The Forgotten Legend Behind Every Chinese Character

The day Chinese writing was born, the legend says something impossible happened. The sky tore open and rained grain down onto the fields. And after dark, you could hear crying in the air. Not people, ghosts. So what kind of invention makes heaven weep and the spirits wail? The answer is a man with four eyes and a phoenix that dropped a clue right at his feet. Hey everyone, I'm Jared Madsen and this is Learn Chinese Now. Chinese might just be the coolest writing system on the planet. It's part picture, part poetry, and every single character is layered with meaning. So who came up with something this beautiful? Well, to get to him, we can't start with him. We have to go way, way back. Before farming, before fire, before there were even people. All the way back to when the entire universe was a single egg. If you love this stuff, language, history, the strange origins of everyday things, hit like and subscribe so we can keep making it. All right, let's crack that egg. Inside that egg was Pangu who grew for 18,000 years. He awoke and split the egg open. The yang parts became the sky. The yin parts became the earth. Pangu pushed them further and further apart as he kept growing for another 18,000 years. Then Pangu died and his body became the world. His eyes became the sun and moon, his hair, the stars and the plants, until every piece of him formed a part of the world we live in. But the world was all birds and trees and stuff, and that's boring. So a goddess named Nuwa came along. Nuwa had the upper body of a woman, but the lower body of a serpent. She took some yellow clay and molded it into the shape of a human, and it came to life. She made an individual mold for each person, until she got tired of doing that and just dipped a rope into the mud and flicked the drops onto the ground where they became people too. So now it wasn't just birds and trees, but people. But these people didn't know anything about anything. Around the same time, a god named Suiren came to the earth. He saw humanity huddled in caves, eating raw meat and dying of disease, and he set off on a journey to find something that could fix their problems. He went to the land of the torch where there was an enormous ancient tree called the Sui tree. Birds would come and peck at it, and every time they did, sparks and little flames burst out. Suiren grabbed two branches, rubbed them against one another, and fire had now been discovered. Basic survival was now possible, but people weren't meant to just be cavemen, so along came a god named Fuxi to civilize them. Now, he's Nuwa's brother, and also possibly her husband. He taught people how to hunt and fish and how to raise animals, and he also taught them how to set up proper marriage customs, ironically, and establish family lineages. So, people now had families, and they were well fed, but the carnivore diet that was all the rage in 10,000 BC was starting to fade out, and people were looking for something different. Enter Shennong, also known as the divine farmer. Shennong had a human body and the head of an ox. He traveled the country, testing every plant by eating it and watching what it did to his body. Now, fortunately, Shennong had a transparent belly, so if some poison was about to dissolve inside him, he could see it right away and go find an antidote. Through his efforts, he discovered agriculture, he discovered tea, and he discovered Chinese medicine. Now it was up to humans, or at least semi-divine humans, to figure out the rest. And the great inventor, known as the Yellow Emperor or Huangdi, took the stage. The calendar, boats, charts, even clothes, some say, were invented by this semi-divine ruler who lived on a high mountain accompanied by an eight-tailed tiger with a human face as his guardian. Legend says Huangdi had four faces, through which he could see all of his people's problems at once. And yet, even a god-like figure like that needed help with one of the most important inventions of all, writing. Huangdi had a historian in his court, a man named Cangjie, who was also quite supernormal. Cangjie had four eyes, literally four eyes, and in some legends, the face of a dragon. A brilliant man, he was trusted with all sorts of official matters. Now, when you hear official matters, you might picture things like negotiations with neighboring countries or war strategies, stuff like that. But it was a lot simpler back then. Cangjie's task was this. Huangdi had a whole bunch of livestock, and he wanted Cangjie to take inventory of all of it. The problem was, how could he count all those animals? There were no Arabic or Roman numerals. Back then, when you counted something, you'd take a rope and tie it into a knot to signify a number. A straight length of rope was one. A rope tied into an X was five. A straight length with a knot in the center was ten, and so on. It was fine for small numbers, but what if you counted the oxen and there turned out to be 3,756 of them? And what if one died the day after you counted? It would take forever to adjust and readjust all those knots. There had to be a better system. But what kind of system would actually work? Cangjie had no idea. So he did what works best to clear his mind. He went for a walk, and as he was strolling along, one of his four eyes caught movement overhead. Was that a flaming chicken in the sky? No, it was a phoenix. Stunned, Cangjie could only stare at the mystical bird. And just then, he saw something drop from the firebird's claws. A mouse, or maybe a secret medallion, or a magic scroll. He ran over to look at it. It was a disc of hard-packed dirt. What the heck? Then he turned it over and saw a giant footprint pressed into the top of it, like that of a tiger, but unlike any footprint he'd ever seen. So he went to his hunter friend to figure out what it was. The hunter said, Now, a pixiu is a very famous Chinese mystical beast. It has the body of a lion, the head of a dragon, and wings. You see statues of them outside Chinese restaurants, banks, and homes. And there's a reason for that. The only things a pixiu eats are gold, silver, and precious metals. But one day, the pixiu was up in the heavens, and it went to the bathroom in the wrong place. And it really ticked off the Jade Emperor, Yu Huang Dadi, the ruler of heaven, who punished it by sealing off its rear end. So now it can only take wealth in and can't ever let it back out again. So if you're a bank, that's pretty great symbolism, right? You're going to keep all that money people hand you and never lose it. And that's why you see the pixiu everywhere. But anyway, back to our story. The hunter just looked at a footprint and instantly knew it belonged to a pixiu. And suddenly, Cangjie had a thought. The footprint is a symbol of the pixiu. So what if I made a footprint of something else? That mark would be a word for that thing. That would be writing. So Cangjie set out to make a symbol for everything in the world, from stones and branches to houses and temples, from bears to bees and everything in between. But how was he going to pull that off? Is he just going to draw a little picture of each thing? He was stumped. He sat down under an old tree to think. Then an old tortoise came slowly crawling past him. Intrigued, he studied the intricate patterns and curves of its shell. He picked it up and looked at its belly, marveling at the crisscrossing lines. And that's when it hit him. He had to use those same simple lines and patterns so his writing system would be easy to read and learn. Cangjie grabbed some scrap wood and started carving. He found more wood and carved and carved and carved until finally he'd written out all of his characters. Then he revealed his writing system to the world. A system that would pull the Chinese people out of the shadow of ignorance and into civilization. And legend says that on that very day, the wicked ghosts that haunted people wailed in agony and the skies rained millet. And when we found the first traces of Chinese writing on oracle bones dated to around 1500 BC, that's exactly what we saw. Symbols that were abstract but also pictographic. Over time, Chinese characters have grown more and more abstract but they still carry the essence of the very first ones Cangjie invented. So what happened to Cangjie after that? Well, the gods blessed him by giving his four eyes the power to tell truth from falsehood. Later in life, he could see deep into the mysteries of the universe. And Cangjie had been honored by the Chinese people ever since. On the Chinese calendar, April 20th is Grain Rain Day. It marks the end of spring and the start of the rains that make the crops grow. And it's called Grain Rain in honor of the day the gods made the skies rain millet to celebrate Cangjie's writing system. There are Cangjie monuments all over China today remembering the half man, half god who brought them civilization. And that's the story of how China got its writing. From a cosmic egg through fire and farming and medicine all the way to a four-eyed historian who turned a single footprint into the very first written word. Now, I've got a question for you. Out of all the gods we met today Nu Wa who shaped people out of clay Sui Ren who stole fire from a burning tree Fu Xi Huang Di Who do you want us to cover next? Drop the name in the comments below and let me know. Oh, remember Shen Nong, the ox-headed farmer with the see-through belly? I breezed right past him today. But his story is unreal. He poisoned himself. Over and over. Every single day. Just so the rest of us would have medicine and tea. And one afternoon, a single little flower finally won. That story is on your screen right now. Click it to watch. And until next time Zaijian!