Born in a small town in Zhejiang Province, Wu Changshou began composing poems and carving seals, an art that required both manual dexterity and a keen sense of composition, at the age of ten and became president of the Xiling Seal Art Society in 1913. Wu was particularly fascinated with the famed stone drum inscriptions, poems or songs recording hunting expeditions that were carved on ten stone boulders during the Qin dynasty (221–206 B.C.E.) and record an early form of writing known as the "stone drum" script of shiguwen. Widely known through rubbings, the Stone Drum Inscriptions have been the focus of much study and discussion since the eighteenth century. In addition to his many works of calligraphy in this style of writing, in which he often cited these inscriptions, or sections of them, he also composed poems based on these texts.