The Evolution of Chinese Characters

An ancient woman with snow-white braided hair sits hunched in front of a crackling fire, skillfully and carefully etching lines with a sharp object into a large ox bone. These strokes slowly form vaguely familiar figures: a square with a mark in the middle for “sun”, a shape with three points shooting upwards for “mountain”, what looks like a running stream for “water”. Later, this diviner will heat up these inscribed bones until they crack so that she can interpret the resulting patterns: an answer from the gods.

Oracle bone, Shang dynasty

Fast-forward 400 years: a craftsman deliberately carves intricate figures composed of individual lines and disconnected strokes into a bronze wine vessel, characters that bear significant resemblance to the ones from centuries ago, but are nevertheless slightly different.

Another 400 years later, the Qin emperor declares the unification of the writing system, whose individual characters are again modified versions of those from 400 years ago. However, like an ever-growing family tree, one can still detect a strong resemblance between these characters and their previous counterparts.

Five hundred years pass. In the Han Dynasty, this likeness is still present. During this time in history, an official script is established that eventually leads directly to the beginnings of a regular written language, which becomes the basis of modern day traditional Chinese characters.

A basic sketch of the evolution of Chinese characters

This is the basic evolutionary path of Chinese characters. Many people believe that Chinese characters derive from pictographic origins; that is, each character is designed based on what it represents. However, this is only true for a very small percentage of characters. In fact, most characters are pictophonetic and arise from a “radical”, which provides the basic meaning and phonetic expression of the character.

For this reason, my mom always claims that Chinese characters are quite easy to learn. If one does not recognize a Chinese character, he only needs to be able to discern the radical in order to have a good chance of guessing not only the gist, but also the general pronunciation of the character!

Today, there are writing styles beyond the basic standard script. For example, cursive writing is commonly used in Chinese calligraphy, and is respected and well-known for its artistic, flowing strokes. Additionally, there is freehand cursive, which is less abstract than cursive writing, and thus more legible to the general public. Furthermore, large seal and small seal scripts are forms of writing often used for personal stamps and stationary. Lastly, there has recently been a surge in popularity of simplified Chinese, especially in mainland China. This type of script was adopted more than 50 years ago as a governmental attempt to increase accessibility of knowledge to the masses and to eradicate illiteracy.

Because Chinese script is the oldest script in East Asia, its influence can be seen in many Asian writing systems, such as Japanese and Korean, both of which consisted entirely of Chinese characters before adapting Chinese script to create their own writing systems. Indeed, the Chinese writing system is deeply entrenched in the history of East Asia, and continues to play a crucial part in the development of Chinese society.

A Morning Swim in North Korea

I swim because I love the sense of freedom I feel in the water. This sensation of unboundedness, of unrestrained fluidity, is even more pronounced when at the water’s edge lies a fenced-in land of captivity. The Yalu River separates the hermit kingdom of North Korea from China, and it was in the Yalu that I swam, just upstream of the crane-sprouting Chinese city of Dandong, on a clear October morning.

Yalu River swimmers with North Korea on far shore

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

As I spat into my goggles a few steps from the water, to my surprise, nine men and one woman walked down the embankment in their swimsuits, put on fins and high-tech hand paddles, and started to slide into the river. A few smiled at this stranger in trunks, and one of them, short and muscular, with a clutter of teeth and circular fire-cupping imprints across his back, signaled for me to get in the water next to him. He later told me his name was Yi Hong Fung.

Most of the swimmers gradually dispersed in the direction of the far shore, about 500 meters away. But Yi and I swam together, alternating between freestyle and breaststroke, occasionally testing each other’s speed. I felt light and fast, and probably could have quickly outdistanced him despite his paddles and fins (much of my youth was spent in competitive swimming), but this was not a race. And I didn’t know if the swimmers were going to pass the river’s midpoint, the official boundary, or veer back toward the Chinese shore.

Answer: We stroked all the way to the far bank and landed a bit downstream because of the current. Yi stood in the North Korean mud and warmed up in the sunlight. I needed the sun, too. You can imagine the water was cold, yes, but it was bearable because of our exertion, and to my surprise, it seemed clean—no litter, suds, turds or taste of diesel. We stood next to a four-meter-high fence of ragged netting held up by poles that looked like scavenged tree branches—North Korea’s protection against invading swimmers and escaping citizens.

North Korean shore of Yalu River at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)

The riverbank was a gradual rise of swamp grass; twenty meters from where we’d landed there was a small white shack—a North Korean guard station. There were no visible gun-toting Democratic People’s Republic of Korea soldiers here, as there had been the day before at the upstream trickle of a Yalu branch at Tiger Mountain. There, Chinese minders and the DPRK personnel threatened gunfire at anyone trying to take a picture of the soldiers. Here, no one. Silence.

Yi and I had been the first of the group to reach the far shore; others smiled at me as they arrived. Their skin glowed with the orange color of the early sun. I punched Yi’s shoulder and said, “hun hao” (very good), to praise his strength. He made a similar gesture to acknowledge mine.

After we plodded through the mud for a while, I motioned to Yi for us to swim back to our starting point, now upriver. “Bu shi.” This meant no, and with a sweep of his hand he indicated that the current would be too strong, we’d have to aim for a downstream point. It was all part of his regular circuit, I supposed.

Here we are: Yi and I, planted in the shallows of arguably the least free country in the world, a fenced pen holding in millions through a combination of despotism, punishing violence, and enforced mind-control ideology.

Yi was free, free to do this whenever he wanted, although I guess he didn’t recognize the mockery he made, with every swim, of the hermit tyrant ruling the far shore. But Yi lives in China. The West would say he is not really free either, that he is a citizen of a country controlled by an illegitimate, information-suppressing party; a self-engendered corrupt network of pseudo-communists.

But on this morning, with Yi’s toothy smiles and exuberance, the simple freedom of swimming seemed the only concern of both of us.

As we swam back to the Chinese shore, Yi turned his head now and then to make sure I hadn’t been swept too far by the current. We sprinted the last 100 meters, perhaps racing, perhaps just trying to beat the current to our mark on the other side— a stretch of riverside stone steps where clothes were being washed by a group of women.

Yi and I shook hands on the steps. He seemed as energized as I was, with a robustness bordering on joy. “Xie xie,” I thanked him. He replied the same.

I walked about a kilometer up-river to where I’d left my clothes. I strolled slowly, to give myself more time to think about freedom.

Train crossing Yalu River to North Korea at Dandong

(Photo: Victor Robert Lee)