Jami' al-tawarikh
The lavish illustrations and calligraphy required the efforts of hundreds of scribes and artists, with the intent that two new copies (one in Persian, and one in Arabic) would be created each year and distributed to schools and cities around the Ilkhanate, in the Middle East, Central Asia, Anatolia, and the Indian subcontinent. Approximately 20 illustrated copies were made of the work during Rashid al-Din's lifetime, but only a few portions remain, and the complete text has not survived. The oldest known copy is an Arabic version, of which half has been lost, but one set of pages is currently in the Khalili Collection, comprising 59 folios from the second volume of the work. Another set of pages, with 151 folios from the same volume, is owned by the Edinburgh University Library. Two Persian copies from the first generation of manuscripts survive in the Topkapı Palace Library in Istanbul. The early illustrated manuscripts together represent "one of the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid art in any medium", and are the largest surviving body of early examples of the Persian miniature.
Japanese calligraphy
At the same time, a style of calligraphy unique to Japan emerged. Writing had been popularized, and the "kana" syllabary was devised to deal with elements of pronunciation that could not be written with the borrowed Chinese characters. Japanese calligraphers still fitted the basic characters, called "kanji" , into the squares laid out centuries before. A fragment, "Kara-ai no hana no utagire" (, AD 749) is considered the first text to show a style unique to Japanese calligraphy; it shows a Tanka poem using Man'yōgana, thus deviated from contemporary Chinese calligraphy. Ono no Michikaze (AD 894-966), one of the so-called "sanseki" , "Three Brush Traces"), along with Fujiwara no Sukemasa and Fujiwara no Yukinari, is considered the founder of the authentically Japanese "wayō" style, or "wayō-shodō" . This development resonated with the court: Kūkai said to Emperor Saga, "China is a large country and Japan is relatively small, so I suggest writing in a different way." The , a poem written by Emperor Saga on the occasion of Saichō's death, was one of the examples of such a transformation. Ono no Michikaze served as an archetype for the "Shōren-in" school, which later became the "Oie" style of calligraphy. The "Oie" style was later used for official documents in the Edo period and was the prevailing style taught in the "terakoya" schools of that time.