The Chinese characters have been used for the longest time, over the widest area and by the largest number of people in the world. The creation and application of the Chinese characters has not only propelled the development of Chinese culture, but also greatly influenced world culture.

The first evidence of the characters is around 6,000 years old. More than 50 kinds of carved symbols appeared around the Banpo Site and other nearby areas. They were structured and arranged in a certain order, and they have the same characteristics as today's simple characters - scholars deem them to be the original Chinese characters.

The Chinese characters were systemized during the Shang Dynasty(16th century BC) during which Chinese civilization reached developed to a relatively high level with the appearance of Jiaguwen (Oracles). Oracles are ancient characters carved onto tortoise shells and beast bones. During the Shang Dynasty, kings would consult them before taking any action, and the shells and bones served as the tools for divination.

Shells and bones were processed before use. The remaining flesh and blood would be got rid of and they were pared, sawed and rubbed down. And then, concave indentations were chiseled out by falchions on the inner sides of the shells and the inverse sides of the bones. These indentations had to be well arranged and those who wanted to divine had their names, dates and questions carved onto the shells and bones.

Later, necromancers had the concaves burned, and the flaws of these concaves used to be called ��Omen��. The necromancers foretold according to the features of the flaws and the result, whether true or false, would be carved onto the shells and bones as well. If the words went true, then the shells and bones with the ��Omen Words�� would be kept as official documents.

To date, archaeologists have unearthed about 160,000 shells and bones, among which some are complete and others are just fragments without any recognizable characters on them. Around 4,000 characters of different kinds have been recognized and about 3,000 have been studied by the scholars. Of these, more than 1000 are agreed to have been decoded.

As for the others, some are unexplainable and some are debated continuously. Nevertheless, using the decoded 1000 characters as an aid, we can get some general knowledge of the Shang Dynasty. The Oracles are systematic characters which form the foundations for the development of modern Chinese characters. Later, the Chinese characters took various different forms - Jinwen, Xiaozuan, Lishu, Kaishu and they have are used fairly unchanged to this day.

The Chinese characters have been gradually standardized. Xiaozuan set down the number of strokes of each character; Lishu shaped the new forms of the Chinese characters; Kaishu helped establish the new form and basic strokes��horizontal, vertical , left-falling, dot, right-falling , rising and turning stroke. For more than 1000 years, Kaishu remained the standard form of Chinese Characters.

The Chinese characters are a meaning-oriented character system based on Xiangxing characters and consisting of Xingsheng characters. The total number of characters is around 10,000, of which 3000 used frequently. They are used to construct an infinite number of sentences and meanings.

The creation of the Chinese characters heavily influenced the writing systems of neighboring countries. The characters of Japan, Vietnam and Korea were all created on the same basis as the Chinese characters.