For instance, the Shenlong 神龍 copy, widely regarded as the most faithful to the original and attributed to the Tang calligrapher Feng Chengsu 馮承素 (617–672), reveals an impressive attention to detail. The copy was traced meticulously, likely by adhering a piece of wax paper over the original, tracing onto the wax paper, then tracing again onto silk. It thus preserves certain mistakes and imperfections, which are regarded as a valuable imprint of Wang’s internal state, to a degree not seen in other editions. The Shenlong copy is one of only a few that survive from the Tang.

Another is a silk copy attributed to another court calligrapher, Chu Suiliang 褚遂良 (596–658). It has a highly noticeable deviation from other copies; namely, a component has been added above the character 領 in the fourth line to form 嶺 (both characters, in this context, mean “mountain ridge”). The exact origins of such differences remain unexplained and have become the focus of scholarly interest.

These earlier copies then served as models for other copies: a Tang copy attributed to Ouyang Xun, for instance, was chosen to be carved in stone because of its fidelity to the original. This stone was later lost, then rediscovered during the Qingli 慶曆 Era (1041–1048) of the Song Dynasty in Dingzhou 定州, a city in modern Hebei, which at the time was under the Dingwu military regional commandery (定武軍節度使). The many rubbings made from this Dingwu stone, such as this one, are now among the most treasured. They stand in striking contrast to the traced copies because the characters are in negative, pale against the black ground of the rubbing ink, with edges that blur.

A couple centuries later, one of these Dingwu rubbings was copied freehand by Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322), the Yuan calligrapher who wrote an annotation to the Shenlong copy, while traveling in a boat to Khanbaliq, today’s Beijing. This copy of a rubbing of a stone carving of a copy was severely damaged in a fire in the Qing Dynasty—born in water, destroyed in flame.

Another Yuan Dynasty copy by Lu Jishan 陸繼善 (fl. 14th century), meanwhile, has a very different feel: it is traced meticulously, and with the sole exception of the Shenlong copy, it most faithfully preserves the characteristics of the original. These two copies are a good illustration of the diversity of this tradition. A millennium after Wang Xizhi drafted the original, Zhao Mengfu was making spontaneous freehand copies, while Lu Jishan was carefully tracing the characters one by one, each from different calligraphic pieces that were themselves copies.