Precursors

In the last 50 or so years, inscriptions have been found on pottery in a variety of locations in China such as Bànpō near Xī'ān, as well as on bone and bone marrows at Hualouzi, Cháng'ān near Xī'ān. These simple, often geometric marks have been frequently compared to some of the earliest known Chinese characters, on the oracle bones, and some have taken them to mean that the history of Chinese writing extends back over six millennia.

However, because these marks occur singly, without any context to imply, and because they are generally extremely crude and simple, Qiú Xīguī (2000, p. 31) concluded that "we do not have any basis for stating that these constituted writing, nor is there reason to conclude that they were ancestral to Shang dynasty Chinese characters." Isolated graphs and pictures continue to be found periodically, frequently accompanied by media reports pushing back the purported beginnings of Chinese writing a few thousand years. For example, at Dàmàidì in Níngxià, 3,172 pictorial cliff carvings dating to 6000–5000 BCE have been discovered, leading to headlines such as "Chinese writing '8,000 years old.'" Similarly, archaeologists report finding a few inscribed symbols on tortoise shells at the Neolithic site of Jiahu in Henan, dated to around 6,600–6,200 BCE, leading to headlines of "'Earliest writing' which was found in China.

In his comment released to the BBC, Professor David Keightley urged caution in the latter instance, pointing to the lack of any direct cultural connection to Shāng culture, combined with gaps between them of many millennia. However, in the same BBC article, a supporting argument is provided by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, who collaborated with a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province in the discovery. Dr Harbottle points to the persistence of sign use at different sites along the Yellow River throughout the Neolithic and up to the Shāng period, when a complex writing system appears.

One group of sites of interest is the Dàwènkǒu culture sites (2800–2500 BCE, only one millennium earlier than the early Shāng culture sites, and positioned so as to be plausibly albeit indirectly ancestral to the Shāng). There, a few inscribed pottery and jade pieces have been found, one of which combines pictorial elements (resembling, according to some, a sun, moon or clouds, and fire or a mountain) in a stack which brings to mind the compounding of elements in Chinese characters. Major scholars are divided in their interpretation of such inscribed symbols. Some, such as Yú Xǐngwú, Táng Lán and Lǐ Xuéqín, have identified these with specific Chinese characters. Others such as Wang Ningsheng interpret them as pictorial symbols such as clan insignia, rather than writing. But in the view of Wang Ningsheng, "True writing begins when it represents sounds and consists of symbols that are able to record language. The few isolated figures found on pottery still cannot substantiate this point."

Legendary origins

According to legend, Chinese characters were invented by Cangjie (c. 2650 BC), a bureaucrat under the legendary emperor, Huangdi. The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity. Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zì—Chinese characters. It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of the world.

Oracle bone script

Shāng Dynasty Oracle Bone Script on Ox Scapula, Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Germany. Photo by Dr. Meierhofer

The oldest Chinese inscriptions that are indisputably writing are the Oracle bone script (甲骨文 jiǎgǔwén, literally "shell-bone-script"). These were identified by scholars in 1899 on pieces of bone and turtle shell being sold as medicine, and by 1928, the source of the oracle bones had been traced back to modern Xiǎotún (小屯) village at Ānyáng in Hénán Province, where official archaeological excavations in 1928–1937 discovered 20,000 oracle bone pieces, about 1/5 of the total discovered. The inscriptions were records of the divinations performed for or by the royal Shāng household. The oracle bone script is a well-developed writing system, attested from the late Shang Dynasty (1200–1050 BC). Only about 1,400 of the 2,500 known oracle bone script logographs can be identified with later Chinese characters and thus deciphered by paleographers.

Bronze Age: Parallel script forms and gradual evolution

The traditional picture of an orderly series of scripts, each one invented suddenly and then completely displacing the previous one as implied by neat series of graphs in popular books on the subject, has been conclusively demonstrated to be fiction by the archaeological finds and scholarly research of the last half century. Gradual evolution and the coexistence of two or more scripts was more often the case. As early as the Shāng dynasty, oracle bone script coexisted as a simplified form alongside the normal script of bamboo books (preserved for us in typical bronze inscriptions) as well as extra-elaborate pictorial forms (often clan emblems) found on many bronzes.

Left: Bronze fāngzūn (方樽) ritual wine container dated about 1000 BCE. The written inscription cast in bronze on the vessel commemorates a gift of cowrie shells (then used as currency in China) from someone of presumably elite status in Zhou Dynasty society. Right: Bronze fāngyí (方彝) ritual container dated about 1000 BCE. A written inscription of some 180 Chinese characters appears twice on the vessel. The written inscription comments on state rituals that accompanied court ceremony, recorded by an official scribe

Based on studies of such bronze inscriptions, it is clear that from the Shāng dynastywriting to that of the Western Zhōu and early Eastern Zhōu, the mainstream script evolved in a slow, unbroken fashion, until taking the form now known as seal script in the late Eastern Zhōu in the state of Qín, without any clear line of division. Meanwhile other scripts had evolved, especially in the eastern and southern areas during the late Zhōu, including regional forms, such as the gǔwén “ancient forms” of the eastern Warring States preserved in the Hàn dynasty etymological dictionary Shuōwén Jiézì as variant forms, as well as decorative forms such as bird and insect scripts.

Unification: Seal script, vulgar writing and proto-clerical

Seal script, which had evolved slowly in the state of Qín during the Eastern Zhōu dynasty, became standardized and adopted as the formal script for all of China in theQín dynasty (leading to a popular misconception that it was invented at that time), and was still widely used for decorative engraving and seals (name chops, or signets) in the Hàn dynasty onward. But despite the Qín script standardization, more than one script remained in use at the time. For example, a little-known, rectilinear and roughly executed kind ofcommon (vulgar) writing had for centuries coexisted with the more formal seal script in the Qín state, and the popularity of this vulgar writing grew as the use of writing itself became more widespread. By the Warring States period, an immature form of clerical scriptcalled “early clerical” or “proto-clerical” had already developed in the state of Qín based upon thus vulgar writing, and with influence from seal script as well. The coexistence of the three scripts, small seal, vulgar and proto-clerical, with the latter evolving gradually in the Qín to early Hàn dynasties into clerical script, runs counter to the traditional beliefs that the Qín dynasty had one script only, and that clerical script was suddenly invented in the early Hàn dynasty from the small seal script.

Hàn Dynasty

Proto-clerical evolving to clerical

Proto-clerical, which had emerged by the Warring States period from vulgar Qín writing, matured gradually, and by the early Western Hàn, was little different from that of the Qín. Recently discovered bamboo slips show the script becoming mature clerical script by the middle to late reign of Emperor Wǔ of the W. Hàn, who ruled 141 BCE to 87 BCE.

Clerical & clerical cursive

Contrary to popular belief of one script per period, there were in fact multiple scripts in use during the Hàn. Although mature clerical script, also called 八分 bāfēn script, was dominant at that time, an early type of cursive script was also in use in the Hàn by at least as early as 24 BCE (very late W. Hàn), incorporating cursory (sic) forms popular at that period as well as many from the vulgar writing of the Warring State of Qín. By around the Eastern Jìn dynasty this Hàn cursive became known as 章草 zhāngcǎo (also known as 隶草 / 隸草 lìcǎo today), or in English sometimes clerical cursive, ancient cursive, or draft cursive. Some believe that the name, based on 章 zhāng meaning "orderly", is because this was a more orderly form of cursive than the modern form of cursive emerging around the E. Jìn and still in use today, called 今草 jīncǎo or "modern cursive".

Neo-clerical

Around the mid Eastern Hàn, a simplified and easier to write form of clerical appeared, which Qiú (2000, p. 113 & 139) terms "neo-clerical" (新隶体 / 新隸體 xīnlìtǐ) and by the late E. Hàn it had become the dominant daily script, although the formal, mature bāfēn (八分) clerical script remained in use for formal situations such as engraved stelae. Some have described this neo-clerical script as a transition between clerical and regular script, and it remained in use through the Cáo Wèi and Jìn dynasties.

Semi-cursive

By the late E. Hàn, an early form of semi-cursive script appeared, developing out of a somewhat cursively written kind of neo-clerical script and cursive. It was traditionally attributed to Liú Déshēng ca. 147–188 CE, although such attributions refer to early masters of a script rather than to their actual inventors, since the scripts generally evolved into being over time. Qiú 2000, p. 140 gives examples of early semi-cursive showing that it had popular origins rather than being only Liú’s invention.