The origins of Chinese characters: Cangjie and the oracle bones

According to an ancient Chinese legend, writing was invented by Cangjie, minister of the mythical Yellow Emperor, a man with four eyes who observed the tracks of birds and animals on the ground and drew the first signs from them. The treatise Huainanzi, compiled in the second century BC, adds that at that moment millet rained from the sky and the spirits wept in the night. The invention of writing appeared as a cosmic event, able to upset the order between humans and invisible powers.

The dragon bones

Documented history begins with an episode that has become famous. In 1899, according to the traditional account, the scholar Wang Yirong noticed signs carved on fragments of bone sold as «dragon bones» in Beijing pharmacies, where they were ground up for medicinal use. They were inscriptions of the Shang dynasty, and their origin was soon traced to Anyang, in Henan province, site of the last Shang capital.

These texts, dated roughly between 1250 and 1046 BC, are the oldest extensive evidence of Chinese writing. They are found on ox shoulder blades and turtle plastrons used for divination: diviners made small hollows in the bone, exposed it to heat and interpreted the cracks that formed. Beside them they carved the question put to the ancestors and sometimes the outcome, concerning harvests, wars, rain, births and sacrifices.

From Zhou bronzes to the Qin reform

Under the Zhou dynasty writing developed on ritual bronze vessels, intended for ancestor worship, which bear inscriptions, sometimes very long, about the merits and investitures of noble families. In the following centuries, during the Warring States period, each kingdom developed local variants of the characters, making communication between different regions difficult.

After unification in 221 BC, the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang imposed a unified form, the so-called small seal script, to whose definition the minister Li Si contributed. Under the Han the clerical script took hold, quicker to write, from which derive the regular forms still used today. This continuity allows a modern reader to recognise many characters carved more than two thousand years ago.

Xu Shen and the six categories

Around 100 AD the scholar Xu Shen compiled the Shuowen jiezi, the first great Chinese dictionary, which analyses more than nine thousand characters arranged under five hundred and forty key components. Xu Shen classified the characters into six categories, including pictograms, indicators of concepts, compounds of meaning and phonetic-semantic compounds. These last, which join an element of meaning with one of sound, make up the great majority of characters.

For this reason the term «ideograms», widespread in the West, is partly misleading: Chinese writing represents not pure ideas but words of the language, with their sounds. In religious tradition, however, the characters kept a sacred aura. Taoist talismans, called fu, used stylised forms of writing, sometimes illegible to the uninitiated, regarded in tradition as orders addressed to the world of spirits.

From the legend of the weeping spirits to the cracks of the oracle bones, the history of Chinese characters shows how long writing and divination remained intertwined. Writing was born to question the ancestors and heaven, and only later did it become the instrument of bureaucracy, poetry and philosophy. Cangjie is still remembered today as the patron of scribes.