History of the script

The first transmission: Cangjie

According to old Chinese sources the script was created nearly five thousand years ago by Cangjie, historian of the Yellow Emperor — the orthodox account until modern times, first recorded in the Xunzi and repeated in the Lunheng, the Shuowen Jiezi and the Records of the Historian. The book reads these sources as agreeing that Cangjie knew the principles of the River Chart and Luo Writing, and that his creation of characters continued Fuxi's making of the trigrams. In handing down the characters he made he must also have handed down the rules for making them, and those rules lie mostly within the characters themselves.

Oracle bones and the seal script

The oracle-bone script seems to support the evolutionary account. The book reads it differently: oracle-bone inscriptions already contain 典, 冊, 筆 and 建, so the main writing tools of Shang were brush and bamboo strips, which decay — while the marginal script carved on bone survived. Oracle-bone writing appears fully mature, so it was probably the private script of the diviners, handed down within the Shang clan. Oracle-bone and bronze scripts were two parallel systems; the seal script descends from Cangjie through Zhou and Qin, not from the oracle bones (citing Wang Guowei on the “ancient” and “zhou” scripts).

Wen and zi

The postface of the Shuowen: when Cangjie first wrote, he drew things by their kinds, and these were called wen; later form and sound were added to each other, and these were called zi. The book notes that wen anciently meant pattern (紋), grounded in the “patterns of heaven” that express the basic rules of the cosmos — spirals, the swastika, the taiji diagram; the 回 pattern on ancient vessels is one instance.

The second transmission: Wang Cizhong

The regular script we write today has been in use for two thousand years; most calligraphers credit Wang Cizhong of the Eastern Han, who “in his youth changed Cangjie's old script into the bafen”. Heaven is round and earth square: the curved strokes of the seal script answer to heaven, the square strokes of bafen to earth. Through the two transmissions the script moved from heaven's roundness through the human way to earth's squareness.

Classical Chinese, yayan and the branching of Chinese

Classical Chinese and yayan, the earliest recorded pronunciation, are held to share the script's divine origin; a strict system of court historians and generations of scholars kept them stable for millennia. Replacing the classical language with the vernacular over the last century made Chinese branch quickly — hence the coexisting names Hanyu, Zhongwen, Guoyu and Huayu. In sound, the Tang and Song eight tones modelled on the trigrams later shrank to four; the eight survive in Cantonese.

Simplified and traditional forms

Simplified characters, introduced after 1949 on the principle of easy writing and recognition, changed a structure stable for more than two thousand years and removed much of the cultural content and spatial correspondence that characters carried. In the book's view the rules of the traditional forms agree with traditional culture and ways of thinking, and contain the grammar of characters, words and texts; so our explications start from the traditional form and note the simplified one.