Chinese Character History

The Chinese written system is ideographic. Each character is composed of a few differently shaped lines called “strokes” within an imaginary square.

Characters or ideographs which have a pictorial property represent units of meaning called morphemes.

  The written language is central to China's culture. It's characters act as a communication protocol to connect all the Chinese people, threading together five thousand years' history and culture. The first stage of the development of Chinese written characters was known as the oracle bone inscriptions (called oracle bone inscription), dating from the Shang dynasty (18th-12th century B.C.) which is the first dynasty to leave historical records in China. Ta-Chuan (“large seal”) in the Chou dynasty (1111-225 BC), and Hsiao-Chuan (“small seal”) in Chin dynasty (221-206 BC). In the period of the Chin dynasty, a very important writing equipment, the “brush pen”, was invented and widely used. This new tool generated a different way to write Chinese characters and caused the shape and stroke of the character to begin to change.

With the introduction of the brush pen, a new style of written characters, Li-Shu, became a major script in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), after that, Hsinq-Shu (“running style”), Tsao-Shu (“grass style”), and Wei-Pei followed. Ultimately, Kai-Shu prevailed in the Sui Tang dynasty (605-905 A.D.). Kai-Shu finally became a regular style of writing system used by all Chinese in almost 1400 years. Kai-Shu is also known as modern Chinese writing, and has not changed since the first century of the Christian Era. The composition of Chinese characters is based on the “Six Principles” (called Li-Shu) that were interpreted by Hsu Shen in the Later (Eastern) Han Dynasty (25-167 A.D.). These principles elucidate the relationships among the shapes, sounds and meanings of Chinese characters. The contribution of Hsu to the Chinese written language is in his creation of 540 radicals, used to organize the Chinese characters into groups.

Further simplification and reduction to 214 radicals were instituted by Mei Yung-Tso in his master work, Tzu-Hui. The radical index system was later adopted by the biggest Chinese dictionary, Kana-Hsi Tzu-Tien. which collected 49,188 characters and was compiled during the reign of Kang-His emperor in the ching dynasty (1644-1911A.D.). Today, most dictionaries still use the same 214 radical system.

Observing the development of the Chinese written language, we may surprisingly find that the most of the changes between different writing styles are in their strokes' shapes due to the various writing equipment. The basic arrangement of strokes was still maintained as the language evolved. It is an exciting discovery presented in this paper as evidence to support the fundamental relevancy of the CPR: Chinese characters can recognize by some features which are essentially from the pictorial graphs (or logograph). Despite the change of writing tools, or the improvement of printing (the earliest printing discovered in China by the end of the 2nd century A.D.), the features of Chinese characters have been maintained since then.