Chinese Birthday--Until kanji are created--

　Kanji began to be used in earnest from the Shang Dynasty, also known as the Yin Dynasty.

　Its original form is oracle bone characters carved into turtle shells and animal bones. It dates back to the 17th century BC.

　Were Chinese characters invented by the people of the Shang Dynasty?

　The prototype of Chinese characters was discovered in the Sanxingdui culture that flourished around Sichuan province. It is one of the Chinese civilizations that flourished over 2,000 years ago and suddenly disappeared.

　Symbols such as star shapes and waveforms have been found in the excavated artifacts. It is thought that it is not just a pattern but letters for communication, but it is not clear.

　There is some theory that oracle bone characters were adopted by the people of the so-called Yellow River Civilization as a civilization in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, that focused on the convenience of communication through symbols, and that it was fully developed during the Shang Dynasty.

　Chinese character which is still used today, is a development and abbreviation of the oracle bone character.

　Letters are a convenient tool for communicating with others who are physically and temporally distant.

　On the other hand, the people of the Shang Dynasty themselves were illiterate, or rather they were prohibited from using oracle bone script.

　The Shang Dynasty was a theocratic government in which people asked the God of Heaven to tell their fortunes about not only the dates of battles but also the trivial matters of everyday life, and then followed the results.

　Oracle bone script was considered a Sacred Talisman for communicating with the gods of heaven, and its use was prohibited to anyone other than a limited number of people, such as royalty and priests.

　Sacrifices are offered for fortune-telling. There were livestock such as cows, sheep and horses, but prisoner captured in battle were also sacrificed. In particular, the Qiang Tribe who lived in the western part of the Shang Dynasty were often sacrificed. The same goes for the numerous slaves within the dynasty.

　While friends were being sacrificed every day, the Zhou State located to the west of the Shang Dynasty rebelled and slaves and prisoners of war were transferred to the Zhou State, and the Shang Dynasty collapsed in an instant.

　The Zhou State replaced the Shang Dynasty and established the Zhou Dynasty as the king of Chinese civilization in the 11th century BC. From this period onwards, oracle bone characters became widespread.

　The Zhou Dynasty did not place as much importance on fortune-telling as the Shang Dynasty, and did not consider oracle bone characters writing itself sacred.

　On the other hand, paying attention to the convenience of writing, oracle bone characters was actively used to communicate with the feudal lords who ruled various regions.

　In particular, the name of the recipient lord and the circumstances surrounding the gift of the Three-Legged Kettle were engraved on the inside called Chinese bronze inscriptions, that the king of Zhou gave to the feudal lords.

　Based on Chinese bronze inscriptions, various feudal lords in various regions also actively utilized oracle bone characters, and writing spread throughout the continent.

　Because the characters were passed down by hand across a vast continent, the shapes of the characters in each region were different and inconsistent. If a person from the East goes to the West, they often cannot read the same characters at all.

　The time will come when the characters that were once inconsistent will be unified. Unification of China by Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

　Just like weights and measures which were not unified in each region, characters were also unified based on the characters of the Qin area that had been traditionally used by the pre-unification Qin Dynasty.

　However, the Qin Dynasty unified the country for only 15 years. Moreover, in the latter five years, the dynasty was thrown into chaos due to nationwide rebellions.

　The characters were actually unified during the Western Han Dynasty (206BC to 8 AD). Originally, the Qin characters which the Qin Dynasty tried to unify, were widely recognized as the Han Dynasty characters as kanji (It means is the Han characters) which were popularized in a unified form. Despite trying to unify the characters, the Qin Dynasty seems to have suffered a loss.

　On the other hand, there are aspects of the Qin Dynasty that are forever etched in history.

　The pinyin notation for Qin Dynasty is Qin. Even during the period of the unified dynasty which was only for a short period of time, they actively dispatched envoys to surrounding countries, creating opportunities for cultural exchange between the East and the West.

　The name of the Qin Dynasty was spread to various places through messengers. In the process of spreading Qin changed to Chin and spread to Europe. There is same theory that the origin of the word China, which was later vaguely referred to by Europeans to refer to mainland China is from the Qin Dynasty.

　Although the Qin Dynasty collapsed in a very short period of time as a unified dynasty, it remained forever as the name of mainland China.