Calligraphy at the New Summer Palace (Yiheyuan)

This man is using a sponge brush on a stick to do calligraphy on the stones at the New Summer Palace. He is dipping the sponge into water; as you can see, it comes to a point and works something like a brush would with ink. He's doing it just for fun, since the water-painting will soon dry and disappear. Not everyone recognizes the water marks, which stretch for perhaps ten or twenty yards, as a labor of love. When they do they carefully hop over them and stop to admire the artists. I don't know if people rent the brushes or bring them with them on their visits to the New Summer Palace, which was crowded with local people and Chinese as well as other tourists. This demonstrates the reverence the Chinese have for the formation of characters as well as for the meaning of the words themselves. When Chinese children learn the characters they must practice the exact order in which the strokes should be created; it's a process that is awkward at first but becomes more automatic with practice. You can see hundreds of different fonts, many of them calligraphic, every day in China. Ephemeral as the writing is, it's lovely while it lasts.