Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary sovereign…
2637 BCE to 2494 BCE
Cangjie, a bureaucrat under the legendary sovereign and Han Chinese cultural hero Huangdi, will be said to have invented Chinese characters around 2650 BCE.
The legend tells that Cangjie was hunting on Mount Yangxu (today Shanxi) when he saw a tortoise whose veins caught his curiosity.Inspired by the possibility of a logical relation of those veins, he studied the animals of the world, the landscape of the earth, and the stars in the sky, and invented a symbolic system called zì: Chinese characters.
It was said that on the day the characters were born, Chinese heard the devil mourning, and saw crops falling like rain, as it marked the beginning of the world.
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East Asia
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