It is difficult to ascertain exactly how old Chinese characters are. The geometric designs on the 5,000-7,000-year-old pottery of the Yangshao culture discovered at
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| Designs on ancient pottery. | Yangshao Village in the 1920s may be the embryo of Chinese characters. The following 2,000-3,000 years is a blank period for the development of Chinese characters and no cultural relics from this period have been discovered with traces of writing on them.
The oracle bone inscriptions and inscriptions on ancient bronze objects developed more than 3,000 years ago during the Shang Dynasty are the earliest systematized Chinese characters.
Oracle bone inscriptions, Divinations and supplications to the gods and the replies received inscribed on animal bones and tortoise shells are the earliest written characters so far discovered.
In the autumn of 1899, Wang Yirong, a Beijing official, fell ill with malaria. The imperial doctor wrote out a prescription for
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| Picture of Cang Jie. | him. One of the medicinal ingredients was called a "dragon bone." He purchased the medicine from a drugstore, and was intrigued to find that there were some markings on the piece of bone, which looked like ancient forms of Chinese characters. He bought more "dragon bones," and
consulted his friend Liu E, who was an expert in the ancient Chinese script, who agreed that the markings were probably ancient characters. Later, Wang traced the origin of the bones to Xiaotun Village, northwest of Anyang, Henan Province and entrusted a businessman to buy more "dragon bones" directly f
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| Inscriptions on oracle shells. | rom the village. The
village is the location of the last capital of the Shang Dynasty.
If Wang had not fallen ill, if he had not been well versed in the ancient Chinese language, and if the imperial doctor had not written out a prescription for him including "dragon bones," these antique characters which are of such great importance for research into the origin of Chinese civilization might never have been discovered.
Wang Yirong was not only an upright and honest official of the Qing Dynasty, he was once governor of Shanxi Province and also a great patriot. When the Sino-Japanese War broke in 1894, he asked the emperor to let him go back to his nat
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| A short note written by Wang Yirong. | ive home in Shandong, and raise a militia to resist the invaders. But the Qing government concluded a treaty in 1895 with the Japanese invaders, which humiliated the country and made it forfeit its sovereignty. In August 1900, when the allied forces of eight powers invaded Beijing, Wang was appointed minister in charge of training the armed forces in the metropolitan area. When Beijing fell to the invaders, Wang wrote his last words in formal script, stating his loyalty to the emperor, and then he, together with his wife and elder daughter-in-law, drowned himself in a well. This happened less than one year after he found the oracle bone inscriptions, and he did n
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| Some inscriptions on tortoise shells illustrated on Liu E's book Tortoise Shelle Preserved by Tie Yun. | ot leave any records about his research into the oracle bone inscriptions.
The earliest book about the research and interpretation of the oracle bone inscriptions was written by Liu E, another discoverer of such inscriptions. In 1903, Liu E published his book Tortoise Shells Preserved by Tie Yun. In this book he identifies
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| Some inscriptions on tortoise shells illustrated on Liu E's book Tortoise Shells Preserved by Tie Yun. | more than 40 characters on some 3,000 pieces of tortoise shells he collected. Later, somebody corroborated his interpretations of 34 of them. Liu proved that these characters were of the same historical period as the inscriptions on bronze Shang Dynasty objects.
Oracle bone inscriptions were approximately used in the same period with the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Mavan script of Central America and the Sumerian cuneiform characters. However, only the Chinese characters are the direct ancestors of the modern script.
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| Maogong three-legged cauldron and the inscrip-tions engraved on its base. |
Among some 4,700 characters appearing on the 100,000 pieces of tortoise shells discovered so far, some 1,800 have been identified. These inscriptions have yielded a great deal of information about the political system, agriculture, animal husbandry, astronomical phenom ena, warfare, and other
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| Taishan Mountain Inscription in the seal script by Li Si. | aspects of the Shang period. They are also valuable materials for the study of calligraphy.
Like the characters of various scripts developed later, the characters on the tortoise shells occupy a square space each, basically engraved from top to bottom and with the lines from right to left, the same way as they have been written in the more than 3,000 years since then. It is clear, also, that the engravers of such inscriptions had an eye for symmetry and beauty.
Inscriptions on bronze objects . Bronze objects include cooking utensils, wine sets, water containers, weaponry, musical instruments and mirrors. The inscriptions run from one or two characters to several hundred. Some 3,000 different characters appear on bronze objects, 2,000 of which have been interpreted. The characters on bronze wares are more standard, regular and orderly than those on bones and tortoise shells.
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| Rubbing tools on a rub-bing of a calligraphic work, which demon-strates characters in white against a black background. | During the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C.) of the late Zhou Dynasty, many of the states ruled by dukes or princes simplified the strokes of seal-script characters in their own way, and developed various kinds of "big-seal" styles, different from the lesser-seal style mentioned below.
When Qin Shihuang of t
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| Sword of Prince Wu of the Spring and Autumn Period. | he State of Qin united China for the first time, under the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), among the reforms he enacted was standardization of the various scripts, based on the characters used in Qin, later known as the "lesser-seal-style", which have a simplify quality. As in the big-seal style, the lesser-seal-style strokes have the same thickness, and there is no difference between right-upward strokes and left-downward strokes. But the strokes are more even and symmetrical than that in the big-seal hand.
The initiator of the use of the lesser-seal hand was Li Si (?-208 B.C.), a prime minister of Qin and the first calligrapher in recorded Chinese history. His calligraphic works are powerful and vigorous, and appreciated as models of the lesser-seal hand. A famous example of Li Si's calligraphy can be found in Andai Temple at the foot of Taishan Mountain in Shandong Province. Originally, there were more than 200 characters inscribed on a tablet erected at the top of the mountain, but only nine can be read today. The picture on the top shows a rubbing of the remaining part of the tablet. Such rubbings are made by covering inscriptions on stone or bronze with a piece of moist paper and pressing an ink-soaked silk wad stuffed with cotton. In this way, the characters stand out in white against the black ink background. Many illustrations in this book are rubbings from original inscriptions.
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