History of Chinese Characters

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zi -- Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of civilization, for good and for bad.

Modern archaeological evidence suggests that the characters are more ancient still. The earliest evidence for what might be writing comes from Jiahu, a Neolithic site in the basin of the Yellow River in Henan province, dated to c. 6500 BC. It has yielded turtle carapaces that were pitted and inscribed with symbols. Later excavations in eastern China's Anhui province and the Dadiwan culture sites in the eastern part of northwestern China's Gansu province uncovered pottery shards, dated to c. 5000 BC, inscribed with symbols. It is unknown whether these symbols formed part of an organized system of writing, but many of them bear resemblance to what are accepted as early Chinese characters, and it is speculated that they may be ancestors to the latter.

Inscription-bearing artifacts from the Dawenkou culture culture site in Juxian County, Shandong, dating to c. 2800 BC, have also been found. The Chengziyai site in Longshan township, Shandong has produced fragments of inscribed bones used to divine the future, dating to 2500 - 1900 BC, and symbols on pottery vessels from Dinggong are thought by some scholars to be an early form of writing. Symbols of a similar nature have also been found on pottery shards from the Liangzhu culture of the lower Yangtze valley.

Although the earliest forms of primitive Chinese writing are no more than individual symbols and therefore cannot be considered a true written script, the inscriptions found on bones (dated to 2500 - 1900 BC) used for the purposes of divination from the late Neolithic Longshan Culture (c. 3200 - 1900 BC) are thought by some to be a proto-written script, similar to the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is possible that these inscriptions are ancestral to the later Oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty and therefore the modern Chinese script, since late Neolithic culture found in Longshan is widely accepted by historians and archaeologists to be ancestral to the bronze age Erlitou culture and the later Shang and Zhou Dynasties.

The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (jiǎgǔwén, lit. shell-bone-script), a well-developed writing system of the Shang Dynasty (or Yin Dynasty), attested from about 1600 BC (from Zhengzhou) and 1300 BC (from Anyang), along with a very few logographs found on pottery shards and cast in bronzes, known as the Bronze script (jīnwén), which is very similar to but more complex and pictorial than the Oracle Bone Script. Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known Oracle Bone logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and therefore easily read. However, it should be noted that these 1,400 logographs include most of the commonly used ones.

Written Styles

There are numerous styles, or scripts, in which Chinese characters can be written, deriving from various calligraphic and historical models. Most of these originated in China and are now common, with minor variations, in all countries where Chinese characters are used.

The Oracle Bone and Bronzeware scripts being no longer used, the oldest script that is still in use today is the Seal Script (zhuànshū). It evolved organically out of the Zhou bronze script, and was adopted in a standardized form under the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. The seal script, as the name suggests, is now only used in artistic seals. Few people are still able to read it effortlessly today, although the art of carving a traditional seal in the script remains alive; some calligraphers also work in this style.

Scripts that are still used regularly are the "Clerical Script" (lìshū) of the Qin Dynasty to the Han Dynasty, the Weibei (wèibēi), the "Regular Script" (kǎishū) used for most printing, and the "Semi-cursive Script" (xíngshū) used for most handwriting.

The Cursive Script (cǎoshū) is not in general use, and is a purely artistic calligraphic style. The basic character shapes are suggested, rather than explicitly realized, and the abbreviations are extreme. Despite being cursive to the point where individual strokes are no longer differentiable and the characters often illegible to the untrained eye, this script (also known as draft) is highly revered for the beauty and freedom that it embodies. Some of the Simplified Chinese characters adopted by the People's Republic of China, and some of the simplified characters used in Japan, are derived from the Cursive Script. The Japanese hiragana script is also derived from this script.

There also exist scripts created outside China, such as the Japanese Edomoji styles; these have tended to remain restricted to their countries of origin, rather than spreading to other countries like the standard scripts described.