The evolution of Chinese writing

At first sight, Chinese script looks like a series of stylised drawings written in an imaginary square and, in fact, that’s exactly here where its origin lies: pictograms representing the real world.

The earliest traces of this particular writing system date back to the Shang dynasty period (between the 14th and the 11th Century B.C), when pictograms were engraved on bones and turtle shells, for divination purposes. These ones, along with the inscriptions on bronzes, dating from the end of the Shang dynasty and the beginning of the Zhou dynasty, represent the oldest form of this language. Even though we don’t have enough examples of writing prior to these historical periods to be able to make a comparison, it is thought that the amount of time needed to achieve the language development as the one that can be seen on the oracle bones and on the bronzes would have been quite a lot.

Thereafter, due to the confusion resulting from the possibility to write the same character in different ways, Qin Shi Huang, the imperaror who reunified China, ordered to unify the writing as well. Thus, the Small Seal script was born, in which ideogram looked beautiful aesthetically, but difficul to write.

Hence, further simplifications were introduced: first the Clerical script and then the Cursive script, a more hasty type of writing where strokes are written all at once, with the brush never leaving the paper, resulting difficult to understand.

During the 3rd Century A.D the Standard script began to replace the two previous scipts: the Clerical script, deemed too strict and the Cursive one, considered too difficult to read. This script is the one that is still used nowadays on printed paper.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, then, together with the introduction of pinyin (the phonetic transcription of characters using Latin alphabet), in order to reduce the problem of illiteracy among the population, a simplified writing system was officially implemented. Nowadays this writing system is used in the People’s Republic of China and Singapore, while in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao the traditional one is still the only one commonly used.