Chinese characters have a history of more than 6,000 years, and are the longest-lasting script in the world without any gaps. Chinese characters are the only characters that have been passed down to this day and are the only remaining fruits of the pictographic ideographic characters created by the ancients. The derivative scripts of Chinese characters, such as Vietnamese Nom, Xixia, Jurchen, and Khitan, have disappeared, and Japanese only partially retains Chinese characters. Modern Chinese characters are divided into traditional characters and simplified characters.