Wu Wei, president of the China Mawangdui Calligraphy Art Institute, shows a set of Mawangdui calligraphy stamps at a special ceremony in Shenzhen on Sunday.

Released by the State Postal Bureau, the set of custom stamps includes 12 characters in the Mawangdui writing style representing the 12 symbolic animals that are used in Chinese astrology to denote the year of a person’s birth.

Wu, a Shenzhen-based artist, redeveloped the art of Mawangdui calligraphy, which had been lost for more than 2,000 years.

The artist revived the style based on writing samples on silk that were discovered in the Mawangdui Tomb of the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 25) in Changsha, Hunan Province in 1972.

(Shenzhen Daily May 17, 2005)