Hello, and welcome to Chinese Folk Tales.
This is Beibei.
We've been talking about some very important inventions in ancient China, and here's more to come.
The effects brought on by the invention that I'm going to talk about today are as far-reaching and influential as inventions come.
But we barely notice them anymore.
It feels like they have always been there.
I'm not talking about things for our stomach, but for our minds.
The invention of written words.
Back in ancient China, people had no way to remember things besides storing information in their heads.
But as we know, that storage space is not all that reliable.
Things get lost all the time.
So people tied knots on strings to help them remember that something had happened.
Let's say someone caught two rabbits today.
Okay, two knots.
Easy enough.
But by the next time you look at the knots you probably won't remember whether that meant two rabbits or two birds, and caught by who and given to whom.
Clearly, it's not a very efficient system.
What to do?
Well, drawing came more naturally.
Someone caught a wild boar and everyone got to have a dose of yummy protein.
Now that's something significant and worth recording.
Whoever was in charge could draw a scene of humans hunting a wild boar on some rocks in the cave.
But events kept happening and it took so much time to draw.
So the pictures became more and more simplified, until they were distilled into symbols or abstract characters.
In Chinese mythology, there was a man named Cang Jie who was credited with the invention of writing.
Someone who could invent writing could not have been ordinary.
Not even in his or her looks.
Legend has it that Chang Jie had four eyes.
And that's not enough.
There were two pupils in each eye.
Freaky, huh?
I think this was to emphasize that Chang Jie was extraordinarily observant.
He was given the responsibility of recording events in the tribe, keeping tracks of the population, the amount of prey from hunting, the amount of harvest and storage of food.
What tedious lists people have to make.
As smart and sharp-eyed as Cang Jie was, he still had a hard time remembering every little detail.
Again, One day, Cang Jie came to a three-way forked road where a few hunters were arguing.
One hunter was saying, And another was saying, And the third was saying No no, you guys should listen to me and go that way.
There are bears there.
Hmm, how did they know?
Cang Jie went up and asked.
The hunters laughed and answered.
Look at these footprints.
They are left on the ground by different animals.
Oh, that wasn't rocket science.
But it did give Cang Jie an inspiration.
If different footprints can represent different animals, why can't we create different symbols for different things?
Now, Chang Jie didn't just have some small plan to characterize some animals.
He wanted to create symbols for everything.
He spent a lot of time observing the patterns of the stars.
The way the mountains stood and the rivers ran.
And the tracks of wild beasts and fish in the sea.
Then he created symbols for all of them.
And these were the earliest written Chinese characters.
Day after day, Chang Jie created one word after another.
And he shared his creation, so more and more people started using these characters to record their lives.
How big a deal was this to the ancient Chinese?
Legend has it that because Cang Jie created Chinese characters, the sky rained down grains and ghosts cried at night.
Is that a good thing or bad?
Well, it's just saying that it was such a big deal that really weird things started happening.
Because the creation of written words signified the beginning of civilization and the unraveling of nature's secrets.
Most amazingly, what ancient people discovered could now be recorded and passed on to generations to come.
The characters that Chang Jie created are very different from the ones we use today.
They were more like symbols and after thousands of years, these symbols slowly evolved and became the characters we use today.
And Cang Jie has long been honored as a saint.
So that's the story of how Chinese characters came about.
Every step of human progress came from the accumulation of generations of individual intelligence and collective efforts.
Figures like Shen Long, Lei Zu and Cang Jie were cultural heroes who brought about changes that have had sweeping effects on human existence.
There are also other heroes who were remembered by their heroic efforts that changed nature.
We'll talk about them in our next episode, and hope to see you then.
Bye for now.
If you've got any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact us via email at podcast at cricomcn or find us on Twitter China Plus Pods.
