仓颉造字　(cāng jié zào zì)

Birth of a Language

The Yellow Emperor (2717-2599 BC) ruled over a very large territory. Fortunately, he had a very smart aide named Cangjie.

Cangjie had an extremely good memory. He could keep records of food storage, the number of livestock or the number of captives seized in a battle all in his mind.

In order to do a better job, he created some memory methods, such as tying different-colored knots on strings or using shells to represent numbers to help him remember things.

The emperor was happy that Cangjie was doing such a good job, so he decided to give him more assignments. Cangjie then realized that his simple mnemonics were not effective enough to help handle so many tasks. From time to time, he found it difficult to keep track of everything without creating confusion. He decided that he needed to find a better way.

He locked himself up in a house and racked his brains for several days and nights, but he failed to come up with a better or feasible idea.

One morning, he was disturbed by some people quarreling outside his window. When he opened the window to find out what was going on, he saw three hunters arguing with each other about the footprints left by animals in the snow. One said they were the footprints of a deer going south, another insisted they were the footprints of a mountain goat going west. The third hunter claimed they were footprints of a tiger.

Looking at the footprints, Cangjie thought if different footprints could help identify different animals, why don’t I use different symbols to indicate different things?

In the following days, Cangjie began to study the shapes and other characteristics of animals and landscapes in the world and the sun, moon and stars in the sky.

Based on his observations, he used simple lines to draw symbols to represent each of them. And those symbols gradually evolved into a unique pictograph, which eventually became Chinese characters.

With the new pictographic system, Cangjie could do his job more efficiently.

The Yellow Emperor realized the significance of this invention and ordered the whole nation to learn the new writing system. It was said that on the day the Chinese characters were created, the sky began to shower crops as a heavenly present to congratulate human beings for passing this major step in evolution and civilization.

However, during his creation of the Chinese characters, Cangjie made a mistake.

One day, an old man came to see Cangjie and asked him why the symbols for horse, donkey and mule all had four legs, but the symbol of ox had only a tail and no legs.

Cangjie immediately recognized that he had inadvertently used the fish symbol for an ox. But it was too late to make any changes.

Even today, the Chinese character for “fish,” in its classic form, still has four legs, but the character for “ox” has only a tail and no legs.