山（shān）mountain - The Evolution of Chinese Character

Today I want to share with you one Chinese character ”山”. 

山 means mountain. If we look at the earliest form of 山, in a script known as Oracle Bone Script（甲骨文）,  we can see 山  written as this. It’s just like a mountain, right? 

In the Bronze Script（金文）, a later script after Oracle Bone, you can see even more variations of the character like these. We can see that in the pre-Qin period（先秦時期，－221 BC）, the structure of characters is not fixed. This means that one character has more than one writing way. Its structure is flexible.

Let’s see this picture. This is the peak of a tall mountain, and these are smaller mountains around it. How did this picture become the character 山? like that. We can see the character 山 is a pictogram（象形字） a word that physically resembles the object they represent.

Now let’s see the evolution of 山. This is the Oracle Bone Script（甲骨文） form from the Shang Dynasty（商朝，c. 1600 BC– c. 1045 BC）. This is the Bronze Script（金文） form from the early Western Zhou Period（西周時期，c. 1045 BC– 771 BC）. Here We have the Small Seal Script（小篆） form taken from the famous Han Dynasty（漢朝，202 BC – 220 AD） Dictionary called 說文解字. Next We have the Eastern Han Dynasty’s（東漢，25–220 AD） Clerical Script（隸書） 山. And finally, 山 in the Regular Script（楷書）.