In ancient times Fu Xi ruled the land under heaven. Observing celestial bodies and earthly order, studying stripes of fur and feather and species far and near, he wrote Book of Changes, creating the Eight Diagrams¹ for divination. To the times of Emperor Shen Nong, tying knots was employed for recording; however, when things grew complicated, error became inevitable. Realizing that different footprint would betray different creatures, Cang Ji, a historian of Yellow Emperor, created our written language by adopting Fu Xi's diagrams. From then on all things could be recognized thus organized.

The pictographic symbols Cang Ji created were cardinal characters, the images inherent in things. Those developed afterwards by borrowing the meaning and pronunciation of cardinal characters are compound characters. What we write on bamboo slip or silk is script, which has undergone a great change since the ancient times. The stone inscriptions at Mt. Tai record the worship of seventy-two pilgrim monarchs, and each of them is scripturally different from others.

Shi Zhou, a historian by the end of Western Zhou, compiled Big Seal Script² in fifteen volumes, which was lost. The ancient script was still in practice when Confucius edited Six Scriptures and Zuo Qiuming wrote Spring and Autumn. The years that followed saw lasting confrontation between seven states, in which the old scriptures of rite were done away with, and measurement of land, size of carriage, laws and decrees, code of dress, speech and writing evolved into different standards.

After the First Emperor of Qin annexed the land, Prime Minister Li Si suggested abolishing the scripts that differed from that of the state of Qin, upon which a set of new textbooks were complied: Cang Ji by Li Si, Calendar by Imperial Steward Zhao Gao and Erudition by Imperial Astronomer Hu Wujing. This new standard, so-called small seal script, was worked out from Big Seal Script with a considerable simplification. During this period, the literature was burnt, old customs were banned, quite many officials were recruited, and military service became compulsory. With increasing management work, clerical script was developed and credited with convenience, upon which big seal script withered away.

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2. Children's primers.

Analytical Dictionary of Characters, the first Chinese dictionary of 9,353 characters in small seal script and 1,163 references in big seal script, was compiled by Xu Shen, 58-147 AD. He used elements of Chinese characters, or radicals, to organize his dictionary, starting from one-stroke radicals in the beginning, an indexing format that has changed little in Chinese dictionary-making since. He analyzed how a new character was created or used to represent some word of the spoken language according to the six categories of Chinese characters. In this postface he reviewed Chinese writing evolution to justify his philological research.