Cangjiepian
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The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (, sāncāng), was a BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 221 CE), many scholars and lexicographers expanded and annotated the Cangjiepian. By the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907), it had become a lost work, but in 1977, archeologists discovered a cache of (c. 165 BCE) texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of
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5 sectionsContents
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The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (, sāncāng), was a BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 221 CE), many scholars and lexicographers expanded and annotated the Cangjiepian. By the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907), it had become a lost work, but in 1977, archeologists discovered a cache of (c. 165 BCE) texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of the Cangjiepian.
==Title== The eponymous Cangjiepian title derives from the culture hero Cangjie, the legendary Yellow Emperor's historian and inventor of Chinese writing. According to Chinese mythology, Cangjie, who had four eyes and remarkable cognizance, created Chinese characters after observing natural phenomena such as the footprints of birds and animals.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Cangjiepian” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.