A meaningful starting point of discussion of the Chinese script, then, is its origin. Due to the long, pre-record history of the Chinese civilization, it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint an exact historical point when Chinese script originated. This difficulty has been acknowledged by many researchers and is reflected in the differing periods they have designated for the origin of Chinese script (see, for example, Boltz, 1999; Cheung, 1983; “Chinese Language,” 1997; Jian, 1979; Lattimore, 1946; Rodzinski, 1984). Various stories have been told about the origin of Chinese script, with many ancient ones pointing 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. (“Chinese language,” 1997)
The truthfulness of the stories is certainly questionable. More likely, Cangjie only sorted out the characters already invented by the people (“Chinese language”; Xia et al., 1979, p. 312). A recent discovery of some ancient tombs in Yanghe, Shandong Province, has unearthed a dozen pottery vessels dating back to a late period of the Dawenkou culture of about 4,500 years ago. Each of these pottery vessels bears a character, and these characters “are found to be stylized pictures of some physical objects” and are therefore called pictographs (“Chinese language,” 1997). These pictographs are already quite close in style and structure to the oracle bone inscriptions of the sixteenth century BCE but predated the latter by about 1000 years (“Chinese language,” 1997).
Similar discoveries have been made in the last few decades, with some unearthed, character-bearing pottery vessels dating back to as early as the period between 4800–4200 BCE (Cheung, 1983, p. 324–25). Of course, these characters are less than regular enough to form a systematic script, the first of which is usually considered to be the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty, around the sixteenth century BCE.
As mentioned earlier, unlike that of many European languages, Chinese script is not an alphabetic script , but a script of ideograms. According to Feibo Du (1998) and “Chinese language” (1997), the formation of Chinese characters follows three principles: hieroglyphics (the drawing of pictographs), associative compounds, and pictophonetics.
Hieroglyphics, probably the earliest method of forming Chinese characters, refers to the method of forming a character according to the actual form of the object the character refers to. For example, the character for the sun was written as
Though easy to understand, pictographs have a serious drawback: they cannot express abstract ideas. To make up for such a drawback, associative compounds were developed to form characters that combine two or more pictographic characters, each with a meaning of its own, to express abstract ideas. For example, the sun
Neither pictographs nor associative compounds, however, indicate how the characters should be pronounced. Hence, the method pictophonetics was developed. Pictophonetics combines two elements: meaning and sound, in forming characters. For example, the character for “papa,” combines the element fu for the meaning (father) and the element ba for the sound.
The significance of these three methods of creating script is that they represent some of the most common measures of developing a systematic script for the ancient Chinese language. Researchers often use them as evaluation criteria for determining whether a particular historical period possessed a systematic script. Of course, later versions of Chinese script, especially that of the current Chinese language, contain characters that do not fall into any of the three categories. This is why some researchers (e.g., Jian, 1979) have argued that modern Chinese script should contain six essential features (more details later in the book). Nevertheless, they are valuable tools for our examination of the development of writing and writing technologies, especially in the early stages of Chinese history.
The Mystery of the Dominant Chinese Ideologies
A crucial aspect to an in-depth comprehension of the Chinese culture is the understanding of its dominant ideologies, for the development of any writing technology is inevitably shaped by the ideologies of a particular culture. In the history of Chinese thought, there have existed many different ideologies, but my discussion will focus on the three most dominant ones: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, because these three have exerted the most influence on the Chinese culture, not only across all geographical regions but also across most historical periods. Other ideologies, such as Legalism, Marxism-Leninism, and Maoism, are more or less regional or ephemeral; discussion of these ideologies will, therefore, be done only when they apply to my discussion of the development of a particular writing technology in subsequent chapters.
Confucianism
Confucianism, probably the most influential ideology in the history of Chinese thought and therefore worthy of a detailed examination, originated mainly in the teachings of Confucius and his disciples. Confucius (551–479 BCE) was born around the late period of Spring and Autumn and the early period of Warring States. Throughout his life, he was mostly poor, untitled, and without official position. Probably because of this, he devoted his whole life to learning and teaching. According to Ci Hai (an encyclopedic dictionary of the Chinese language), he had as many as 300 disciples, about 70 of whom became famous (p. 1119). Confucius was a philosopher, a political scientist, an educationalist, and a social critic. His ideas are mostly preserved in the so-called “five classics,” namely, The Book of Songs, The Book of History, The Book of Rites, The Book of Change, and The Spring and Autumn Annals, and four books (i.e., The Great Learning [or Ethics and Politics], the The Golden Medium [or The Book of Mean, or Central Harmony], The Analects [or The Sayings of Confucius], and The Book of Mencius). The book that most directly records his sayings is The Analects. Confucius’s time was an era of instability. It was a time when the objective traditions of the land were being eroded by the influence of a subjective sophistry similar to that in the Greek tradition. “And it was Confucius who inspired a defense against these sophistic innovations by reasserting confidence in old principles and practices” (Ware, 1955, p. 10). Robert Oliver (1971) argues that Confucius set for himself the goal “to change the nature of Chinese civilization with a bloodless revolution” (p. 121). He may be overstating the case here, and such an assertion is obviously arguable, for it was never Confucius’s intention to upset but to preserve the great tradition in Chinese civilization, or more accurately, as Thomas Cleary (1991)