• Learn to Speak Chinese
• Origin of the Chinese Script
• Oracle Inscriptions
• Inscriptions on Bronze Objects
• Bamboo and Wood Slips
• Inscriptions on Drum-shaped Stone Blocks
• Inscriptions on Stone Tablets
• Writings on Silk
• Rubbings

Origin of the Chinese Script (Hanzi de Qiyuan)

There have been various stories about the origin of the Chinese script, with nearly all ancient writers attributing it to a man named Cangjie.

Cangjie, according to one legend, saw a divine being whose face had unusual features which looked like a picture of writings. In imitation of his image, Cangjie created the earliest written characters. After that, certain ancient accounts go on to say, millet rained from heaven and the spirits howled every night to lament the leakage of the divine secret of writing.

Another story says that Cangjie saw the footprints of birds and beasts, which inspired him to create written characters.

Evidently these stories cannot be accepted as the truth, for any script can only be a creation developed by the masses of the people to meet the needs of social life over a long period of trial and experiment. Cangjie, if there ever was such a man, must have been a prehistoric wise man who sorted out and standardized the characters that had already been in use.

A group of ancient tombs have been discovered in recent years at Yanghe in Euxian County, Shandong Province. They date back 4, 500 years and belong to a late period of the Dawenkou Culture. Among the large numbers of relics unearthed are about a dozen pottery wine vessels (called zan), which bear a character each. These characters are found to be stylized pictures of some physical objects. They are therefore called pictographs and, in style and structure, are already quite close to the inscriptions on the oracle bones and shells, though they antedate the latter by more than a thousand years.

The pictographs, the earliest forms of Chinese written characters, already possessed the characteristics of a script.

As is well-known, written Chinese is not an alphebatic language, but a script of ideograms. Their formation follows three principles

1) Hieroglyphics or the drawing of pictographs - As explained before, this was the earliest method by which Chinese characters were designed and from which the other methods were subsequently developed. For instance, the sun was written as , the moon as, water as ,, the cow as and so on. These picture-words underwent a gradual evolution over the centuries until the pictographs changed into " square characters, " some simplified by losing certain strokes and others made more complicated but, as a whole, from irregular drawings they became stylised forms.

2) Associative compounds-The principle of forming characters by drawing pictures is easy to understand, but pictographs cannot express abstract ideas. So the ancients invented the "associative compounds, " i. e., characters formed by combining two or more elements, each with a meaning of its own, to express new ideas. Thus, the sun and the moon written together became the character , (ming), which means "bright"; the sun placed over a line representing the horizon formed the ideogram (dan) which means "sunrise" or "morning".

3) Pictophonetics - Though pictographs and associative compounds indicate the meanings of characters by their forms, yet neither of the two categories gives any hint as to pronunciation. The pictophonetic method was developed to create new characters by combining one element indicating meaning and the other sound. For instance, (ha) the Chinese character for "papa" is formed by the element (ba) which represents the sound and the element (fu) which represents the meaning (father).

Oracle Inscriptions (Hanzi de Qiyuan)

These refer to the scripts carved by the ancients of the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th to 11th century B. C'. ) on tortoise shells and ox scapulas (shoulder blades), which are considered to be the earliest written language of China.

Their discovery was by accident. In 1899, Wang Yirong, an official under the Qing Dynasty, fell ill. One of the medicaments prescribed by the physician was called "longgu" (dragon bones). They turned out to be fragments of tortoise shells which were found to bear strange carved on patterns. He kept the "dragon bones " and showed them to scholars who, after careful study, came to the conclusion that the carvings were written records from 3, 000 years before and were of great historical significance. Further enquiries revealed that the "dragon bones" had been unearthed at Xiaotun Village, Anyang County, Henan Province, site of the remains of the Shang Dynasty capital.

Further digs made at the site in later years brought to light a total of more than 100, 000 pieces of bones and shells all carved with words. About 4,500 different characters have been counted, and 1,700 of them deciphered.

Three thousand five hundred years ago, Anyang was a marshy area teeming with tortoises, a favourite food of the local inhabitants. And the Shangs were a very superstitious people. Their rulers would resort to divination and ask the gods for rev elation whenever there was a gale, downpour, thunderstorm, famine or epidemic. Before going on a war or a big hunt, their need to divine the outcome becomes more urgent.

The method of divination then was to drill a hole on the interior side of the tortoise shell and put the shell on a fire to see what cracks would appear on the obverse side. By interpreting the cracks the soothsayer predicted the outcome of an event. After each divination, the dates, the events and the results would be written down and carved on tortoise shells or bones. And the collection of these became the earliest recorded historical material in China, from which modern scholars have divined "how things were in the Shang society".

In the oracle inscriptions, one finds many pictographs in their primitive picture forms. Together they show that a well structured script with a complete system of written signs was already formed in that early age.

Later on, the area around Anyang became dry, and tortoises grew scarce, so people began to use bamboo strips instead for divination. From this grew the practice of asking the gods about the future by drawing bamboo sticks, as one may see today at certain temples a practice that has its remote root in the superstition of the Shang people.

Inscriptions on Bronze Objects (Jinwen or Zhongdingwen)

Another type of early Chinese script in its long history of development is represented by the inscriptions cast or carved on ancient bronze objects of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. It is called .Jinwen ( literally, script on metal ) and, as ancient bronzes arc generally referred to as zhongding (bells and tripods). it is also called zhongdingmen.

The ding, originally a big cooking pot with three (rarely four) legs, became a ritual object and a sign of power, and the owning of such tripods, as wc41 as their sizes and numbers, was a status symbol of the Shang slave-owning aristocrats. At the beginning only the names of the owners were cast or engraved on the tripods. Later the tripods (and other bronzes) began to carry longer inscriptions stating the uses they were put to and the dates they were cast. Towards the end of the Warring States Period (475 221 B. C. ) ,,the ducal states of Zheng and Jin had their statutes promulgated and cast on tripods.

Thus the inscriptions on the bronzes grew longer, from a few characters to a few hundred, from simple phrases to detailed accounts.

Many bronze objects bearing inscriptions have been unearthed in China and can be seen in a large number of museums.

A priceless tripod is the Daynding (Large Tripod Bestowed upon Yu) dating from the early Zhou Oynasty (c. 11th century to 771 B. C. ), now kept at the Museum of Chinese History in Beijing. About one metre high and weighing 153. 5 kilograms, it has on its interior wall an inscription of 291 characters in 19 lines, by which King Kang summed up the experience in found ing a new nation and drew lessons from the failure of the preceding Shang Dynasty. The inscription also mentions that the King awarded his aristocrat follower Yu 1, 722 slaves of various grades and large numbers of carriages and horses.

Another important bronze called Maogongding, now kept in Taiwan Province, belongs to the late Western Zhou. It bears an inscription of 497 characters, the longest ever discovered on any bronze hitherto unearthed. It is an account of how King Xuan admonished, commended and awarded Maogong Yin; it also reveals the instability of the Western Zhou regime at the time.

Both tripods furnish rare and valuable information to throw light on the slave society under the Western Zhou.

The ancient bronzes reflect not only the high level that Chinese metallurgy attained in their time. The inscriptions they bear may well be regarded as "books in bronze" which fill important gaps left by the scanty written history of that remote age.

Bamboo and Wood Slips(Zhujian yu Mujian)

In museums of ancient history one often sees bamboo or wood strips written with characters by the writing brush. These slips are called jian, the earliest form of books in China.

The practice of writing on slips began probably during the Shang Dynasty (c. 16th-11th century B. C. ) and lasted till the Eastern Han (AI) 25-220), extending over a period of 1,600 - 1,700 years. The historical Records, the first monumental general history written by the great historian Sima Qian (c. 110 B.C. - ?), consisting of 520,000 characters in 130 chapters and covering a period of 3,000 years from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Emperor Wudi of the Han, was written on slips. So were other well known works of ancient China, including the Book of Songs ( the earliest Chinese anthology of poems and songs from 11th century to about 600 B. C. ) and .Jiazhang Suanshu (Mathematics in Nine Chapters completed in the 1st century AD, the earliest book on mathematics in the country).

Excavations in 1972 in an ancient tomb of the Western Han Dynasty (206 B. C. -A. D. 24) at Yinque Mountain, Linyi, Shandong Province, brought to light 4,924 bamboo slips. They turned out to be hand-written, though incomplete, copies of two of China's earliest books on military strategy and tactics The Art of War by Sun Zi and The Art of War by Sun Bin. The latter had been missing for at least 1,400 years.

To write on bamboo or wood slips was no easy task. Take bamboo slips for example. Bamboos were first cut into sections and then into strips. These were dried by fire to be drained of the moisture of the natural plant to prevent rotting and worm infestation in future. The finished bamboo slips run from 20 to 70 cm in length. Judging from those unearthed from ancient tombs, royal decrees and statutes were written on slips 68 cm long, texts of the classics on 56-cm-long slips, and private letters on 23 cm ones. The brush was used in writing and, in case of mistakes, the wrong characters would be scraped off by means of a small knife to allow the correct ones to be filled in. The knife played the same role as the rubber eraser today.

Writing on bamboo or wood slips was done from top to bottom, with each line comprising from 10 to at most 40 characters. To write a work of some length, one would need thousands of slips. The written slips would then be bound together with strips into a book. Some books were so heavy that they had to be carried in carts. In some cases the blank slips were first bound into books before they were written on.

An unofficial story tells about Dongfang Shuo (154-93 B. C. ), a courtier and humorist, who wrote a 30,000 -character memorial to the Western Han Emperor Wudi, using more than 3,000 slips. These had to be carried by two men to the audience hall.

Legend also extols the hard work of the First Emperor of the Qin of 2,200 years ago by telling that he had to peruse and comment on 60 kilograms of official documents every day. This may not be so astonishing as at first hearing, when one recalls that the passages were written on wood or bamboo slips.

Heavy and clumsy as they were, ancient books of bamboo and wood played an important part in the dissemination of knowledges in various fields. They were in circulation over a long period until gradually replaced by paper which was invented during the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 23-220).

Inscriptions on Drum-shaped Stone Blocks(Shiguwen)

Shigawen, the earliest Chinese script cut on stone, is kept in the Palace Museum (Forbidden City) of Beijing. It is in the form of inscriptions, on 10 drum-shaped stone blocks, of 10 poems of 4 character lines, depicting the ruler of a state on a big hunt. The characters are written in a style called dazhuan (big seal character) and have been taken as the "earliest model of zhuan-style writing", important to the development and studies of Chinese calligraphy.

The "stone drums" were discovered in the Tang Dynasty (Al) 618-907) at Tianxing (present-day Baoji in Shaanxi Province) and caused a stir among men of letters and calligraphers. Celebrated poets like Du Fu, Han Yu and Su Dongpo sang of the discovery in verse. It was only after the end of World War 11 that the "stone drums" were moved to Beijing for safekeeping. But age, rough handling and long distance from ports have taken a toll on the valuable relics. Many of the characters have disappeared or eroded by weathering, and one of the "drums" has even become completely devoid of any engraving.

Before the invention of paper and printing, the best way in China to keep outstanding writings and calligraphic works was to carve them on stone. Those cut on drum shaped blocks are called shigawen (stone drum inscriptions); and those cut on steles and tablets are called beimen.

The former, being much earlier and rarer, are greatly treasured.

The dating of the set of stone drums under discussion was a subject of controversy over the ages. Careful research made by archaeologists in recent years has led to the conclusion that they were engraved in the state of Qin during the Warring States Period (475-221 B. C. ) and are therefore well over 2,000 years old.

Inscriptions on Stone Tablets(Beiwen)

Before the invention of the art of printing, how did ancient Chinese preserve and disseminate their culture and art? As mentioned before, they relied to a great extent upon inscriptions on stone tablets.

These inscriptions are known as beiwen ( writings on stelae) or, less common, shishu ("stone books"). The earliest examples so far discovered are a set of 46 stelae engraved with the Confucian classics after the handwriting of the great Eastern Han calligrapher Cai Yong, carved in Al) 175 or the fourth year in the reign of Xiping. They are called "Xiping Shijing" (Xiping Classics on Stone). They were placed in front of the lecture halls of the then Imperial College in old 1 uoyang (the site of the 3rd-century town, a little to the east of today's Luoyang) as standard versions of the classics for the students to read or to copy from.

To engrave a voluminous work or series of works would require thousands of stone tablets and generations of perseverance and painstaking work. By far the greatest work engraved on stone is the Dazangjing (Great Buddhist Scriptures ), which comprises more than 14,000 tablets. The carving of the stupendous collection began in the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and concluded about 1644, when the Ming Dynasty was replaced by the Qing, extending over a thousand years! This rare collection of books on stone is kept in 9 rocky caves on Shijingshan (Stone Scripture Mountain) in Fangshan County, southwest of Beijing.

In order to preserve the "stone books" of various periods, scholars in China started as early as 1090 (5th year of the Yuanyou Period under the Song Dynasty) to collect the stelae scattered around the country and keep them together at Xi'an. Today in the halls of the "Forest of Stelae" are 1,700 tablets of many dynasties from the Han down to the Qing - the greatest collection in China.

The engravings on these stones cover a wide range of subjects-from the classics to works of calligraphy, from linear drawings to pictures in low relief. They include the Thirteen Classies (Book of Changes, Book of History, Book of' Songs, the Analects, etc. ), the basic readings required of Confucian scholars of past ages. These, totalling 650,252 characters, were cut on both sides of 114 stelae in A.1). 837 of the Tang Dynasty. The stelae stand side by side like walls of stone, a veritable library of stone books.

The Forest of Stelae at Xi'an is not only a treasure house of Chinese literature and history but represents, a galaxy of the best calligraphers of different ages and schools, including all the different scripts-zhuan seal character, li (official script), coo (cursive ) and kai (regular ) -each with its representative works. Visitors here may feast their eyes on the whole gamut of Chinese calligraphy.

Writings on Silk(Boshu)

From sometime in the Warring States Period (475-221 B.C. ) and over a long period of time in ancient China, plain silk of various descriptions joined bamboo and wood slips as the material for writing or painting on. Silk had advantages over the slips in that it was much lighter and could be cut in desired shapes and sizes and folded, the better to be kept and carried. But owing to its much greater cost, silk was never so popularly used as the slips.

The most valuable find of ancient silk writings was made in 1973 from an ancient tomb known as the No. 3 Han Tomb at Mawangdui, Changsha, Hunan Province. It is in the form of 30-odd pieces of silk, bearing more than 120,000 characters. They consist largely of ancient works that had long been lost. For instance, Wuxingzhan describes the orbits of five planets (Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars and Saturn) and gives the cycles of their alignment, all with a precision far more remarkable than similar works which appeared later. Also found were three maps drawn on silk, showing the topography, the stationing of troops and the cities and towns of certain regions of China.

They are the earliest maps in China, and in the world as well, that have been made on the basis of field surveys. Contrary to their modern counterparts, they show south on top and north at the bottom. The topographic map is at a scale of 1:i80,00(), and the troop distribution map at about 1: 80, 000/100, 000. Their historical value may be easily imagined when one remembers that they are at least 2,100 years old.

Silk was considered in old China an exquisite material for writing on; some were pre-marked with lines in vermilion. During the Tang Dynasty (618-907), it was the fashion to weave the lines into plain white silk to be used exclusively for writing.

Many artists of today have carried on the ancient practice of painting and writing on silk.

Rubbings(Taben)

To make rubbings from carved inscriptions was the earliest method of making copies in China before printing was invented.

In ancient times, engravings were often made on stone of important imperial decrees, texts of Confucian classics, Buddhist scriptures, proved medical recipes as well as poems, pictures and calligraphic works by noted men of letters so that they may be appreciated and preserved for posterity.

To make rubbings is to make copies from these cut inscriptions or pictures. The method followed is rather simple in principle paste a wetted piece of soft but firm paper (xuan paper is normally used) closely over the stone tablet or bronze and beat it lightly all over with the cushioned end of a stick so that the parts of paper over the cut hollows will sink in. The paper is then left on to dry. Then ink is applied by dabbing it on until the paper is turned into a copy with white characters or drawings on a black ground. Removed and dried, it becomes the rubbing.

Rubbings vary and are called by different names according to the ink used. Wujinta (black gold rubbings) are made with very black ink; chanyita (cicada wing rubbings) are made with very light ink; zhuta (vermilion rubbings) with vermilion ink. Bound book form, the rubbings become beitie (stele rubbings), which may be used either as models for calligraphy or kept in a collection for appreciation or research.

As inscriptions on bronze, stone or wood wear out with time, early rubbings made from famous pieces of work are more valued and cherished than the ones made later.

Rubbings are convenient and meaningful mementoes for foreign tourists to remind them of their China tours. They are especially liked by Japanese visitors who share the same written character.