Mongolian La and the Calligraphic Tradition

Calligraphy in the traditional Mongolian script has been practised continuously since the script's adoption, and it developed in the same settings as the literature it served: chanceries, monasteries and the copying of religious books. The vertical spine is what gives the tradition its character. A column of Mongolian is judged first on the straightness and evenness of that spine, and then on how the strokes hang off it, so the discipline is close to the discipline of ruling a line and different from that of a script composed of separate characters.

Seal script, ornamental hands and monumental forms all exist, and the folded ornamental style used on official seals is the best known of them outside Mongolia because it appears on documents that reached other courts. The art was disrupted in the twentieth century in the Mongolian People's Republic when Cyrillic replaced the traditional script in general use from the 1940s, and it continued without that break in Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script has remained in everyday use. Mongolia has since made room for the script again in official life, and calligraphy has been one of the routes by which it came back, taught and exhibited as an art before it was restored to ordinary business.