There is a kind of legend about the origin of Chinese characters, and ancient Chinese books all say that Chinese characters were created by Cang Jie. It is said that Cang Jie saw a god with a strange appearance, and the hole looks like a picture painted with words. Cang Jie described his image and created words. Some ancient books say that after Cang Jie created the characters, it leaked the secret, and the sky fell down, and the ghosts and gods cried night after night. There is also a legend that Cang Jie observed the footprints of birds and beasts printed on the mud, which aroused his spiritual feeling of pronouncing words. This kind of rumor is unreliable. Writing is the need of the people in Guangda to live according to the facts, and it took a long period of social practice to become rich and developed slowly.

From the autumn of 1954 to the summer of 1957, Chinese ancient scholars excavated Banpo site for many times (now the north of Banpo Village in the eastern suburb of Xi 'an City), and it was found that as early as 6111 years ago, the people on the left and right Banpo created artistic works with literary characters, such as disintegrated symbols, paintings, sculptures and decorations. Banpo people's carved symbols are mostly left on painted pottery, which can be regarded as the original Chinese characters.

In recent years, China has discovered a number of tombs and burials (more than 4,511 years ago) at a site in Dawenkou, Lingyang River, Juxian County, Shandong Province, and a large number of cultural relics have been unearthed. On some pottery statues, there is a picture-like character engraved on each, and more than 11 single characters have been published. These characters are drawn according to the shape of the real thing, so they are called "pictographic characters" The structure of the script is similar to that of the pictographic characters on Oracle bone inscriptions, but it is more than 1111 years earlier than Oracle bone inscriptions. Therefore, "pictographic character" is the earliest written character in China, and it has the characteristics of written characters.