A Brief History of Chinese Characters
A Brief History of Chinese Characters
Chinese Characters
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.
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:
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.
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…
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:
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.
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.
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!”
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.”
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:
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.
…which
gradually
became more
symbolic…
Over many centuries, Chinese characters then underwent a gradual process of stylisation:
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 transcription in brackets shows the reconstruction by linguists of how ancient Chinese is
thought to have been pronounced.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chinese characters have been carved, painted, written and printed on many materials,
including:
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.
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.
There are six types of Chinese character, but for our purposes, three of those are by far the
most important. These are:
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
- 14 -
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.
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.
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
- 15 -
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.
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
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.
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.
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.