As widely known, Chinese characters are pictographic. For the general public, the concept of Chinese characters being pictographic is often a source of pride when speakers passionately praise the unparalleled uniqueness of Chinese character pictographs. However, Chinese character pictographs are not taught in schools, and it's difficult to find books that introduce them. As a result, most people have little understanding of what Chinese character pictographs are. A minority might know a handful of pictographic characters, often no more than ten. The concept of Chinese character pictographs is distant and vague for the majority, and aside from a fleeting sense of pride, it serves little practical purpose.
Due to the burning of books and persecution of scholars by Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the most pictographic oracle bone script disappeared from Chinese history for approximately 2100 years. Even Xu Shen, the compiler of the "Shuowen Jiezi," who lived much later, had not seen oracle bone script and might not have known of its existence. He explained Chinese characters based on their meanings, without any pictographic interpretations. During these 2100 years, Chinese people were entirely unaware of oracle bone script, the oldest form of Chinese characters from which all others originated. It was the mother of Chinese characters. It wasn't until 1899, during the late Qing Dynasty, that the official and ancient Chinese character expert Wang Yirong rediscovered oracle bone script. It was then that the world learned that we had missed out on oracle bone script for 2100 years.
From that time until now, 123 years have passed, and the excavation and identification of oracle bone script has made significant progress. There are varying answers online regarding how many oracle bone script characters have been deciphered, ranging from a low of 1000 to a high of 2500. Why such a huge difference? I suspect it may be due to how one counts cases where a character is written multiple ways. Before Emperor Qin Shi Huang standardized Chinese characters in Small Seal Script, Chinese characters were written in multiple forms, including oracle bone script, bronze script, and great seal script. A single character could have many different forms.
For example:
The character "車" (ché, car/vehicle)
The character "魚" (yú, fish)
Obviously, there are two ways to calculate:
- If we count the five different oracle bone script forms of "車," we have five deciphered characters, even though they all represent "car/vehicle."
- If we consider them all to represent "car/vehicle," then regardless of the form, we only count it once under the character "車." Thus, although there are five deciphered forms of "車," we only count one.
The answer can vary greatly depending on how you approach the calculation.
On one hand, we have deciphered at least a thousand oracle bone scripts (according to meaning). However, compared to the tens of thousands of Chinese characters, this is still a very small number. Significant improvement is unlikely in the short term, and even in the long term, the number of deciphered characters will remain limited. This is because there are only 4500 characters found on oracle bone script fragments, including both deciphered and undeciphered ones.
The discovery of oracle bone script greatly aids our understanding of the pictographic nature of Chinese characters, as oracle bone script is essentially drawings. The combination of characters and drawings in oracle bone script vividly demonstrates this. Although the number of deciphered oracle bone scripts is still limited, we have been able to clarify the origins and evolution of many Chinese characters. However, this field of study is still underdeveloped. Apart from an unofficial "Pictographic Dictionary," very few are working on this, and it remains largely unexplored.
Because I taught Chinese and calligraphy at Huaxia Chinese School from 2011 to 2016, I began to explore Chinese character pictographs and tried to incorporate them into teaching, primarily in calligraphy instruction, with excellent results. Since then, I have systematically researched Chinese character pictographs and pictographic calligraphy. In 2016, I established two related English blogs: "Amazing Chinese Characters" and "Pictographic Chinese Calligraphy," providing information on Chinese character pictographs and pictographic calligraphy to readers worldwide for free. I also started writing Chinese blog posts, introducing and explaining Chinese character pictographs from a pictographic perspective, rather than focusing on their meanings.
When we shift our perspective to Chinese character pictographs, we are struck by the ingenious ideas our ancestors had when creating characters. Their creativity and imagination are truly astonishing. This also deepens our understanding of Chinese characters and idioms.
Learning pictographic Chinese characters helps you understand their origins and evolution. Once learned, they are essentially unforgettable for life. Students I've taught still remember the characters they learned years later, and they can explain them because they truly understand these characters.
Furthermore, pictography is a unique characteristic of Chinese characters and a manifestation of the artistic nature of Chinese characters. There is no other language in the world with such an artistic characteristic.
To facilitate everyone's understanding, I will compile and edit Chinese explanatory blog posts on this subject into a series of books. This will help Chinese teachers, students learning Chinese, and readers interested in understanding Chinese character pictographs.
The book will include explanations of single-character pictographs, radical pictographs, and comparisons of similar character pictographs, all from an imaginative perspective. The latter two forms are my original interpretations, and as far as I know, no one else has explained Chinese characters in this way, at least not from a pictographic perspective. While there are others working on single-character pictograph explanations, "Pictographic Chinese Characters" often differs from them in its explanations.
Written on February 10, 2022.
