were taught in school that the Chinese characters were the invention of one man, Cang Jie, an official in the court of the Yellow Emperor around 2600 BCE. According to one version of this legend, Cang Jie got the idea for characters from the tracks which he saw birds and other animals make in the ground. However, scholars today agree that Chinese characters are not the invention of any one person but are rather the cumulative product of many individuals over a long period of time. The characters are quite clearly pictographic in origin. The prototypes for the characters are simple drawings of animals and other natural objects which can be found etched on fragments of ancient pottery dating back to before 2000 BCE. Recently, there have been reports of thousands of pictorial symbols dating back even earlier that have been found carved on cliff faces in northwest China.
The earliest examples of fully developed Chinese writing we have today are the so-called 甲骨文 Jiăgŭwén or oracle bone inscriptions, dating from the late Shang Dynasty (ca. 1300 BCE). To divine the future for the Shang rulers, priests would hold ox collar bones and tortoise shells over a fire until they developed cracks and then interpret the meanings of the cracks, making predictions about weather, religion, politics, and war. The interpretations and predictions would then be recorded on the bones and shells in a few lines of text written in the characters of the day (see the photos on this page and page 15). Over 100,000 pieces of Jiăgŭwén are extant, containing over 3,000 different characters, roughly half of which can be read today.
Oracle bone
The story of the discovery of the Jiăgŭwén is a colorful chapter in the history of Chinese paleography. The oracle bones, which had been discovered in the vicinity of Anyang, Henan, had for some time been regarded as “dragon bones” and had been sold and ground up for Chinese medicine in pharmacies in the Beijing area. In 1899, a scholar by the name of Wang Yirong, who was taking the dragon bones for malaria, examined the characters on the bones and started researching them with his friend Liu E. They concluded that the inscriptions on the bones were older than any other characters known at the time. Wang died the next year, but Liu published a book on his and Wang’s collection of bones in 1903, which made their discovery known to the world.
Both the forms of the characters and the total number of characters multiplied greatly during the succeeding Zhou Dynasty (11th century to 221 BCE), differing widely from place to place. The characters from this period, most extant specimens of which are inscribed on various kinds of bronze vessels, are collectively known as 大篆 Dàzhuàn or Great Seal Script.
In 221 BCE, Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, unified the country and made mandatory throughout all of China the use of the Qin script. This script, known as 小篆 Xiăozhuàn or Small Seal Script, is ancestral to all later forms of Chinese writing and is still sometimes used today for ornamental purposes and in the making of seals. At about the same time as the official Xiăozhuàn script, there developed among the common people a much simplified form of Xiăozhuàn called 隶书 ( 隸書 ) Lìshū or Clerical Script, which was characterized by a straightening out of round strokes and a generally much less pictographic appearance. By the latter part of the Han Dynasty (ca. 200 CE), Lìshū had been further simplified into 楷书 ( 楷書 ) Kăishū or Standard Script, which has served ever since as the standard for both printed and carefully handwritten characters.
The table below summarizes the development of two characters from their Jiăgŭwén to their Kăishū forms (but keep in mind that it is of necessity somewhat simplified, and in actual practice there was not a neat and easily dissected progression—two or more types of characters typically coexisted in different locales for decades or even centuries):
STRUCTURE OF THE CHARACTERS
Every Chinese character is made up of from one to twenty or more separate strokes. The basic strokes are eight in number: diăn (丶), héng ( 一), shù (丨), piĕ (丿), nà (
According to Chinese tradition, the characters are divided based upon their structure into six types called 六书 ( 六書 ) Liùshū “Six Categories of Writing.” This system of categorization was first employed in a well-known Chinese etymological dictionary known as the 说文解字 ( 說文解字 ) Shuōwén Jiĕzì that was completed by a man named Xu Shen in 121 CE. The different categories of characters are as follows:
1. 象形字 Xiàngxíngzì “Pictographs.” These are more or less stylized drawings of objects in the real world such as elements of the universe, topographical features, flora, fauna, parts of the human body, tools, and architectural structures. Although in the development of the Chinese script, pictographs were the earliest type of character, they now make up only a small fraction of characters. Thus, it’s incorrect to consider modern Chinese writing as being primarily pictographic, or to refer to all characters as “pictographs.” Some examples of pictographs still in common use today are:
Oracle bone
2. 指事字 Zhĭshìzì “Simple Ideographs.” Rather than being pictures of objects, like the pictographs, these are symbolic representations of abstract concepts such as number and position. The proportion of simple ideographs in written Chinese is even smaller than that of pictographs. Examples:
3. 会意字 ( 會意字 ) Huìyìzì “Compound Ideographs.” While simple ideographs are composed of a unified whole and are complete in themselves, compound ideographs rely for their meaning on the combination or interaction of the meanings of two or more separate parts, each of which can occur as an independent character. This category of characters, while more important than the simple ideographs, also accounts for only a small fraction of characters. Examples:
4.
