In the month of May, His Majesty asked his soothsayer to divine the year's crop. The result is good. There will be a good harvest in the east; there will be a good harvest in the south; there will be a good harvest in the west; there will be a good harvest in the north.

The Shang people held different ideas about kingship and religion from that of the West. They believed the king's right to rule was based on his good relations with the spirits of his ancestors who controlled the destiny of the domain. The king frequently posed questions to his ancestors about the prospects for royal hunting, the appropriateness of a sacrifice, the advisability of taking military action, the likelihood of rain, or the chances for a successful crop. He did this by instructing his official clerks to write the question on an oracle bone, that is, a shoulder bone of oxen or the breast bone of tortoise. A prophet then held a hot bronze rod to the bone which cracked on the other side, and the nature of the cracks led him to make a forecast. The clerks then engraved the questions and answers on the bones and filled the incised strokes with carmine. These are the earliest records of Chinese writing - oracle inscription.

For centuries villagers near Anyang in Henan, about 90 miles north of Yellow River, had ploughed up inscribed bones or found them lying in the fields after rain. Some were polished and shone like glass; most had rows of notches that looked like a primitive writing. There they lay unnoticed until one day a villager ground it into powder to treat his abscess; amazingly it worked. The villager began to collect and take them to apothecaries in Anyang and neighboring towns, who often ground off the notches before selling them as dragon bones. Few years later in 1899 some of them fell into the hands of Wang Yirong, the President of Royal Academy, who recognized these marks a still older form of seal script on the ritual bronzes of the Zhou dynasty. The villagers began to dig deeper, and soon these bones began to appear on antique market. In 1903 a collection of 1,058 rubbings with captions was published by epigrapher Liu E. In 1908 the bones were traced to Anyang, but it was not until 1928 when China's political chaos was temporarily halted and large-scale excavations conducted by government were begun.

Basic elements of oracle script are pictographs, such as fish, dog, spear, boat, rain, or the sun. Complicated and abstract ideas are achieved by putting two or more pictographs together, such as character 'good' which is a compound of woman and baby. Showing Bronze Age men's reverence for mysterious biological phenomena, some of them were formed in a way that the confucian Chinese mind does not easily absorb. The character 'no', for instance, was made up from two pictographs - female groin, an inverted triangle, and her period, three vertical strokes. Oracle script was particular about explaining the circumstance when an action took place. Character 'dance', for instance, was composed of a human figure and under his arms some props, which could either be branches or some vessels depending on their presence at certain ritual occasion. There was little flexibility of strokes, which were incised in straight lines to compromise with a nicking tool, but it is to their simple, unaffected temperament that Chinese calligraphy history extended.