Chinese Symbol Culture
Discover the inside secrets to Chinese Symbol culture
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The Origination of Chinese Symbols
There is a legendary tale about the origin of Chinese character symbols. The Chinese words were invented
in Huangdi's times (c.2650 BC). Huangdi was supposed to be Chinese's ancestor according to the traditional Chinese
folklore.
He has a civil servant called CangJie, whose picture is shown below. One day when CangJie went out
hunting, a tortoise's colorful veins caught his attention. It raised his curiosity and he began to study this wild animal in detail.
 In order to find some more, He even started to study all sorts of subjects with regard to the animal world, geography and even astrology. Based on his studies, he created the very first Chinese symbolic system. From that day, Chinese symbols were born. Chinese people began to build up their own understanding on some natural phenomenon with their own logical reasons and used the symbol character to record what they had seen. But this is only hearsay. There is no real evidence to back up such a folk tale.
 According to the archaeological evidence,
it is widely estimated that Chinese character symbols have existed for hover 4000 years, As one of the oldest cultural
symbolic writing systems, Chinese characters have originated even earlier than Cangjie's time.
The very first
version of Chinese character symbols is Shell-Bone-Script, which was found in the Chinese Shang Dynasty. Some people call
it the oracle bone script.
 I would prefer to call it Shell-Bone-Script here, as it actually refers to "the inscriptions on tortoiseshells
and animal bones".
Before the invention of paper, Chinese people wrote their symbols on whatever they could find. They started inscribing characters on tortoise shells or animal bones, later on they started to inscribe words on the bronze ware, instruments, monuments, and even bamboo clips.
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If you want to read more about ancient Chinese writings, Ancient Symbol History ...
please visit
 Ancient Chinese Words
Ancient Chinese writings
The Different Written
Scripts of Chinese Symbols
Chinese writing symbol has evolved over thousands of years'
to become what it is today. It has gone through many different periods; each generates different versions of written scripts.
We have presented the classic Chinese written scripts below. You can click on each of them for further details.
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These scripts have finally developed a variety of special handwriting styles. Some of them are still used in people's daily communication, such as "The Standard Scripts", "The Semi-Cursive Scripts" and "The Cursive Scripts", etc.
But others such as "The Small Seal Character" or "The Gold Scripts" are just far too old. They were frequently written in ancient Chinese society over thousands of years ago.
Nowadays, people don't use them for daily writings any more. Sometimes these scripts can only be shown in some Chinese calligraphic works.
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If you want to read more about Chinese symbol history,
Chinese writings ... please visit
Chinese Writing Symbols
Learn Chinese writings
Answers To Frequently Asked Questions
 Are Chinese characters and Chinese symbols same thing?
 It's natural for people to have some confusion about "the title" of Chinese words. Some people call them
Chinese symbols while others call them characters.
But whatever Chinese symbols, Chinese characters, Chinese words,
or even Chinese writing symbols, they are actually different terms for the same thing.
 What's the
difference between Chinese and Kanji symbols?
 Well, for some reason, you can say both Chinese and kanji
symbols are the same thing, as "Kanji" in Chinese means "Chinese words". But if you are talking about Japanese kanji symbols,
that is a different matter.
Although part of Japanese symbols were originated from Chinese words, there's a lot of
difference between these two symbolic writing systems.
For further detail, please visit
Kanji Symbols
 Are Chinese symbols real words or pictures?
This
is one of the most frequently asked question. Originally, Chinese characters were formed based upon the pictures of real
objects and most of those symbols' meanings can be expressed directly by the way they look. We call these symbol characters
"象形字 - The Pictographic Characters".
Let's take "Chinese bird symbol"
as an example.
In the picture, the very first one from the left is the original version of "Chinese Bird symbol".
It was created based on the picture of real birds. Through hundreds of years' development, the bird symbol became look like
the one shown in the middle of the picture.
And then after another hundreds and thousands of years' development, it
became what it looks like today - "鳥".
Today, most of the Chinese symbols are not
"the pictographic characters". Actually Over 90% of them are the Phone-semantic compounds,
which were formed by linking two or more elements together. These elements can be radicals, roots or independent characters.
For further detail, please visit
Chinese Characters
If you are
interested in "The Pictographic Characters", please visit
Chinese Words Secrets I
Chinese Words Secrets II
 How to type Chinese characters into the computer?
 Many people have some confusion about "how to type Chinese words into the computer". Although there is no a single Chinese character or even a radical shown on the keyboards, Chinese people still can use the 26 Roman letters to type Chinese words.
How? This is because in mainland China, there is a kind of Chinese phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. The Pinyin system consists of Roman Alphabets, which is a sort of phonetic transcription for Chinese characters.
Chinese people can use the "Pinyin system" to transcribe different spellings of Roman letters into Chinese symbols.
For further detail, please visit
Chinese Letters
 How to find right symbols for my Chinese tattoo designs?
 To find a perfect Chinese tattoo out of thousands of Chinese symbols isn't an easy job for a foreigner.
You must know what exactly that Chinese word mean before making any decision. You just can not carelessly pick up any symbol without double check what it means.
For example, you can use some online resources like this website to find the right symbols for your tattoo designs, or you can also use our symbol database or even contact us to check what your tattoo exactly means.
For any foreigner, my personal tip here is you should choose Chinese symbols for positive English words as your tattoo designs and try to avoid using symbols for some disputable English words.
You might wonder what these "disputable words" I mentioned here are. Well, some English words like "bad", "wicked", etc can be the candidates.
 These days, such English words' meanings were partially hijacked. For example, the word "bad" normally means "rotten", "detrimental", or "obscene", but today, in slang, the word "bad" means "great" or "very good".
Some people like to choose Chinese symbol for "bad", "wicked" or even "sick" as their tattoos. That's not a good choice.
Although in English, sometimes these words mean "cool" or "good", but in Chinese, the word "bad" still means "obscene" or "detrimental". In other words, in Chinese, "bad" is still "bad" and "wicked" is still "wicked".
So if you choose any Chinese words like that to be your tattoos, you tattoo designs will look very awkward in many native Chinese eyes, because in term of Chinese culture, these words are always negative and nasty.
Article/Jenson Zhu
07/02/2005
To find more about positive Chinese symbols, please visit
Positive Symbols Collection
For more information about Chinese Tattoos, please visit
Chinese tattoo Museum
Chinese symbol tattoos
For more articles and resources about Chinese Symbols, please visit
Chinese Symbol Resource
Symbols Directory
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