Haoquan Wang

Project Description:

Brief

The project is about inventing a language for the imaging city(non-existing) Anastasia to make people believe that Anastasia is a real city instead of an imagining one. The language should be designed to reflect some aspects of the city and be consistent in logic. For the language of Anastasia, it is supposed to serve as a convenient information transmission tool to support the materialistic society, which is full of desire, merchandise exchange, and exotic experience and joy. 

Research

To better “make believe”, this language invention is based on two parts of research, historical background research, and language studies research. There is a process of convincing myself that this is a real city and the language is indeed been used in the past inside this city.

Historical background research:

Geography location

The first step of the process is pinning the city on the map, which is also the first section of historical background research. In the “Imagining cities” paragraph, Anastasia is built upon a centric canal. This is my inspiration, and I add upon some imaging detail, which is two distributaries originated from the centric canal. The major canal and the two distributaries form a triangle structural shape, which is the first structure of the city. The beginning of the research is to locate such a place on our planet. Since I pictured this city in my mind as a mysterious European city, I narrow down the map from the whole planet to just west Europe. A place between Pau, France, and Lourdes, France is where I am located.

The approximate location of Anastasia is next to Nay town, France on the current Geography map. So I choose Nay town as where the “historic relics” I design come from so that the Part II design can better “make believe” because it is quite near.

The history and why it disappeared

In my setting of Anastasia, Anastasia does not exist now, they magically disappear from history so that there are not many relics and records left. However, the setting is not compelling enough for people to hear. To better support this unreal history, I need theories to back up. So I start to research any events that can erase a city from not only the map but also the record of history. I connect the vanish of Anastasia to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, which was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. It seems reasonable for me to ascribe the death of a city to the massacre especially the one triggered by a Religion war.

To further forge the connection between Anastasia’s death and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, I decide to use literature or written material as the witness of this connection. It is not easy to find out a proper, real artifact with my purpose. There are several requirements that the artifact needs to be fulfilled:

1. The author of the artifact should travel to the area between France and Spain, near the Pyrenees.
2. It should contain content related to religion, especially Catholicism, Christianity, and evil.
3. It should be in the format of literature, arts, or anything abstract because it cannot be too detailed or straightforward to show history.

As a result of my history research, Charles Pierre Baudelaire, a French poet who had a rich experience in traveling and had been to the Pyrenees when he was 14. His work Les fleurs du mal (Flower of Evil) part V and VI  are related to Satan and religion. So I can just describe it as “the reflection of Anastasia’s death” even though I didn’t really finish the book and understand what it was about.

Language studies Research:

Spoken form research

I want to emphasize the exotic feeling of speaking the language of Anastasia because the city is an open society that embraces strangers and hedonism. I take human-invented language, “Klingon” and the language of master “Yoda” as references, which all achieve a sense of exotic alien language. Both Klingon and Yoda languages have unique grammar structures, which is the reason for the “exotic feelings”. The most common word order of Klingon is “Object-Verb-Subject”; the most common word order of Yoda language is “Object-Subject-Verb”. This gives me the inspiration to play with word orders and grammar structure.

Besides speaking order, the tone is also another design inspiration for the language of Anastasia. Tone can be applied to represent meanings. Chinese, for example, has four tones to form different words and phrases. 

Written form research 

I research the existing language system. The first language system is the Latin language which using the Latin alphabet as the language foundation. These languages are widely used in Europe. It seems that the language of Anastasia should belong to the Latin language system because of the setting of the European city. However, I think the language of Anastasia should reflect the material and objects of the city. Therefore, it should originate from a symbol system that reflects any physical forms surrounded. It should be similar to hieroglyphic languages such as ancient Egyptian language and ancient Chinese.

 

How do people in Anastasia speak?

Basic rules

To design the way people in Anastasia speak, I bring all my research result together and figure out a list of what kind of features should the language demonstrates. And here is the list:

1. The language should reflect the key/soul of the city, “the city of desire” and “the materialistic society” both in spoken form and written form. 
2. The language should be convenient enough for use, the efficiency of information exchange should be guaranteed.
3. The way people speak should be “exotic”, which I can achieve through the adjustment of sentence structure and the application of tones

With this list, I start my design. In order to “make believe”, I choose to create this language from something that already exists in the world. I firstly readjust the words order/sentence structure of English. Learning from Klingon, I put objects to the very beginning of a sentence, and verb/predicate as the following. To be unique from the other human-invented language, I decide to remove the subject from the sentence structure and use tones of verb/predicate to demonstrate the meaning of the subject. So the final sentence structure is “Object+Verb/Predicate(with subject tone)”. For example, in Anastasia’s language, “I want to eat dinner” = “Dinner want to eat(with I tone)”. To elaborate more, I set a small rule for Anastasia’s language: there are only three tones, “I/We”, “You/You” and “He/She/It/They”. This is the first phase of design this language.

The structure can also reflect the city’s features: “Anastasia residents’ language habits are more focused on the things around them or their desires. Self-consciousness is weak compared to the perception of others. What they are going to do and what they are trying to get is more important” (quote from my Project I idea presentation slide). Besides reflecting the personality of the city, the language structure that ignores the subject element emphasizes more on the action and the object, which is definitely convenient for use in daily life for me since for most of the cases people do not need to say subject in every single sentence.

The more detailed a thing is, the more believable people may think it is. To make people believe more, I keep exploring how people may speak during their daily life. Question sentence is necessary for everyone. So as the people of Anastasia. Tone is one of the methods of showing a question throughout different cultural backgrounds. Since tone is taken to demonstrate the idea of subject, I need to find out a new way to show questions under the language system of Anastasia. I take inspiration from my Japan traveling experience, which I realize that the local people who can only speak few words of English always repeat the words they know to question me. So repeat the Verb/Predicate at the end of a sentence is my final design for Anastasia’s language to question. For example, “do you want to eat dinner” = “dinner want to eat eat(with “You” tone)”.

with these detailed, well design rules, the language can be used in most cases. This is the key to “make believe” for me because, with these complete language rules, people can learn how to use this language with a vocabulary list or dictionary.

A small detail of speaking

To add some small designs to elaborate the language context, I fake a story about the city. Here is the quotation from my presentation slides:

“People’s desires seem to be satisfied by everything in the center. When people talk about what they want to do, what they want to eat, what they want to achieve, they get a unified answer: “Go to the center.” Over time, “Go to the center” meant “yes,” and “Go outside” became “no”.”

The character of the city Anastasia, yes and no will also be shown later.

How people write

To correspond to my story setting, the language of Anastasia is no longer exists and there are few relics and records of its language. Therefore, for part II, I choose to design some surviving relics of written form so that the written form design won’t make the language suspicious. The way people write should also follow the way people speak. The sentence structure keeps the same and the tone should also be “written” down. To show the tone, I use lines at the different orientations of sentences to represent subject meaning:

So when the people outside want to read and experience the language, the first thing they need to do is to look at the lines surrounding a sentence, which can help to figure who is the subject. Then read from left to right, the most left is the object, and the f0llwing are Verbs/Predicates. At the end of the reading, check whether the last character is repeated twice.

Here are my design images of Anastasia’s written characters:

In order to make these designs like “relics”, I use the effect function of Adobe Illustrator “Effects->Distort->Ocean Ripple” and play with the values setting.

In order to call back to my historic background research, especially why Anastasia disappeared, I fake a note relic to “record” the massacre.

And I also find a church to be the place where this “record” is revealed. It is discovered in the Eglise Saint Vincent in Nay Town.

 

Reflection

The only context I used in the language I design is the time when I design it. At first, I want to write down a passage to fake a doomsday record instead of just a few sentences. When I create, I kind of form a sense that this language really may be used once I can invent more words and phrases. To draft the article, I restructure sentences in my mind, with the grammar of Anastasia, and then use symbols to create a combination of illustrations that represent the meanings. One thing which is really interesting is that as I keep creating Anastasia’s “article”, my language habit, or the way I think, starts to shift and change into Anastasia mode. From this perspective, I think my design succeed in “make believe”. It is well designed in both grammar rules, spoken form, and written, and there is a small detail to improve its reliability.

Besides language itself, I think the story I add on for Anastasia serves an important role in terms of make believe. Connecting with real history, real literature and real geography information are really compelling. But there is still a logic flaw, which Professor Marcella pointed out in our critique.

The geographical location of Anastasia is between France and Spain, which means that its language system is supposed to indicate some elements of French or Spanish. The current design is hard to “make believe” because it looks completely different from those two languages. It makes more sense if this city is located on an island. (This is my paraphrases for Professor Marsella’s feedback). This is my largest logic flaw and I need to correct it in the future if I choose to keep working on this project. Also, the fake settings should correspond to each other.

 

Reference

1. 1. Pyrenees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenees
   2. St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre
   3. Huguenots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenots
   4. Google Map
   5. Imagined Cities: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XHetcWG1cd-_fcdOX1Bw83mTdtO3PYCy/view
   6. Charles Pierre Baudelaire: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%8F%E5%B0%94%C2%B7%E6%B3%A2%E5%BE%B7%E8%8E%B1%E5%B0%94
   7. Project I idea presentation slide: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12IMD8aJmthCr4ztp3OOp1JMdlIbZxRoe4jovRTACWL0/edit?usp=sharing
   8. Project I presentation slide: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1a9QeGr9xcc407PjwFKLosdeMGR2Xyd2-MXWk-g-uKPE/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

“Uglier and Uglier” is a 7 hours long video filmed by Chinese artists Song Ta in 2012. Song Ta filmed passing women in a university without their consent and ranked them from “the most attractive” to “the unforgiving”. This art piece raised a firestorm on the Chinese internet and OCAT, the art gallery which exhibited this art piece has already withdrawn it and apologized for their “careless evaluation”.

This work, and all the social reactions triggered by it, also raise a firestorm in my mind and force me to think over contemporary art and conceptual art. Let me analyze this artwork first, and try to understand why Song Ta created this, and why he did it in an offensive, aggressive and disrespectful way. Looking at the content of the video, Song Ta chose a very brutal and naked way to expose the issue of appearance ranking and privacy, both of which are happening all the time in any corner of the world, to the public. We have to admit that, shooting women without consent, ranking them from the most beautiful to most ugly, posting the video in an art gallery to display, is provoking. I felt disgusting because he just reveal the evil nature of human beings by doing this, and in an illegal way. It hurt not only just the women in the video but also all the female groups in society. So why he did this? Is he a bad person who materializes females? And why OCAT decided to exhibit this work?

I tried hard to convinced myself that it is a work with deep meaning, revealing the social status of females, appearance disrespect, and privacy leak. The first reason I explain for Song Ta is that he had to choose this provoking way of sarcasm so that his voice could be heard by the public even though it would hurt others, and he had prophesied everything may happen after the exhibition of his work, including the anger of the society, especially of the female group. He even exaggerated his disrespect and attack through the interview with BIE(Vice in China). With my assumption, video, interview, exhibition, his public speaking, online discussion, public attitudes’ shift, and even the public internet attacks on Song Ta himself, can be seen as a series of performance art about feminism progress in China. I almost succeeded in persuading myself to believe this is a real art piece and forgive Song Ta’s guilt for hurting those women. But I questioned myself at the end, is he really who I think he is? Whether this work is intentional or just pure evil? What is more is that he indeed violated the law and hurt people. Can art only be a symbol of beauty and goodness? Should the art of evil exist?

I still have no answer to those questions. My concentration gradually moved to “what is art”, “art and goodness” and “the relation between art and law”. I wish to bring up this piece(maybe it is not art at all) and discuss this.

Reference: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/song-ta-uglier-and-uglier-art-intl-hnk/index.html

You are going to write a short fake interview (questions and answers) about the city you have chosen for Project I. What does your interview comment, support or criticize about the city?

1. What kind of interview is it?  Come up with a scenario of the interview. 
   1. Who’s being interviewed? Why is this interview important?
   2. Who’s the interviewer? What kind of narrative does it add to the scenario you have come up with?
   3. What kind of questions does the interviewer ask? How much information do you want to reveal through the interview? You can also leave the reader with questions. 
   4. What kind of details do you need to include in order to make this interview convincing?
2. Provide an image or artifact to go with the interview, but the object does not need to appear in the interview. What is the relevance between the image/object and the interview? 
3. Post the interview as well as the image/artifact on your blog post and explain their relevance. 

 

Fake interview:

 

Interviewer(BA below):  Sean Baudelaire, the brother of Charles Pierre Baudelaire a French poet who traveled to The Pyrenees in 1838. He followed his brother, traveling alongside Thy Pyrenees, and saw the cities of Anastasia from a far distance. He could not find the geographical information about this prosperous city on the map. So he spent time finding and interviewing people who had been there.

Interviewee(anonymouse): A traveler who had been to Anastasia and stayed there for 1 month.

 

BA: When I travel alongside the north side of The Pyrenees, more specifically, the northwest corner of the mountain, a place called Lourdes, I saw a city built on the place where three rivers meet. You said you have been there before, can you tell me the detailed position and information about it?

Interviewee: Yeah, I traveled there several years ago. I cannot remember the exact position cuz it was an accident that I visit there. I just passed by and need to refresh myself for the journey to Spain, which I need to go around the side of the mountain. I can pin it on the map if you need it.

BA: For sure, I will pin my travel site and the direction I look through for you. Just make sure we are talking about the same city.

Interviewee: (Pick up the map) Hah, yeah I think it is the same city.

Interviewee: Emmm, well, it was weird though, it is a medium city I would say, it was built upon three rivers, and it is convenient in terms of transportation. There were exotic goods for sale in the city. And I also saw many people not from there, emmm, you can tell they are not indigenous because they speak differently, compared to the local. And it is weird because all the passengers only stayed for a while, they would not come back to this city, Perhaps it is because of the weird language of Anastasia. It is not difficult to learn but weird to use for the people outside.

BA: How weird? 

Interviewee: So they don’t use subject. The local people seem to ignore themselves in life, they want more from the outside instead.

BA: True, weird enough. But how do they speak?

Interviewee: well, for example, if they want to say “I want to eat this”, it should be in “this want to eat”.

BA: So they emphasize the object, and the action following. But how do they clarify the subject of action?

Interviewee: Tones. It took me some time to figure it out. I had the same puzzle you have. They use three tones to represent I/We, he/she/they, and you.

BA: Sounds hard to learn, it might be the reason why people choose to leave and never come back.

Interviewee: True. It is hard, but when you get it, it is okay though. It has its own advantage.

BA: For example?

Interviewee: It is convenient, in terms of information transmission. 

 

(BA recording, for a short time)

 

Interviewee: There is also an interesting point. If they want to express questioning, they would repeat the predicate or the action at the end of the sentence. It is quite cute.

BA: Okay, but I still think, it is not compelling enough for the argument of why people are unwilling to stay.

Interviewee: Language is subjective, I think, that is one of the reasons for me. I prefer a detailed structure and clear language. But I think for most the people, they might think they will be enslaved by the desire of cities…

 

(to be continued)

Artifact of interview:

This is the map Interviewer used to check whether they are talking about the same city. It has some pin notes on the location of the interviewer’s travel position and the location of Anastasia where the interviewee had been to.

(Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrenees#/media/File:Pyrenees_topographic_map-en.svg)

 

Link

Think of a fiction novel that you thought felt real while reading it. 

Write a blog post and write below:

Title a (short) fiction novel:

Short summary of novel:

In your own opinion, explain what elements of the novel made you feel immersed in the narrative to a point of trust and belief.

Title: The Three Body Problem

Summary:

The Three Body Problem is the most famous science fiction novel of China, written by Cixin Liu. The story is about the clash of civilization between the earth and the the planet Trisolaris. The story of The Three Body Problem starts from the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, a top-secret project to explore the existence of aliens (Red Bank Project), directly under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee. Ye Wenjie, a female astrophysicist who witnessed her father’s death by red guards as a physics professor at Tsinghua University, entered the top-secret base by chance. After accidentally discovering the sun’s gain reflection, she privately used the principle to send out twice radio waves containing earth’s message into space. The message was received by the inhabitants of the nearest star system, the Trisolarans, and from then on the communication between the Trisolarns and earth was established. There are three suns in the galaxy of Trisolaris, which makes the climate and living codition on the planet Trisolaris unpreditcable and almost impossible for the continuation of civilization. The people of Trisolaris tried to calculate stellar movment but failed. They pinned their hopes on interplanetary migration. After receiving the signal and information of earth, they choose to conquer earth and set off from 4 light years away. After basic science is locked away by the Trisolaran civilization’s technology Sophon, humanity begins to fight the trisolaran advanced civilization with the “Face the Wall Project”, and discovers the Dark Forest law, winning and maintaining a fragile and short-lived peace. With the help of other super civilizations hidden in the dark cosmic background, human beings lead other civilizations to destroy trisolaran civilization by launching gravitational waves, but they also lay hidden dangers for their own road ahead.

Why Immersive?

I feel pretty immersive while reading for many reasons. Since it is a full-length novel with a bunch of background setting that needs a long paragraph to explain, I only want to cover several simple settings which bring me into this ‘authentic’ world. The first reason is the author’s application of real history. I’ve always thought that if a fictional thing wants to look very real, it must be real in some way, or look very close to the real. The story begins in the Cultural Revolution. Ye despaired of mankind after witnessing his father being beaten to death by red Guards led by his mother, and sent a signal into outer space. That’s how the story unfolds. Apart from the actual history of the Cultural Revolution, sending something into outer space is what humans have been doing since the 1960s. The “Red Bank project” in the novel reminds me of China’s signal transmitter in Guizhou province. Because China experienced the Cultural Revolution, because many astrophysicists saw despair in the disaster of that year, and because China actually had astrosignal transmitters, which were actually used to look for signs of aliens, I even wondered if this was really an unknown history while reading.

The second reason is the setting of “Sophon”, the invisible particle supercomputer created by the Trisolarans to spy on and lock down the earth, which can draw energy from a vacuum, fly at extremely close to the speed of light, communicate instantaneously using quantum entanglement, and use microscopic high-dimensional space to go anywhere and switch dimensions freely. Because it would take a long time to get from Trisolaran to Earth, it is highly likely that in the process, human technology will make a breakthrough and no longer be afraid of Trisolarans. In order to stop human technological progress, especially in the field of high energy physics, the trisolarans use this technology to interfere with human scientific experiments and monitor human beings at all times. Sophon makes me crazy because it is intangible, it could be anywhere. Many of the experiments in high energy physics that are carried out every day in the world are failing, and human progress in the field of high energy physics is not smooth. Could there really be sophons interfering with the scientific process of human beings, could there really be these invisible particles watching us?

 

 

 

1. Zobeide, Cities & Desires 5 p45-46

Zobeide is a city of dreams, desires, and pursuits. It originated from a sharing, identical dream of men from different countries. In their dream, people are in a beautiful city, the White City. In my imagination, maybe it is not white in the architectural sense, but the bright but soft moonlight brings beauty to the dream city, a kind of artistic conception that can only exist in dreams. People met a woman in the city. She had long hair and was naked. People all fell in love with her and start pursuing her, but no one succeeded. After waking up, people tried to find the city, looking for the woman, but still no success. So the people decided to bring the dream city into reality, and everyone arranged the streets along the path they were following and rearranged the streets where they had lost the girl so that they would not lose her again, but no one ever saw the girl again.

I think Zobeide is synonymous with all the stories that are driven by dreams and desires to the big city. The woman in the dream is the desire of people’s hearts, but when the desire stays in the mind, it is unreachable, and that is why no one can pursue that woman in the dream. People begin to take practical actions to find, to choose the city where “the girl might exist”, a city where their dreams could be realized. Those places are often subjectively embellished because there may be “that girl”. The reality of these cities may not be so rosy. That’s why the first person who came to Zobeide couldn’t understand why so many people wanted to be there because he didn’t look at the city through a dream filter. New York City is the one that comes to my mind when I read this imaginative city.

This is the visual exploration of Zobeide:

Actually, I blend two images of NYC together, one is old and dirty, and the other is more prosperous:

Original images:

2. Anastasia, Cities & Desires 2, p12

It is a beautiful and rich city, rich in material life and exotic, open-minded, and hedonistic. Food and wine, exotic jewelry, and men and women splashing in the garden pond are all evidence of a materialistic society. But beneath this beautiful surface lies the truth of desire. People are slaves of desire and a part of desire itself. This is a powerful city that has everything that individuals can’t have, everything that people want to enjoy but don’t have. When your desire is aroused, the city will stand naked in front of you, you can not stop, can not refuse, you can only surrender to his evil and sinister. In this city, all your slaves seem to be tied to desire, and your job is to make a desire come to life at the conceptual level, but the work itself is definitely a desire because you want to pay for something. In my opinion, everything is desire itself, and people have been assimilated.

From my personal experience, Shanghai is definitely in this category. Every corner of Shanghai is filled with desire. Bourgeois cafes, late-night jazz bars, hard-partying nightclubs, high-end restaurants above the clouds, branded stores of all kinds as consumerism. In this materialistic city, people are exposed to desires all the time. Some people are completely enslaved by desires. The sober individuals are always fighting against different temptations, and do not know when his surrender will come. Every time an idea comes up, this city gives you an answer. This is the magic city, this is Shanghai.

 

3. Zora, Cities & Memories 4, p15-16

Zora is not the kind of city that makes its own profile out of the city as a whole. Instead, every detail of the city creates memories for you, so that its memory points are so unique compared to other cities that can be summed up in one word. As mentioned in the passage, though there is nothing particularly beautiful or rare about them, the streets, the houses on both sides of them, the windows and doors of the houses are left little by little in your memory. This is a city to savor, a city to remember. This explains why the most knowledgeable people can remember Zora. For ordinary people, Zora is difficult to remember. It is not as iconic as other cities. Its connotation is so profound that it may reject the public. But unfortunately, in order to be memorized easily, “the city was forgotten by the earth”. I read to the end of the article without fully understanding what had happened, perhaps the city had lost its essence.

I can’t think of a real city that perfectly fits this description, but I think this is also a city that has lost its connotation. The city for some reason has self-doubt, perhaps giving up its uniqueness, perhaps trying to get closer to other cities in order to be remembered. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I can’t give an answer.

 

4. Chloe, Trading Cities 2, p51-52

In the city of Chloe, people are always in a hurry and are far away from each other. When people meet on the street when their eyes cross, a million thoughts come into mind, and opinions about strangers are formed. But this kind of thinking doesn’t last, and people quickly jump to the next goal and repeat the thought process. It’s a cold society, but human contact still happens.

Such cities are very common in real life. What impresses me most is Tokyo. When I walk at the intersection outside Shibuya JR station, the busiest intersection in the world, the most heavily traveled road, everyone is making eye contact with everyone else. I bet everyone has opinions and thoughts about others in their mind. But they’ll always pass each other. What’s the connection

 

Assignment I: 

Choose any specific object you consider to be authentic such as an artifact in a museum or from an archaeological site, electricity bill issued by the city, or a recording of an obsolete language of a Native American tribe. Write a blog post for no more than three paragraphs about the artifact addressing below: 

1. Upload an image of your artifact. (2D/3D object, audio, video, etc.)
2. Explain why, in your opinion, this artifact is authentic.
3. Now, let’s assume this artifact could be fake. Based on what reason do you think this artifact is not genuine?

 

The work of Su Tingyu, a calligrapher of the Qing Dynasty was exhibited in Jiangxi Provincial Museum and Xiamen Museum. This work raised a great controversy because of the use of simplified Chinese “乱” in this Qing Dynasty cultural relic. 

Let’s assume this artifact is a fake one first. This is not a genuine one because most of the simplified Chinese characters in use today were introduced after The State Council of China officially announced “the Simplified Chinese Characters Program” in 1956. Hence, in this case, the shown character is supposed to be “亂” instead of “乱”. This is the main argument in terms of its authenticity.

However, it could be authentic since there are cases of the use of simplified Chinese characters in ancient Chinese calligraphy. The characters for “east东” and “horse马” in Wang Xizhi’s cursive “Seventeen Ties” are indistinguishable from the simplified characters used in modern times

Wang Xizhi’s Running script lanting Collection Preface contains 324 characters, of which 102 are simplified characters, accounting for one-third of the total words.

Coincidentally, in addition to Su Tingyu’s and Wang Xizhi’s simplified characters, many simplified characters even appeared in bamboo slips and silk manuscripts of the Han Dynasty, and were used throughout the dynasties.

Many simplified characters were also found in the warning World Tongyan, which was officially published by Feng Menglong, a litterateur in the late Ming Dynasty.

In conclusion, the use of simplified Chinese characters in ancient works does not mean they are fake! It just means that People were lazy when it came to writing.