This is one reason why the principle of strokes is so important to the tradition of written Chinese. In learning to write Chinese characters, children are taught not just the shapes of characters, but a set order in which to make their component lines. These lines are known as strokes – traditionally what is drawn with a single motion of the brush. Properly drawn strokes are important, as every literate person is to some extent expected to be a calligrapher. In fact, the Chinese invented calligraphy – the art of beautiful but abstract writing. While the Egyptians made their writing beautiful, it was left to the Chinese to invent an art form in which the abstract lines of the written word were rendered beautiful in themselves. In the more calligraphic and cursive styles of handwriting, the order in which strokes are made influences the way the lines of a character get run together. If you can’t identify the way the strokes have been connected, the cursive styles are illegible.
In addition to the calligraphic value of stroke order, the standardization of strokes has served the standardization of the written language. And by counting strokes and identifying radicals, one can look up a word in a Chinese dictionary and find its meaning.
But what about the pronunciation? While it is true that a large majority of Chinese characters have a phonological component to them, the system is far from precise enough to make the pronunciation of an unfamiliar character obvious. For example, the character for “mother,” contains the rebus component for “horse,” , but the two are not pronounced identically. The word for “mother,” m, is pronounced with a high tone (the voice at a high, level pitch), while the word for “horse,” m, is pronounced with a tone that starts fairly low, dips lower, then rises. Tone is a feature that some languages use to distinguish one word from another; the same syllables pronounced with different pitches mean different things. The accents which are used to indicate the tones in Romanized transcriptions of Chinese represent fairly well the movement of the voice pitch for each tone. So ma has the high, level tone and má has the dipping tone. The other two tones used in standard Mandarin Chinese are the rising tone (sounding like a question to an English speaker) of the word má, meaning “hemp,” and the sharply falling tone of the word mà, meaning “to call someone names” or “to scold.”
A difference in tone is only one source of imprecision in the phonological component of a character. Another major factor is the changes in the Chinese language since the script was codified. All spoken language changes with time. Written language, which by its very nature transcends the temporal limitations of speech, tends to become fossilized. The language on which the phonological components were based was that of Old Chinese, spoken during the Shang and Zhou periods. A great many changes in the language have occurred since then. The result is that while the rebus components of characters can tell us something about which words were pronounced similarly, they cannot tell us precisely how those words were actually pronounced in Old Chinese, nor can they tell us whether the words are pronounced the same today. They cannot even tell us whether the two words were pronounced identically in Old Chinese, as it is not clear how close a pronunciation originally had to be in order to be considered close enough for use in the rebus component.
The historical changes in the pronunciation of Chinese serve to reduce the phonological component of the modern Chinese script and to strengthen its logographic nature, as the phonological component has become increasingly imprecise. For example, characters that have the phonological component pronounced gng in modern Mandarin, can be pronounced gng, gòng, gng, gng, gàng, hòng, hóng, xiàng, jing, qióng, kng, or kng. This is a great deal of variety, yet the range of possibilities is not limitless. It is quite clear than a character with the component is not to be pronounced m, for example. Meanwhile the semantic classifiers are also subject to becoming dated – pillows are no longer made of wood, but the character, , zhn, still uses the “tree/wood” radical. It is therefore impossible to predict with certainty either the pronunciation or the meaning of an unfamiliar character.
In the first Chinese dictionaries the only way of unambiguously indicating the pronunciation of a character was to supply a homonym – another character with the same pronunciation. But not all morphemes had homonyms. The earliest surviving solution to this problem dates from AD 601, when Lù Fyán published his pronouncing and rhyming dictionary. In Lù Fyán’s dictionary, the pronunciation of each character was given in terms of two others, one of which had the same initial sound and one of which rhymed with it. This is as though we showed the pronunciation of show by listing the words sheep (same initial sound) and though (a rhyme). The system works, but only if one already knows the pronunciation of the two reference characters.
L S and X Shèn’s concern with standardizing the script set the stage for a use of writing of which the Chinese were to become the masters. China, the Middle Kingdom, has always had a strongly centripetal organization. Its cohesion has allowed China to recover after periods of conquest and fragmentation, and to remain in this day of crumbling empires one of the largest nations of the world geographically, and the largest in population. A standardized writing system has been part of that cohesion since the days of L S and the First Emperor.
Writing standardizes language and serves to mark the identity of national groups. Written Chinese became the touchstone for all Chinese people, regardless of how widely their spoken language diverged. To some extent, this happens whenever there is a written tradition. A shared written standard serves to indicate which varieties of speech belong to the same language. For example, American English and British English sound quite different, but the Americans and the British write very much the same – in fact, the minor differences in spelling do not reflect the rather significant differences in pronunciation between the two varieties.
In Europe, the traditional dialects of the Netherlands shade off into the dialects of lowland Germany almost imperceptibly, as the dialects of France once did with the dialects of Italy. Yet the Dutch speak Dutch, the Germans speak German, and the Italians speak Italian for two interconnected reasons. One is the presence of a national boundary, and the other is the presence of national written standards. The difference between Dutch and German is more about where the national border is and what standard written language is learned in school than it is about any clear, sharp line between people’s everyday speech.
In China, the Chinese people (known to themselves as the Han, as distinct from other ethnic groups who live within China’s borders) distinguish themselves from other peoples by their written language. The Han have probably always spoken a wide array of dialects. Today the spoken versions of Chinese fall into seven broad categories that linguists rarely hesitate to classify as distinct languages. But the Han themselves insist that they all speak the same language, and they adhere to the same written standard; so the seven Chinese languages are generally referred to as dialects. The Mandarin Chinese of the north is mutually unintelligible with the Yue or Cantonese Chinese of the south, for example. Words that are distinctively Cantonese can in some cases be written in nonstandard, Cantonese characters, but in other cases – and in all other “dialects” – they must be left out of written texts entirely. Yet words that are etymologically related in Mandarin and Cantonese, no matter how differently they are pronounced, can be written with the same character. Characters may be read out in any dialect, though in standard written Chinese the formation of compound words and of sentences will be distinctively Mandarin, as they used to be distinctively Classical. However, the order in which words are arranged into sentences is pretty similar across the Chinese “dialects,” making written Mandarin fairly accessible to speakers of other dialects.
This dialectal flexibility is extremely useful. The Chinese languages or dialects share a common ancestor, just as the Romance languages all descend from vernacular Latin; but the seven main types of Chinese differ from each other more than the Romance languages do. For example, the number of tones ranges from four in Mandarin to eight or n
ine (depending on how you count) in Cantonese. Cantonese dialects allow words to begin with [], the ng sound that ends the English word thing, and allows them to end in such exotic sounds (to a speaker of Mandarin) as [t], [p], or [k]. Mandarin, on the other hand, allows its words to contain the sound [], similar to the r of American English, while Cantonese contains no r-like sound at all. The sharing of a written language between such widely differing spoken forms is only possible because of the logographic nature of the script.
The logographic script, therefore, has been a unifying force in a nation committed to the ideal of unity. Centralization was a constant theme in the Chinese Empire, with the emperor continually working to hold in check the power of regional noble families who might have weakened his authority. One way of achieving this centralization was through a large state bureaucracy, fed by the civil service examination, a notable Chinese invention. The roots of the civil service exam are in the former Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 9) under the emperor Wudi (141–87 BC), who expanded the bureaucracy and established an Imperial Academy whose students were taught the Confucian classics and, upon passing an examination, were eligible for a government appointment.
Another unifying emperor, Wendi, reassembled China in AD 589 after a period of disunion and disorder, founding the Sui dynasty (ad 589–618). Like Qin Shi Huangdi, Sui Wendi then faced the task of solidifying China’s unification. He created a new bureaucracy, staffed at least in part with officials who had passed a written examination testing their general learning. The system grew during the following Tang dynasty (618–907) and became fully developed under the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127).
Schools to prepare candidates for the civil service exams were established, and a system of blind grading was introduced to counteract bias against low-born candidates. Education became a highly prized attainment, a powerful means of upward mobility. The successful candidate joined the bureaucratic class, while the emperor received into his service an official without pre-existing powerful connections. Nevertheless, there was also a “protection” system, which allowed officials to nominate family members for government positions. Government service was thus partly hereditary and partly meritocratic. In this way hereditary power was held in check, but not so much as to provoke aristocrats to revolution. In the period from 998 to 1126, during the Northern Song period, nearly 50 percent of prominent officials came from poor (non-aristocratic) families.
The examination system was abolished by the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (ad 1260–94), partially restored (with quotas and discrimination against Han candidates) by his Mongol successors, and fully revived under the Ming dynasty (1364–1644), when power returned to the hands of Han rulers. It was finally abolished in 1905 in the final years of the last dynasty, that of the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Meanwhile the civil service exam was adopted by the Koreans and Vietnamese; the idea of the exam (though not the specific content) also inspired the Prussian and British civil service exams.
The curriculum on which the civil service exams were based was in most periods the Confucian classics. From Ming times on, candidates were required to write an essay on a Confucian quotation and to compose a poem in beautiful calligraphy. While this was arguably not the best preparation for an administrative career, it did mean that officials had imbibed deeply of Confucian philosophy, which taught the principles of ethical rule and emphasized one’s duty in a hierarchical social structure headed by the emperor. The exam also stressed that most ancient of bureaucratic skills, literacy – a skill not easily attained in a logographic script, and therefore subject to much variation in mastery.
The difficulty of learning and remembering several thousand characters was commensurate with its rewards. Literacy was the path to worldly advancement, to wisdom (through the Confucian and Daoist classics), and to artistic expression (through calligraphy). The skill was therefore highly prized and not shared lightly. Such valuable knowledge could not be entirely contained, however. With the establishment of a merchant class during the Southern Song dynasty, writing came to be used in trade and business. Drama and fiction written in the vernacular became popular in succeeding centuries, though attempts at mass literacy were unheard of until the twentieth century.
Mass literacy is of course useless if access to writing materials and written texts is limited. Such was the situation in the ancient and classical worlds, when all texts had to be produced by hand, generally written on materials whose quantities were limited (with the exception of clay) or which, like stone, made writing a truly labor-intensive activity. Early Chinese books were written on strips of bamboo, as we have seen, each strip carrying one or more columns of characters. With a thong passed through the strips they became a book, with bamboo pages. The character cè, , meaning a book, register, or table of statistics, depicts the ancient book. The range of meanings associated with the character suggests the early bureaucratic uses to which books would have been put. This character is found in much the same shape in oracle bone inscriptions, though unfortunately no Shang books have survived. The utility of a book that holds only one or two lines of text per page remains limited, however.
The innovation of using woven cloth, usually silk, as a writing surface and the invention of the camel’s-hair brush spurred the further development of book making as well as the art of calligraphy. Cloth made for a porous, smooth surface that could be made in large enough strips to make a scroll.
Yet the truly great Chinese innovation – the second great information technology revolution – was the invention of the world’s first true paper, traditionally dated to AD 105. Papermaking turned scraps into a culturally and financially valuable commodity. Paper made possible cheap and dense information storage, and was to earlier bamboo strips or clay tablets what a modern rewritable CD is to an old five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disk. Imagine any modern volume as a collection of half-inch-thick clay tablets and the impact of the paper revolution will begin to come clear. The Chinese invented paper books, paper money, packing paper, and even toilet paper, four things we would hate to do without.
The word paper comes from papyrus, the everyday writing surface of the ancient Egyptians. Papyrus resembles paper and has many of the same useful properties, but it was made differently, was thicker, and could not be folded. It was also limited in its availability. The papyrus reed once grew abundantly in marshy ground along the Nile River but is now virtually extinct in Egypt, though still found here and there around the Mediterranean. Writing papyrus was made from the pith of the reed. Strips of pith were laid down side by side, wetted and perhaps pasted, and covered with strips laid down the other way, perpendicular to the first layer. The two layers were pressed together, and stuck. The process was not unlike the making of very thin plywood.
True paper is made from fibers which have been broken apart and disintegrated and are then matted together into a thin sheet. Paper can thus be considered a very thin form of felt, which is also made by matting together fibers. Early Chinese paper was made from scraps of fabric, with flax, hemp, the inner bark of trees, and even old fishnets soon joining the list of raw materials. Anything that would provide the necessary fibers could be used, and many such things were either scraps or highly renewable resources. The second IT revolution was thus built on the recycling of trash. Ink made from lampblack (later known as “India ink” in English) made a liquid pigment that could easily be brushed onto paper.
It is easy to underestimate paper. It is ubiquitous, it is cheap, and it takes up very little space. But that is exactly the point. As long as writing materials remained expensive, bulky, and rare, the uses of literacy were restricted. There would have been very little point in inventing movable type, for instance, if not for paper. Even today, the “paperless office” has yet to materialize; the computer revolution has triggered the use of more paper than ever, just as the printing revolution did in its time.
The Chinese people had a great respect for paper and papermakers. Paper was put to lofty use, carrying the wo
rds of Confucius and other sages. Paper also made a very effective burnt offering. Almost anything, from money to goods to pet dogs, could be copied in paper effigy and offered to one’s deceased ancestors. Prayers were written on paper and ritually burned; the prayer would thus ascend to heaven.
It was in fact prayer that inspired the earliest known printing of text on paper, ushering in the third great IT revolution. Paper spread from China to Korea and onward, reaching Japan around AD 610. By this time the technology for printing was available in China. The Chinese used inked seals to transfer a design onto paper, cloth, or leather, and took rubbings from stone inscriptions. They may also have been printing texts on paper. But the first true printing of text onto sheets of paper that history has remembered occurred in Japan in the eighth century.
The reigning monarch of the time, Empress Shtoku (reigned 749–58 and 765–9), was a Buddhist who ordered the printing (in Chinese) of one million Buddhist prayers. These were to be inserted into miniature pagodas and set in various temples throughout Japan. It is not known whether she herself devised the means for producing the million prayers, whether she left that to her advisors, or whether the technique was imported wholesale from China. Whether “a million” actually meant a million or just “a very great number” is also unclear, but many prayers and pagodas were produced in the years from 767 to 770, and some have survived to the present day. Thus printing made possible piety on a new scale entirely.
Woodblock printing on paper (xylography) came to be used for other purposes as well in China, Japan, and Korea. The first printed book, the Diamond Sutra, was printed in China in AD 868 (figure 4.2), and many books of the Chinese classics and Buddhist canon followed, first in scroll form and later in books with pages. Engravings and text could be combined on the same printing block and be transferred together onto the same page, a feat impossible to later movable-type printing presses.
The Writing Revolution Page 9