A short history of Chinese: from oracle bones to pinyin

Chinese is one of the oldest written languages still in use: inscriptions from more than three thousand years ago can largely be read today. Six moments shaped the language you are learning — and they explain why its characters look the way they do, why its spoken varieties differ so much, and where pinyin comes from. Facts here are from Britannica and China’s State Council.

Updated November 7, 2026 · 4 min read

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1. Oracle bones: the oldest Chinese writing

The earliest known Chinese inscriptions — 10 to 60 characters cut into pieces of bone and tortoiseshell used for divination — date from the Shang dynasty. Even then the script was highly developed, and by 1400 BCE it had some 2,500 to 3,000 characters, most of which can be read to this day (Britannica). The picture at the top shows oracle bones from Yinxu; the left piece is a table of the sixty-day cycle used to date divinations. What this long history means for learners today is in Why learn Chinese?

2. From pictures to sound-and-meaning characters

The earliest graphs were schematic pictures — the graph for man looked like a standing figure. But many words cannot be drawn, so a picture was borrowed for another word that sounded alike. To avoid ambiguity, about 213 BCE, under the first Qin emperor, a second element was added to give a clue to the meaning: most characters since then have one part suggesting the sound and another the meaning (Britannica).

3. The Qin standard and the brush

After the Zhou dynasty’s “great seal” script, the writing was fixed in its present form during the Qin period (221–207 BCE). Before the Common Era it came to be written with brush and ink on paper, and the graphs lost their pictorial look (Britannica). Until the 18th century, more than half of the world’s books were written in Chinese.

4. Old, Middle and Modern Chinese

Some scholars divide the spoken language into Proto-Sinitic (until 500 BC), Archaic or Old Chinese (8th–3rd century BC), Ancient or Middle Chinese (to AD 907) and Modern Chinese (from about the 10th century). Much of what we know of Middle Chinese sounds comes from a pronouncing dictionary published in AD 601 by Lu Fayan (Britannica). Meanwhile the spoken varieties drifted apart — today Mandarin, Wu, Min, Gan, Hakka, Xiang and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible (Where is Chinese spoken?).

5. One written language: from wenyan to baihua

All the varieties shared one literary language, wenyan, written in characters; each region read it with its own pronunciation. Before 1917 it was used for almost all writing; since then writing in the vernacular style, baihua, has become accepted, and wenyan survives mainly in literary and scholarly circles (Britannica).

6. The 20th century: a national standard, pinyin and simplified characters

In the early 1900s a programme to unify the national language, based on Mandarin, produced Modern Standard Chinese. Pinyin, based on Beijing pronunciation, was adopted in 1956 as a teaching tool, modified in 1958 and prescribed in 1979 for diplomatic documents (Britannica). A second reform simplified characters by reducing their strokes (Britannica). In 2013 China’s State Council published the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, in three levels, which replaced earlier character lists and includes a comparison with traditional and variant forms (State Council). Learning them goes faster in small daily steps — 16 words a day.

Keep learning

• Why learn Chinese? 7 reasons
• Where is Chinese spoken? — dialect groups on a map
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