Historical milestones China

2500 B.C.

First systemisation of the writing of the Chinese "characters" attributed to the legendary Emperor Huang Di 黄帝

1523 B.C.

Sunder Shang Yin 殷虚, development of the oracle writings on bones or turtle shell.

800 B.C.

First list of 1,000 characters of the "greater seal" 大篆 style established by the great scribe Chou 籕 : the 籕文.

500 B.C.

Characters drawned on tripode vases in bronze.

213 B.C.

The emperor Qin Shi Huang Di 奏始皇帝 burned to ashes the classical books and asked his Prime Minister Li Si 李斯 to create a one and only official list of characters. Limited to 3,300 characters, this list 三倉 is elaborated with the former existing characters, generalizing the principle of :

"basic phonetic primitive + key"

According to this principle, knowing a list of 56 keys and 57 phonetic primitives would have been sufficient to generate the list (56+57+56x57=3,305). Graphically, the characters, drawn with a brush, had to be written in a standard sized square. This style defines the so-called "small seal" 小篆 style.

200 A.D.

during the following HAN 漢 dynasty, the style is definitively fixed. It is the script still in use nowadays (except in Democratic Republic of China, which simplified the writing of over 2,000 characters in 1955).

1rst century

7th edition of the list. The number increases to reach 7,800 characters. The central power weakening, pronunciations start to vary according to provinces and careless copies 奇字 ensue ; this entails now interpretation difficulties, although the original was straight forward. 96 A.D. Editing of the posthumous work of Xu Zhen 許愼 : the 説文解字 (ShuShuō wén jiĕzì or せつぶんかいじ) in Japanese) which classified 9,353 characters derived from the Li Si list.

5-7 century

The chinese writing is adopted by Japan.