This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On the third day of the third lunar month in 353, in the Eastern Jin dynasty, the calligrapher and official Wang Xizhi invited a group of family and friends, forty-one people by the traditional count, to his Orchid Pavilion for the Spring Purification Festival, an old custom of gathering by flowing water to cleanse away misfortune. The guests turned the occasion into a game: cups of wine were set floating down a winding stream, and whenever a cup came to rest before a guest, that guest had to compose a poem on the spot or drink the wine as a forfeit. By the end of the afternoon the party had produced thirty-seven poems, and Wang Xizhi, reportedly already warmed by wine himself, was asked to write a preface introducing the collected verses. Using a brush made from weasel whiskers on cocoon paper, he wrote out the Lantingji Xu, the Orchid Pavilion Preface, in the flowing, semi-cursive running script at which he excelled. The text itself, twenty-eight columns and roughly three hundred and twenty-four characters, reflects on the pleasure of the gathering and, in its closing lines, on the impermanence that makes such pleasures worth recording at all: the friends who meet today will scatter, and only the written page will let a later reader recover what the afternoon felt like. It is that unplanned quality, a working document dashed off at a party rather than a formal commission, that later calligraphers prized most: the characters vary in size and pressure, several are corrected in the artist's own hand, and the whole page reads as a record of a moving arm rather than a fixed design. Chinese tradition came to regard the Lantingji Xu as the finest example of running script ever produced and one of the most influential calligraphies in Chinese history, a model that generations of later calligraphers copied and later gatherings of poets consciously imitated. Wang Xizhi's original did not survive; according to tradition it was buried with the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong, an admirer of Wang's work who is said to have had it interred in his tomb. Every version now known, including the most celebrated tracing copies made under Taizong's own court, is a reproduction, yet the fame of that one drunken afternoon's preface has outlived the physical page it was written on by more than a thousand years.