The Story#
A long, long time ago, people didn’t have writing.
To remember what happened, they could only tie knots in ropes. Big events got big knots, small events got small knots.
But after a long time, there were so many knots that no one could remember what each knot meant anymore.
There was a man named Cangjie. He was very clever and was a minister to the Yellow Emperor.
The Yellow Emperor asked him to manage livestock and grain. Cangjie used the knot-tying method, but there were more and more animals and grain, and the knots became a tangled mess.
Cangjie worried: “If only there were a better way to record things!”
One day, Cangjie went out hunting.
He saw animal footprints on the ground and asked a hunter: “What footprint is this?”
The hunter said: “That’s a deer’s footprint, that’s a tiger’s, and that’s a wild boar’s…”
Cangjie’s eyes lit up: “Different footprints represent different animals! I can draw symbols to represent different things too!”
So Cangjie began observing the shapes of various things.
Seeing the sun, he drew a circle with a dot in the middle; Seeing the moon, he drew a curved shape; Seeing a mountain, he drew three pointed shapes…
Like this, Cangjie created many, many characters.
With writing, people could record events, write letters, and write books. It was so convenient!
Little friends, the characters Cangjie created were the ancestors of our Chinese characters!
What the Story Teaches Us#
Cangjie invented writing through observation and thinking. He teaches us to observe things in life carefully and think hard to find solutions to problems.