A Brief History of

Chinese Characters

by Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
 A Brief History of Chinese
Characters
by Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk

As you know, Chinese is written using thousands of different characters, so it makes sense to
understand as much as we can about how they arose and how they work and are formed,
before we undertake the daunting task of learning them.

Early views from the West

Chinese characters have captivated and confused Westerners in equal measure ever since the
earliest prolonged contact between the cultures, which began with the Portuguese
missionaries who went to and lived in China in the 16th Century.

Following are some representative quotations from that period and later:

Gaspar da Cruz (1569), a Portuguese missionary:

“The [Chinese] have … a great multitude of characters, signifying each thing by a character
in such sort that one only character signifies ‘Heaven’, another ‘earth’, another ‘man’, and so
forth with everything else”.

A Chinese convert to Christianity (1776):

“[characters] … not having any sound, can be read in all languages, and form a sort of
intellectual painting, a metaphysical and ideal algebra, which conveys thoughts by analogy,
by relation, by convention, and so on.”

Fr. J.J.M. Amiot, a French missionary (1776):

“…images and symbols which speak to the mind through the eyes – images for palpable
things, symbols for mental ones. Images and symbols which are not tied to any one language
but can be read in all languages…”

A POINT FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT AT THE START: The impression of each of
these writers is that Chinese characters represent meaning or thoughts directly, without
reference to a particular language.

Were they correct in thinking this?

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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How old are Chinese characters?

There are writing systems which are older than Chinese characters, but they have died out of
use. Chinese characters are the oldest writing system in the world still in use today.

So, they are very old, but do you know just how old they really are?

A BBC report from May 2007 dates Chinese characters back to 8000 years ago, to Neolithic
times. Is this accurate?

The archaeological finds they were reporting on were cave paintings from Dàmàidì (大麦地),
Níngxià (宁夏) Province, which looked like this:

What do you think of these? Are these the earliest Chinese characters?

Well, my students have universally agreed at a glance that these are just simple pictures,
which could have been found anywhere in the world, and that there is nothing to link them to
Chinese characters or to any other language. Serious archaeologists agree with them; they are
essentially the same as similar paintings in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Unfortunately,
at one time the Chinese press had a habit of producing quite frequent reports dating the
origins of Chinese characters ever further back in time, and the BBC appears to have taken
this report at face value…

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Neolithic cultures in China

There were a large number of Neolithic cultures in China in the period 10,000 – 4,000 BC.
They produced fine decorative items such as these:

Typically, these Neolithic pots

and other artefacts were
decorated with geometric designs
such as these; none of them had
any marks resembling Chinese
characters.

The Bànpō Symbols

An intriguing find from Neolithic times is the Bànpō (半坡) Symbols, dating from 5000 to
4000 BC. Could these be the earliest Chinese characters?

What do these remind you of? What do you think they could be?

Most of my students respond that they look like early letters; they remind many of runes, or
ancient Celtic writing.

The problem is that these symbols never occurred together in groups, as they would have to
do if they were letters, representing sounds, forming words. They occurred singly, scratched
on pots. They remain a mystery; no-one has interpreted them or knows their function. They
might be clan emblems or signatures, numerals, or just potters’ marks…

One thing is clear – they are certainly not precursors of early Chinese characters, and there is
no firm evidence that they are even anything to do with language.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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The (mythological) Yellow Emperor, Huángdì

Let us look now at the legend of how

Chinese characters originated. The story
begins with the Yellow Emperor, Huángdì
(皇帝), believed to be the ancestor of all
Hàn Chinese, who is supposed to have ruled
China from 2497 BC to 2398 BC.

Huángdì is a very important figure in

Chinese mythology; the invention of
traditional Chinese herbal medicine is
attributed to him, and he is said to have
lived to the age of 100 (99 years of which
he apparently spent as Emperor), and
attained immortality after his physical
death.

Huángdì’s wife is said to have taught the

Chinese how to weave the silk from
silkworms.

The legend of how Chinese characters were invented

Legend has it that Huángdì became dissatisfied with the rope–tying method of recording
facts…

This was a system of encoding messages by the number and position of knots in bundles or
rope. This system was widely used
in ancient times but became
impractical as the bundles got too
big.

Unable to read messages encoded

only the day before, Huángdì
commissioned his official historian,
Cāngjié, with the task of inventing a
better system of writing…

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Cāngjié (仓颉) – The legendary inventor of Chinese characters

When the Yellow Emperor asked him to

think of a new writing system, Cāngjié (who
had four eyes and eight pupils) went away
and sat by a river and thought and thought …

But not one single thought came into his

head.

He was very aware of what happened at that

time to heads that did not think when the
Emperor ordered them to, so he sat and
thought some more…

Just then a Chinese phoenix flew overhead,

carrying something in its beak… THUD!

He looked down in front of him and there

was a hoofprint in the ground.

But what a strange one it was! It wasn’t a

cow, it wasn’t a pig, it wasn’t a horse or a goat -- what in heaven’s name could it be?

Just then, a huntsman happened to be passing by. Cāngjié asked him what animal the print
belonged to and he took one glance at it and said… “You are indeed a lucky man; it’s a
píxiū!”

The píxiū (貔貅)

The píxiū has a dragon’s head, lion’s body,

wings, a tail, and it eats only gold and silver.

It also has no anus (quite why is another story),

so it is a great symbol of wealth – what goes in
stays in. As it eats gold and silver, every family
should have one to make sure their wealth
doesn’t go away.

The píxiū is very popular in Fēng Shuǐ (风水) –

it can draw Qì (气) (cosmic energy) from all
directions and store it up. It was also a symbol of
the Army in ancient times, as it is not friendly
when provoked.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Cāngjié was mightily impressed by the huntsman’s detective work and asked him how he
could identify the type of hoof so quickly. The huntsman told him he could identify the
distinctive characteristics of every type of hoof – each has its own special characteristics.

Cāngjié thought: “If I can apply this principle to EVERYTHING in the world then that’s my
writing system cracked and my head won’t get chopped off.”

So he looked at the world in a new light,

scrutinising all the objects around him,
carefully distinguishing the shape of each,
drawing characters to represent the sun, the
moon, the stars, the river, the fields, the
mountains, and eventually every manner of
bird and beast.

This is what he drew:

The earliest Chinese pictographs

And legend has it that when Chinese

characters were invented “the Gods wept and
the sky rained millet.”

Shāng (商) Dynasty oracle bones

That, of course, is all legend. In fact, we know very well when Chinese characters date from.
They are first found carved into ox bones and tortoise shells from the Shāng Dynasty, 1600 –
1100 BC, located in what is now Hénán (河南) Province. These Oracle Bone carvings
(jiǎgǔwén) (甲骨文) are the earliest recognisable fore–runners of Chinese characters and
have been read and interpreted by scholars. Many of them are clearly identifiable today:

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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The two bones on the left are ox bones; on the right is a tortoise shell. The circled character is
known to be the ancient version of the modern character for a cowry shell, which was used as
money. You may recognise several other characters if you look carefully.

These bones or tortoise shells were heated until they cracked, the pattern of cracks were
interpreted, and then the divination was then carved into the bones. The best examples have
not only the questions asked, but the prognostication, and sometimes even the subsequent
outcome.

The oracle bones were found in 1899-1900 being sold in a Chinese medicine shop as
“Dragon Bones” – they were being ground into powder and put into medicines. Once their
true origin was recognised they have produced the most valuable evidence of the first
Chinese writing.

The very earliest Shāng writings were simple pictures…

…which
gradually
became more
symbolic…

... this one is a symbol of hunting (a spear and two animals).

Gradual stylisation of pictographs

Over many centuries, Chinese characters then underwent a gradual process of stylisation:

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Notice the change from round shapes to squared-off ones, perhaps easier for carving.

This early stylisation was probably fairly haphazard, different characters changing at different
rates, and with many different styles being used, overlapping in time and purpose. It was
certainly idiosyncratic and far from a unified writing system and could probably only be read
by those for whom it was intended, within a small area, and at the time it was written.

The gradual development of characters over the centuries

Notice how the transition from picture to character appears to take place at different points
for different characters:

The transcription in brackets shows the reconstruction by linguists of how ancient Chinese is
thought to have been pronounced.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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The First Emperor, Qín Shǐhuáng

The First Emperor, Qín Shǐhuáng (秦始皇)

is a real, historical person. King of the State
of Qín (秦), he ruled China from 259 BC
until his death on 10th Sept, 210 BC. From
him we get the name China.

His list of achievements include:

having the first sections of the Great Wall of
China built;
the creation of a national road network of
tens of thousands of miles;
vast canal projects;
the development of a standardised currency;
the division of the country into provinces,
etc., and the introduction of organised
administration across the country.

He removed power from the feudal warlords

– all their weapons had to be returned to the
government or melted down and made into
agricultural tools. By ten years before his
death he had succeeded in unifying China
(221 BC).

Despite his unparalleled achievements, Qín

Shǐhuáng was not an entirely enlightened
ruler in other ways. He taxed his people
mercilessly and promoted legalism, a system of harsh punishments for any wrongdoing, as
well as rewards for the denouncement of family and neighbours.

He particularly hated religion and outlawed Confucianism. He banned and then burned all
books except those officially decreed acceptable. Books on medicine, pharmacy, and
agriculture were spared. All religious and literary books were destroyed.

It wasn’t a good time to be a scholar either, as he didn’t appreciate scholars’ contribution to

society. As a way of discouraging them, he selected 460 of the best and brightest of the time
as an example to others and had them buried up to their necks in the ground and then
executed.

Qín Shǐhuáng had one weakness; he was terrified of dying and took longevity potions which
contained mercury. He died at 49 of mercury poisoning.

He was, they say, finally brought down by one of the Confucian doctrines he hated – a ruler
may rule and be strong, and the people should obey. But ultimately a ruler can rule only with
the support of his people. To keep his mandate the ruler should be just. This idea of the
virtuous ruler, in the family and in the country, is central to Confucianism, and Qín
Shǐhuáng’s cruelty cost him his right to rule.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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The terracotta warriors at Xī’ān (西安)

Qín Shǐhuáng is guarded in death by the Terracotta Warriors at Xī’ān:

As well as the model soldiers and officials, all his childless wives were killed and buried with
him. Chinese legend has it that 700,000 men worked on the tomb and that all were sealed
inside it when he died to preserve its secrets.

This, and the Great Wall, are painted as the supreme examples of Qín’s ruthless ambition –
countless thousands of lives were spent and lost in building these two great monuments to his
arrogance.

Reinvention and standardisation of the characters

Because of Qín’s destruction of the books, Chinese writing was almost wiped out too, and it
had to be largely reinvented after his death, from what was available, from memory, and by
analogy and invention. In the process, the haphazardness which had previously ruled was
brought to an end and standardisation begun as characters were made official across the now
much larger China, providing a common writing system for the many mutually unintelligible
dialects. Thus, inadvertently, Qín Shǐhuáng’s actions laid the basis for 2000 years of Chinese
unity.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Materials

Chinese characters have been carved, painted, written and printed on many materials,
including:

Bronze vessels from 1100 – 250 BC

Note the neatly

carved
characters on
these ancient
pieces.

Bamboo Scrolls from the State of Qín (247–221 BC)

Discovered in 1975 in a Qín grave from

217 BC, these date from the time of Qín
Shǐhuáng and his contemporaries.

They are an extensive collection of legal

records, daily records of government,
history and myths.

Bamboo was cheap but inconvenient – the

daily official documents read by Emperor
Qín were said to have weighed over a
hundred pounds!

Paintbrushes were now popular instead of

carving, bringing about changes in the
shapes of the characters – the rounded
‘seal script’ (pictured on page 8) gave way
to the more angular look we see today.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Silk

Silk, first produced in China (3000 BC), was much more convenient than bamboo but it was
very expensive. Woodblock printing on silk started in the 4th Century AD.

When printing starts, the initial

work involved in making the
blocks (of wood, or later metal)
is so great that one does not
want to change them on a whim.
Printing is thus a very powerful
force for standardisation, of
characters in the case of China
or of spelling in the West.
Although the spoken language
continues to change, once
printing starts, the written
language is relatively fixed.

The fact that printing started so

early in China means that the
writing system is frozen at a
much earlier time than it is in
Europe, where printing (and
thus standardisation) did not
begin until 1495 in Germany,
somewhat later in England.

Paper – do you know when was paper invented?

True paper (made from wood-pulp) is said to have been invented by a eunuch, Cài Lún, (蔡
伦) around 100 AD. The world’s oldest handwriting on paper is from 110 AD and was found
in NE China.

Woodblock printing on paper was invented in China by 593 AD, and the world’s first
newspaper was available in Beijing in 700 AD.

Printing developed greatly during the Táng (唐) Dynasty (618 – 907 AD), which further
standardised the characters.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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This is a a page from the world’s earliest printed book, from 868 AD, a Buddhist text from
Dūnhuáng (敦煌), Gānsù (甘肃) Province, China. Look at the characters – do you see how
they are just like the modern traditional characters?

Movable metal type printing

Movable type was invented

in Korea around 1230 AD
and was soon used in China,
much earlier than in Europe.

This is a page from the

world’s earliest known book
printed with movable metal
type, a Buddhist text from
1377.

Again, look closely at the

characters – they are just
like modern traditional
characters.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Regular Script (kǎishū) (楷书)

Regular script began to be standardised

from 420 AD on.

This is the ancestor of the modern

traditional characters used in Taiwan
and Hong Kong and is characterised
by neat, well–formed characters, all
equal sized and fitting in a square, with
no strokes missing.

Look at the repeated elements

highlighted by the circles.

Most Chinese characters are

COMPOUND characters, made up of
repeated elements – they are thus
certainly no longer pictures.

How Chinese characters were created

There are six types of Chinese character, but for our purposes, three of those are by far the
most important. These are:

Type 1 – Stylised Pictographs and Symbols

Type 2 – Meaning-Meaning Compounds
Type 3 – Sound-Meaning Compounds

Type 1 – Stylised Pictographs and Symbols

You have already seen some common pictographs such as:

木 川 女 口
mù – tree, wood chuān - river nǚ – woman kŏu – mouth

These are the first characters supposed to have been invented by Cāngjié.
Dr. Richard Stibbard
www.chinaglos.co.uk
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More symbolic characters were possible for some abstract ideas such as:

一 二 三 上 下
yī – one èr – two sān – three shàng – up, go up xià – down, go down

But after several hundred of these pictures and symbols, it became impossible to continue.
How could you make up characters for all the many abstract ideas needed for a full writing
system? So, the second type of character was born.

Type 2 – Meaning-Meaning Compounds

These combine two existing characters to represent a word for which there was previously no
character, e.g.:

木 is used to make two new characters: 林 lín – wood (group of trees) and 森 sēn,
half of the word for forest, sēnlín.

日 rì (sun or day) and 月 yuè (moon or month) are combined to make 明.

What do you think this means? Some of my students have, entirely logically, suggested it
could mean “day and night”. But this type of character is not very logical; actually it is the
syllable míng and means ‘bright’ in the word guāngmíng, (the brightness of the sun and the
moon combined). It is also the first half of the word for ‘tomorrow’: míngtiān.

A particularly strange example of a meaning-meaning compound is the character 美, měi,

‘beautiful’, which is also the first half of the word Měiguó, America. It is made up of 羊

yáng ‘sheep’ and 大 dà, ‘big’.

Here are a few more examples of this type of compound:

The character 安 ān (‘safe’ as in ānquǎn) is composed of 女, ‘woman’ under a roof. A

possible explanation is that a woman only feels safe with a roof over her head.

Fine so far, but what about 家, a pig with the same roof over its head? What does that
mean? A pig-sty perhaps? No, it is the character for jiā, ‘family’ or ‘home’!

Was this a good way of expanding the range of characters? What do you think?
Dr. Richard Stibbard
www.chinaglos.co.uk
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There are two quite serious problems with these meaning-meaning compounds: first, their
meaning tends to be apparent only to the person who thought them up. The inventor of the
měi character may have thought big sheep were the perfect example of beauty, but possibly
few would agree! Certainly we cannot predict the meaning of a compound from its individual
parts.

The second problem with these compound characters is that there is no logic in their
pronunciation, nothing to link for instance yáng and dà with měi, or rì and yuè with míng.
They are the most interesting type of character, and often quite fun because they often shed
light on the thought processes of the ancient scribes who invented them, but their lack of
logic in either meaning or pronunciation makes them very hard to learn.

Sound-meaning compounds

The third, and most important method of forming new characters was to create sound-
meaning compounds, in which one part (the ‘phonetic’) stands for the sound only and the
other part (the ‘radical’) gives a rough idea of the meaning.

Example 1 – the ma family

The basic character of the family is

马 mă meaning ‘horse’

This ma (without the tone) is repeated in the following characters, indicating just the sound,
while the radical changes the meaning:

The ‘mouth’ radical, 口, on the 吗 ma? is the question particle as in Nǐ hǎo ma?
left plus the sound ma

Two mouth radicals on top plus the

sound ma
骂 mà is half of the word zémà, meaning ‘to scold’ –
i.e. something to do with speaking loudly (two
mouths) which sounds like ma.

The ‘woman’ radical, 女, plus the 妈 mā in māma means ‘mother’ – something to do

with a woman which sounds like ma.
sound ma

The ‘insect’ radical, 虫, plus the 蚂 mă in the word mǎyǐ means ‘ant’ – something to
do with an insect which sounds like ma.
sound ma

With this new method, it was possible to expand the inventory of characters almost ad
infinitum. Character dictionaries grew to enormous proportions, of up to 50,000 characters.
Most of these are obscure and of little use – around 3000 characters, compounded repeatedly
together to make new words, account for most of those in common use.

Today, more than 80% of all characters are of this sort, so when we are learning characters,
the bulk of them are “families” with a phonetic component indicating the sound (often
roughly) and changing radicals giving a clue (again, rather roughly) to different meanings.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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Example 2 – the bao/pao family

The basic character of the family is

包 bāo awrapping’,
symbol meaning
etc.
‘to wrap, a wrapper,

This bao sound is repeated in the following characters:

The ‘eat’ radical, 饣, plus the 饱 bǎo Wŏ bǎo le! means ‘I’m full!’ – i.e. something
to do with eating which sounds like bao.
sound bao

The ‘fish’ radical 鱼 plus the 鲍 bào in the word bàoyú (bào fish) means ‘abalone’,
a popular (and expensive) fish – i.e. a fish
sound bao
which sounds like bao.

The ‘hand’ radical, 扌, plus the 抱 bào in yōngbào means ‘embrace’ – something to
do with hands which sounds like bao.
sound bao

The ‘fire’ radical, 火, plus roughly 炮 pào means ‘cannon, big gun’ – something to do
with fire which sounds a bit like bao. Often the
the sound bao
phonetic component is a bit inaccurate.

The ‘foot’ radical, 足, plus roughly 跑 păo Pǎo pǎo pǎo! means ‘Run! Run! Run!’. You
get the picture – it’s something to do with feet
the sound bao
and it sounds a bit like bao.

As this example shows, the phonetic component was often chosen (from a list of possible
contenders which all sounded alike) for its contribution to the meaning – it is particularly neat
that the ‘wrap’ meaning occurs in ‘full’ (food wrapped up in the stomach), ‘abalone’ (the
clam’s shell wrapping the flesh), and ‘embrace’ (arms hugging the other person). However,
the primary function of this component is to indicate the sound and often its connection to
meaning is tenuous or non-existent, as in pǎo ‘to run’ and pào ‘cannon’. This has not deterred
notable scholars from going to great lengths to identify such meaning connections, often
rather fanciful ones.

So, let us now answer the question from the beginning as to whether early European visitors
were correct to view Chinese characters as a way of representing meaning directly without
recourse to language.

Were they right or wrong?

The earliest pictographic and symbolic characters might be viewed as an attempt to do that,
but even these represented particular Chinese words and syllables, not just ideas. But the
huge majority of characters are these sound-meaning compounds, and these represent the
sounds of particular Chinese words. They are specific to the Chinese language and are not in
any sense the “images and symbols which speak to the mind through the eyes” that the early
observers believed them to be.

Dr. Richard Stibbard

www.chinaglos.co.uk
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