaken people's interest in the culture of calligraphy and the Han Dynasty.