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Chinese Characters, also known as Hanzi, Kanji, is a hieroglyphic script of Chinese origin.
History[edit | edit source]
Legend has it that in ancient times, Cangjie created characters based on the footprints of birds.
In 1600 BC, the Shang dynasty created the oracle bone script. Modern people have found that these scripts can be linked to modern Chinese characters.
In the development of Chinese characters, they have gradually become square in order to make them easier to write and decipher.
Throughout history, Chinese characters have spread to Japan, Korea and Vietnam and have been used on a large scale. However, due to the prevalence of nationalism and the need to improve literacy rates in modern times, Chinese characters were modified or restricted in both China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.
The contribution of Chinese characters to the course of East Asian history[edit | edit source]
Chinese characters are an ideographic script, so that even after thousands of years of geographical separation, people across China who use different dialects can communicate through them. This is why China can still be a unified country today. This is true even in Japan, Vietnam and Korea. This allows advanced ideas to spread rapidly across national boundaries using Chinese characters as a medium. In 600 AD, for example, Japan stepped into feudal society by learning the Chinese system. And in the second half of the 19th century, Japanese ideas of modernisation were introduced into China, contributing to its progress.
Chinese characters are in fact transnational characters, and each country that uses them can create new words and spread them to other countries through Chinese characters, although historically most words have been created by China and Japan. In the 19th century, Japan was the first country to learn from the Western capitalist system. The spread of capitalist ideas with words to China, Korea and Vietnam accelerated the collapse of the feudal system in these countries.