What is the origin and development of Chinese characters?

The origin of Chinese characters is mainly from pictograms, which are the basis for the formation and development of the Chinese character system. The subsequent evolution of the Chinese characters has taken thousands of years, through the stages of oracle bone inscriptions, gold inscriptions, seal scripts, clerical scripts, regular scripts, cursive scripts, and running scripts, and to this day, the regular scripts are commonly used, but they have not yet been fully finalized.

According to China's ancient literature, the Tien Huang Clan invented the stem and branch and the related record writing, and in the later transmission, the name of the stem and branch was simplified into a single character in the Huang Di era.

In the "Shiji", "Erya" and so on have a cross-relation of records, but the "Shiji" and "Erya" version is not the same. Invented numbers: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, hundred, thousand, ten thousand.

Legend has it that Cangjie created Chinese characters. The Shuo Wen Jie Zi (Explaining Characters in Chinese) records that Cang Jie was inspired by the footprints of birds and animals, classified them into different categories, and collected, organized and used them to play an important role in the creation of Chinese characters, and he was honored as the "Sage of Character Creation".

During the Shang Dynasty, the earliest known mature Chinese characters, oracle bone inscriptions, appeared, and the Zhong Ding inscriptions that appeared later increased the number of characters, but there were no major changes in the shape of the characters.

During the Zhou Dynasty, due to the vastness of the territory and the long period of vassalage, Chinese characters were clearly heterogeneous among the vassal states in the late Spring and Autumn period, and the situation of heterogeneous characters was even more serious during the Warring States period. In order to consolidate his rule after the unification of the Qin Dynasty, Emperor Qin Shihuang ordered his prime minister Li Si, his minister Zhao Gao, and his minister of history Hu Shaojing to organize the characters, and based on the Qin Big Seal Script, he formulated the Small Seal Script, which was used as the standard script and was ordered to be used throughout the country.

Somewhat later, a simpler script, the official script, was generally organized based on the popular scripts of the time, and was widely circulated throughout the country as the universal script.

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