The Pictograms of Ancient China

We don’t know much for certain about Huang Di, or about the rulers who followed him—because they didn’t leave any written records about their empires. Almost everything that we know about these very ancient Chinese rulers has been passed down in stories and legends, from person to person over thousands of years.

We do know that the Chinese went on living in the Yellow River Valley, and that they grew rice, raised silkworms, and tried to defend themselves against invaders. And we know that a new leader came to power, hundreds of years after Huang Di. His name was T’ang, and his family was called the Shang family.

T’ang became king around 1766 BC/BCE. His family would rule the Yellow River Valley for the next five hundred years. In China, this was called a dynasty—one family keeping control of a country for many, many years, passing the crown along from father to son, from brother to brother, or from uncle to nephew.

We know much more about the Shang dynasty than we do about the rulers who came before it.

During the rule of the Shang family, the Chinese began to use bronze. They made weapons, wheels, and farming tools out of bronze. These tools and weapons made of bronze didn’t rot away like wooden tools. Thousands of years later, archaeologists discovered the bronze tools and weapons, buried beneath the ruins of Shang buildings. The bronze weapons tell us that the Chinese who lived during the rule of the Shang dynasty knew how to fight with bows and arrows. They used chariots when they attacked their enemies, and they wore shields and armor to protect themselves. The farming tools tell us that they grew wheat and mulberries, as well as rice, and that they used plows pulled by horses to farm their fields.

But that’s not all the Shang dynasty left us. During the rule of the Shang, the Chinese began to use writing for the very first time. And we can still read this writing, because it was often engraved on bones and on bronze plaques that have lasted for thousands of years.

At first, this early Chinese writing was made up of pictures. These special pictures are called pictograms. Picto means “picture” and gram means “writing.” Pictograms are words that look like pictures. For example, here’s a pictogram for “sun”:

It’s a picture of the sun, with the sun’s rays shining out at both sides. The pictogram for “water” looks like this:

Can you see the waves in the water?

Here’s a Shang dynasty pictogram that means “house”:

Here is a Shang pictogram that means “bow and arrow”:

And here’s a more complicated pictogram that means “soldier”:

This soldier is carrying a halberd, a weapon that has an axe on one side and a dagger on the other.

The Chinese people used these pictograms to write simple messages. The pictograms look almost exactly like the words they represent.