2l8 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



to be expressed. Yet the system has one advantage, enabling 

 those who speak mutually unintelligible idioms to converse 

 together, using the pencil instead of the tongue. For this very 

 reason the attempts made centuries ago by the government to 

 substitute a phonetic script had to be abandoned. It was found 

 that imperial edicts and other documents so written could not be 

 understood by the populations speaking dialects different from the 

 literary standard, whereas the hieroglyphs, like our ciphers i, 2, 3..., 

 could be read by all educated persons of whatever allied form of 

 speech. 



Originally the Chinese system, whether developed on the spot 

 or derived from Akkadian or any other foreign source, was of 

 course pictographic or ideographic, and it is commonly supposed 

 to have remained at that stage ever since, the only material changes 

 being of a graphic nature. The pictographs were conventionalised 

 and reduced to their present form, but still remained ideograms 

 supplemented by a limited number of phonetic determinants. 

 But de Lacouperie has shown that this view is a mistake, and 

 that the evolution from the pictograph to the phonetic symbol 

 had been practically completed in China many centuries before 

 the new era. The Ku-wen style current before the Qth century B.C. 

 "was really the phonetic expression of speech 1 ." But for the 

 reason stated it had to be discontinued, and a return made to 

 the earlier ideographic style. The change was effected about 

 820 B.C. by She Chou, minister of the Emperor Siien Wang, who 

 introduced the Ta-chuen style, in which " he tried to speak to the 

 eye and no longer to the ear," that is, he reverted to the earlier 

 ideographic process, which has since prevailed. It was simplified 

 about 227 B.C. (Siao Chuen style), and after some other modifi- 

 cations the present caligraphic form (Kiai Shii) was introduced 

 by Wang Hi in 350 A.D. Thus one consequence of the "Expan- 

 sion of China" was a reversion to barbarism, in respect at least 

 of the national graphic system, by which Chinese thought and 

 literature have been hampered for nearly 3000 years. 



Written records, though at first mainly of a mythical character, 

 date from about 3000 B.C. 2 Reference is made in the early 



1 History of the Archaic Chinese Writing and Texts, 1882, p. 5. 



2 The first actual date given is that of Tai Hao (Fu Hi), 2953 B.C., but this 



