Pictographic characters in Tanshishan Musuem Fujian Province.

With language, ancient humans began accumulating knowledge through which human culture came forth. With characters, they recorded the language and communicated with each other, which distinguished man from animals. It is characters that drew a line between the primitive and civilized periods of human society.

There are various sayings in ancient Chinese documents concerning the origin of Chinese characters, such as "tie knots," the "Eight Diagrams," "picture," and "carved characters," among others. The legendary story about Cang Jie creating characters is generally recorded in ancient books. According to ancient records, Chinese characters were created by Cang Jie, a history officer of the legendary Yellow Emperor.

Huainanzi (Masters in the Kingdom of Huainan) says that it was because of the characters Cang Jie made that the Heaven rained grains and ghosts cried at night. Xunzi (Hsun Tzu) and Shijing (The Book of Odes) and other ancient books also record the legend of Cang Jie creating Chinese characters. By the Qin (221-206BC) and Han (206BC-220AD) dynasties, the legend had become more widespread and had more far-reaching influence.

Historians in the past once tried to prove whether there was a person named Cang Jie in history, and if he did exist, when he lived, but they failed to draw a conclusion due to lack of irrefutable proof.

The Eight Diagrams

Some people guessed that Cang Jie was the historiographer of the Yellow Emperor. Xunzi thought Cang Jie must have been a prehistoric wise man who sorted out and standardized the characters that had already been in use.

Evidently the legend of Cang Jie cannot be accepted as the truth, for any script can only be a creation developed by people to meet the needs of social life over a long period of trial and experiment. Chinese characters are a huge and complicated system, and they could only have come into being after a long period of creation and development.

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