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Chinese Characters: Mysterious in Origin and Magical in Meaning
From: The British Library
| By:
Frances Wood |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In China, the written word has enjoyed a reverence and awe that reaches far beyond our treatment of script in the West. The continuity of the Chinese language is unique: dating from 1500 BCE, seven major orthographic styles are recognised, and yet script that is over 2,200 years old may still be read today. During the many stages of their evolution, Chinese characters and calligraphy have been treated as a high art, and well into the modern era they have also been considered to have mystical powers. British Library researcher Frances Wood explores language's powerful associations in China.
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 n China, the written word has long been regarded as powerful, even magical: during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), good calligraphy fetched higher prices than painting. |
The origins of the Chinese writing system are still somewhat mysterious. In 1899, the marks on some inscribed bones sold as medicinal "dragon bones" in a Peking pharmacy were recognised as writing. By that time, these pieces of writing were already some 3,500 years old, having been made during the Shang dynasty (c. 1500-1028 BCE). Though subsequent archaeological sites have turned up many pieces of neolithic pottery bearing marks dating back to c. 4000 BCE, these have yet to be interpreted, and the "oracle bone" script, such as that discovered in the pharmacy, is the earliest to be at least half understood. |
The bones, mostly the shoulder blades of oxen, were used by the Shang rulers for scapulimancy: divination by reading the cracks that appeared after the application of heat to the prepared surface of the bone. The inscriptions typically consisted of a preface recording the date and the name of the diviner and the topic of divination, which was often the potential outcomes of military campaigns, hunting expeditions, sickness, childbirth or agricultural events. |
The translation of the oracle bone script was made easier by the survival of an early dictionary, Xu Shen's Shuowen jiezi (c. 120 CE). Xu Shen set out to "explain and interpret" nearly 10,000 characters, mostly from inscriptions in the "small seal" style of the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE), but he also included many oracle bone graphs. At the time Xu Shen was writing, Chinese characters were written in a style that is still in use today, so his dictionary formed a bridge between the ancient past and the present. |
In his preface to the Shuowen jiezi, Xu Shen described the invention of the Chinese script: "The Yellow Emperor's Court Recorder, Cang Jie, looked down and saw the marks left by the tracks of birds and animals. He realised that by distinguishing their patterns he was able to differentiate one thing from another. Thus he created the script." The account, though clearly legendary, makes it clear that Xu Shen saw the Chinese script not as pictographic (a picture of an animal represents an animal) but, rather, as symbolic, where different marks are not actually images of the animals that they represent. This is borne out by the fact that only about 1 percent of the characters in use today are pictographic, and even in the Shang it was only about 4 percent. |
Despite the relative scarcity of "picture" words, many Western writers still characterise Chinese as a pictographic script and describe amusing combinations such as the graph for "roof" over the graph for "pig" meaning (together) "home"; or, the graph for "woman" plus the graph for "child" means "good," but putting three "woman" graphs together produces the word for "chaos and treachery." |
Another aspect of the Chinese script that is often misrepresented is the extent to which it is monosyllabic. At the time that Xu Shen compiled his dictionary, nearly 2,000 years ago, Chinese was more monosyllabic than it is now. Today, more than 10 percent of the characters used (like "hu" and "die," which make up the compound "hudie," or butterfly) have become meaningless on their own. Of the 6,800 characters required to write standard contemporary Chinese, about 30 percent are "free" monosyllabic words.
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Both the Chinese language and the script have developed over time, although the continuity of the Chinese script is unique. Seven major orthographic styles are recognised, beginning with the oracle bone script of the Shang dynasty. This was succeeded by the "greater seal" script used in the early Zhou period (c. 1066-770 BCE). The script was called "seal script," for in succeeding millennia and down to the present day it was one of the preferred carving styles for the characters used on seal-stones or chops, which were, and to some extent still are, the equivalent of a signature in China. |
In the later Zhou period, a time of division that saw different rulers holding power in different parts of China, local styles of writing developed to the point that a character might be written quite differently in different parts of the country. In 221 BCE, the ruler of the state of Qin reunited the country and began to impose the Qin system of weights and measures, coinage and legal procedure, and the Qin style of writing, later known as "lesser seal" script.
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The short-lived Qin dynasty with its short-lived writing style was succeeded by the Han (206 BCE-220 CE), when a new, more fluent script style known as lishu, or "clerical" script, was officially adopted. Though it was to be succeeded by kaishu, "regular" script, and a cursive form of kaishu, called xingshu, or "running" script, lishu is still easy to read today. It survives on many of the bamboo and woodslips used as writing materials. These were preserved particularly well in the desert areas of northwestern China, in the Gansu and Xinjiang provinces, which were garrisoned by Chinese troops during the Han. During the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), the fat-tailed lishu style gave way to the more even brush strokes of kaishu and xingshu. With the rapid expansion in the production of paper, many more copies of calligraphic works in kaishu, xingshu and the highly cursive caoshu--"rough" or "draft" script (though often rendered literally as "grass" script)--have survived, most extensively in the Gansu province, at the cave-temple complex near the Dunhuang oasis.
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Writing styles evolved in relationship to one another. Cursive caoshu is more firmly based in the formality and clarity of kaishu than might be apparent, for it is the regular order and direction of strokes of kaishu that, in a few flowing movements, give elegant form to a caoshu character. Printing, which flourished in China from the ninth century CE, gave a great impetus to the spread of kaishu, although seal script forms were retained for inscriptions on coinage and for formal inscriptions, including stone-carved eulogies and epitaphs. |
Lively, elegant caoshu inscriptions represented the highest form of art, but there was more to the Chinese script than its beauty. The script itself, enormously rich in construction and nuance, combined with the relatively restricted syllabary of the spoken language, allowed for punning and visual effect. Certain styles of script and combinations of characters were also magical, and were thought to be capable of curing disease and relieving suffering. Talismanic inscriptions might be pasted up in the home or written on paper that was burnt and mixed with water for a patient to ingest.
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The written word could be regarded with awe, not just for its potentially magic powers. Paper with characters written or printed on it was carefully collected and stored to prevent its being put to "base uses." Stored paper was carefully kept at the cave-temple complex near Dunhuang (which contained material dating from c. 400 CE to c. 1030 CE), and one of the copies of the imperially commissioned manuscript encyclopaedia Siku quanshu (Complete library of the four storehouses), made between 1782 and 1787 for an imperial establishment in Hangzhou, was carefully pieced together from stored scraps after its dispersal in the Taiping uprising in 1861. |
The characters used in imperial names were additionally protected. During the Qin and Han, the characters used in any emperor's personal name became taboo after his death and had to be replaced by variant forms, sometimes with just one stroke missing, sometimes a whole section of the character removed. After the Han, it became common for the characters in the emperor's personal name to be made taboo during his reign, rather than after death. The Empress Wu (625-705 CE), who ruled China from 684 to 705 after the death of her husband, the Gaozong emperor, promulgated 12 or 14 "new" (and strange) characters, identical in meaning and pronunciation to the original ones in her name but visually different enough to "protect" those original characters.
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At times of high anxiety, such as the literary inquisition of the Qianlong emperor between 1772 and 1788, careless scholars were killed for paying insufficient attention to the full implications of Chinese characters. Cha Siting (1664-1726) set a phrase from a Confucian work as an essay subject in the Jiangxi province juren examinations by which young men could enter the government bureaucracy. In the phrase he chose, "Where the people rest," the first and last characters were the same as those of Yongzheng, the posthumous name of the Qianlong emperor's grandfather but with the tops missing. An enemy pointed out that Cha Siting could have been suggesting that the Yongzheng emperor should have been beheaded. Such was the emperor's anger that after Cha Siting died in prison his body was dismembered and his brothers were imprisoned for good measure.
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The despotic Qianlong emperor prided himself on his calligraphy, which he modelled on the style of Dong Qichang (1555-1636). A patron of many artists, including the Jesuits Castiglione and Attiret, a noted collector of Chinese painting, the Qianlong emperor wrote critical colophons across the centre of many paintings in the palace collection in his large, bold hand. Like many scholars before him, he provided the calligraphy for important inscriptions which were then carved in stone and set into the backs of huge stone turtles. The calligraphy of the Qianlong emperor and many others can be seen carved into rock faces all over China. |
Alongside the stepped paths that wind up the holy mountain of Tai shan in Shandong province, where for more than two millennia Chinese emperors came to sacrifice to the earth (at the foot) and to the sky (at the summit), poems, sutras and extracts from the Confucian Da Xue, or Great Learning, have been carved into the rock face in a variety of calligraphic styles. Opposite the South-Facing Cave, dedicated to the worship of the Princess of the Rosy Clouds, two poems by the Qianlong emperor are carved in huge, decorative characters in the rock face and, further down the mountain, carrying on the long tradition of leaders writing epithets, there is a brief calligraphic inscription by Guo Moruo in 1961.
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Guo Moruo (1872-1978) was a poet, playwright, literary critic, epigrapher, archaeologist and translator who served on the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and on the State Scientific Planning Commission and as head of Academia Sinica. He, like Chairman Mao Zedong, wrote classical Chinese poetry about modern themes and was proud enough of his calligraphy to have it inscribed in stone. Mao's calligraphy still decorates the masthead of the newspaper Renmin ribao (People's Daily), and during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, when all that was old or traditional was attacked, his calligraphy was one of the few forms of art still permitted. It is still quite highly praised. |
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