Written Chinese in the context of "Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts"

The history of China spans several millennia across a wide geographical area. Each region now considered part of the Chinese world has experienced periods of unity, fracture, prosperity, and strife. Chinese civilization first emerged in the Yellow River valley, which along with the Yangtze basin constitutes the geographic core of the Chinese cultural sphere. China maintains a rich diversity of ethnic and linguistic people groups. The traditional lens for viewing Chinese history is the dynastic cycle: imperial dynasties rise and fall, and are ascribed certain achievements. This lens also tends to assume Chinese civilization can be traced as an unbroken thread many thousands of years into the past, making it one of the cradles of civilization. At various times, states representative of a dominant Chinese culture have directly controlled areas stretching as far west as the Tian Shan, the Tarim Basin, and the Himalayas, as far north as the Sayan Mountains, and as far south as the delta of the Red River.

The Neolithic period saw increasingly complex polities begin to emerge along the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The Erlitou culture in the central plains of China is sometimes identified with the Xia dynasty (3rd millennium BC) of traditional Chinese historiography. The earliest surviving written Chinese dates to roughly 1250 BC, consisting of divinations inscribed on oracle bones. Chinese bronze inscriptions, ritual texts dedicated to ancestors, form another large corpus of early Chinese writing. The earliest strata of received literature in Chinese include poetry, divination, and records of official speeches. China is believed to be one of a very few loci of independent invention of writing, and the earliest surviving records display an already-mature written language. The culture remembered by the earliest extant literature is that of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 – 256 BC), China's Axial Age, during which the Mandate of Heaven was introduced, and foundations laid for philosophies such as Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Wuxing.

The Han dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD) established by Liu Bang and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) and a warring interregnum known as the Chu–Han Contention (206–202 BC), and it was succeeded by the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 AD). The dynasty was briefly interrupted by the Xin dynasty (9–23 AD) established by the usurping regent Wang Mang, and is thus separated into two periods—the Western Han (202 BC – 9 AD) and the Eastern Han (25–220 AD). Spanning over four centuries, the Han dynasty is considered a golden age in Chinese history, and had a permanent impact on Chinese identity in later periods. The majority ethnic group of modern China refer to themselves as the "Han people" or "Han Chinese". The spoken Chinese and written Chinese are referred to respectively as the "Han language" and "Han characters".

The Han emperor was at the pinnacle of Han society and culture. He presided over the Han government but shared power with both the nobility and the appointed ministers who came largely from the scholarly gentry class. The Han Empire was divided into areas directly controlled by the central government called commanderies, as well as a number of semi-autonomous kingdoms. These kingdoms gradually lost all vestiges of their independence, particularly following the Rebellion of the Seven States. From the reign of Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BC) onward, the Chinese court officially sponsored Confucianism in education and court politics, synthesized with the cosmology of later scholars such as Dong Zhongshu.

Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one that has remained in continuous use. Over a documented history spanning more than three millennia, the function, style, and means of writing characters have changed greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect the sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes, the units of meaning in a language. Writing all of the frequently used vocabulary in a language requires roughly 2000–3000 characters; as of 2025, more than 100000 have been identified and included in The Unicode Standard. Characters are created according to several principles, where aspects of shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning.

The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally ideographic or pictographic in style, but evolved as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including the promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script, which had matured by the early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been the primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography, states using Chinese characters have standardized their forms—broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia, while traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek logos 'word', and gramma 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.

Classical Chinese is the language in which the classics of Chinese literature were written, from c. the 5th century BCE. For millennia thereafter, the written Chinese used in these works was imitated and iterated upon by scholars in a form now called Literary Chinese, which was used for almost all formal writing in China until the early 20th century. Each written character corresponds to a single spoken syllable, and almost always to a single independent word. As a result, the characteristic style of the language is comparatively terse.

Starting in the 2nd century CE, use of Literary Chinese spread to the countries surrounding China, including Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the Ryukyu Islands, where it represented the only known form of writing. Literary Chinese was adopted as the language of civil administration in these countries, creating what is known as the Sinosphere. Each additionally developed systems of readings and annotations that enabled non-Chinese speakers to interpret Literary Chinese texts in terms of the local vernacular.

Traditional Chinese characters are a standard set of Chinese character forms used to write Chinese languages. In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters. These forms were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century, when various countries that use Chinese characters began standardizing simplified sets of characters, often with characters that existed before as well-known variants of the predominant forms.

Simplified characters as codified by the People's Republic of China are predominantly used in mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore. "Traditional" as such is a retronym applied to non-simplified character sets in the wake of widespread use of simplified characters. Traditional characters are commonly used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia. As for non-Chinese languages written using Chinese characters, Japanese kanji include many simplified characters known as shinjitai standardized after World War II, sometimes distinct from their simplified Chinese counterparts. Korean hanja, still used to a certain extent in South Korea, remain virtually identical to traditional characters, with variations between the two forms largely stylistic.