Since Ancient Times, Characters Have Been Like Pictures (Part One)
This is a short, richly illustrated early-childhood art-education feature on the history and pictorial quality of Chinese writing, presented as a series of "learn by analogy" (举一反三) examples for children. It opens by calling Chinese characters one of the world's four original writing systems and the only one still living, then sketches the script's evolution from prehistoric symbols through oracle bone script, bronze inscriptions, seal scripts, clerical script, and finally regular, cursive, and running script. It illustrates this history with paired activities — writing and paper-cutting a double-happiness character, drawing pottery-jar symbols from the Dawenkou culture, a fish glyph from Zhou bronze inscriptions, bird-script and flower-and-bird calligraphy — and includes one example of Yunnan's Naxi Dongba pictographic script, describing it as a primitive script partway between picture-writing and ideographic writing, with over 1,400 characters. Craft instructions for cutting paper hearts and double-happiness figures are included.
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