Front Matter
Oracle Bone Script
China's earliest writing, used for divination in the Shang dynasty (~1200 BC).
The Letters
Signs · Unicode · TypesThe Decipherment
From apothecary to academy (1899–present)Before
Until oracle bones came to light, scholars regarded the Shang dynasty — recorded in Sima Qian's "Records of the Grand Historian" — as myth and legend. Meanwhile, for decades, farmers in Xiaotun village (Anyang, Henan) had been digging up bone fragments and selling them to apothecaries as "dragon bones," to be ground into hemostatic and analgesic powders. Inscribed bones actually fetched lower prices, and shopkeepers sometimes scraped off the writing to raise the value.
Breakthrough
In 1899, the paleographer Wang Yirong — sick with malaria — recognized inscriptions on a bone fragment he had pulled from his boiled prescription. He immediately bought up every inscribed bone in the Beijing apothecaries: ~1,500 pieces in that year alone. In 1903 his friend Liu E published "Tieyun canggui," bringing oracle bones into scholarship; in 1908 Luo Zhenyu traced the source to Xiaotun in Anyang, opening the way to systematic excavation.
After
Systematic excavation by Academia Sinica began in 1928; to date ~160,000 fragments have been recovered, yielding ~5,000 distinct characters of which ~1,500 are deciphered. The king names on the bones match Sima Qian's Shang genealogies exactly — turning legend into history. China's International Center for Oracle Bone Studies now offers a 100,000-yuan (~$14,000) bounty for each newly decoded character, encouraging AI-assisted attempts. Oracle bones are the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters — a still-living writing system 3,200 years on.