Unlike the Grotesque typeface, the strokes used in Heiti characters were not uniformly thick rather, they flared out at the ends, imitating the way a calligrapher’s brush lingers at the beginning and end of each stroke. Heiti typefaces from the printing age are distinct from the fonts you’ll find on your phone, in part because early Heiti was designed in line with the aesthetics of traditional Chinese calligraphy. Gothic-based typefaces were soon introduced to China and imitated by local type foundries, where readers took note of their thick, black strokes and renamed the style Fangtouti (“square end typefaces”) or Heiti. As modern lead-based movable type was introduced to East Asia, Japanese type foundries took inspiration from the Latin typeface style known as Grotesque, applying its monolinear strokes of consistent thickness to Chinese characters to create the so-called “Gothic” ( gochikku, later known as goshikku) typeface. It is the result of the collision of Eastern and Western cultures in the second half of the 19th century. The rise of Heiti is far more recent - and straightforward. Today, although typographers on the Chinese mainland prefer to refer to this script as Songti, it is known as Mingti elsewhere, including Taiwan. This style is marked by strokes of differing thickness with distinctive Serif-like decorative marks at their ends, sometimes known as “little triangles” in Chinese.

Indeed, somewhat confusingly, what is now known as Songti is actually a product of the Ming Dynasty (1369-1644), when engravers and printers developed elements of earlier Song Dynasty (960-1279) printed characters into a full-fledged script style.

Songti is by far the older of the two, though it’s not quite as old as the name suggests. Together, Heiti and Songti are the two leading modern Chinese typefaces. It is also starkly different from the more delicate Songti, or “Song Dynasty-style” typeface preferred by Chinese printers for books, newspapers, and other forms of literature for centuries. Literally “black-style,” Heiti is the dominant family of digital fonts in use on Chinese phones and computers around the world. This type of Chinese font is known as Heiti. At first glance, their component strokes seem to have a consistent thickness reminiscent of Latin Sans Serif typefaces like Helvetica. Turn on your mobile phone, set the system language to “Chinese,” and watch as the interface instantly converts to Chinese text.

Chinese character font style