This is a great article but it leaves out what in my opinion is the most interesting part of this history. Li Si unified the script in the form of "Lesser Seal"

This is a great article but it leaves out what in my opinion is the most interesting part of this history. Li Si unified the script in the form of "Lesser Seal", but this script wasn't used much except for, if I recall correctly, official proclamations, engravings and whatnot. At that time the first emperor purged the bureaucratic class, except for a small school of philosophers, and delegated most clerical tasks down to military officers and slaves. These people absolutely butchered the script and replaced its refined artistic regularity with a more casual free-form style. This is called Li Shu or "clerical script". Fast forward a hundred years or so, the new emperor is kinder to Confucianists and the academics are out of hiding. Now the scholars have a choice: use the standard script of Li Si or adopt the messy free-form style of the officers and slaves. The amazing thing is that they chose to use clerical script and did a complete re-interpretation of the aesthetics of Chinese writing based on the characteristics of that script. The "refined" artists of the later eras appreciated how fluid and dynamic the writing of untrained scribes was and incorporated those qualities into a completely new standard. There's an absolutely mind-blowing history here in terms of the evolution of an art form.