Oracle is the oldest existing Chinese characters. The total number of it is about 4,500 words, and around one-third of them, comprehensible. Its basic vocabulary, basic grammar, basic font structure is the same as that of the future generations of Chinese language.

In 1899, Wang Yirong, an official under the Qing Dynasty, fell ill. One of the medicaments prescribed by the doctor was called “longgu” (dragon bones). They turned out to be fragments of tortoise shells which were found to bear strange carved-on patterns. He kept the “dragon bones” and shoed them to scholars who came to a conclusion after careful study that the carvings were written records from 3,000 years before and were of great historical significance. Further enquiries revealed that the “dragon bones” had been unearthed at Xiaotun Village, Anyang County, Henan Province, site of the remains of the Shang Dynasty capital.

Further digs made at the site in later years brought to light a total of more than 100,000 pieces of bones and shells all carved with words. About 4,500 characters have been counted, and 1,700 of them deciphered.

The oracle bone inscriptions were mainly used for divination and keeping records of events happened in the late Shang Dynasty (1,300 BC-1,046 BC). The bones are invaluable for us to understand the Shang Dynasty. The rulers of the Shang Dynasty were very superstitious so divination was basically a daily activity for almost everything, such as weather, health, farming and fortune. The bones not only were used in divination as a tool, but also in recording the activities and results on them. The inscriptions were classified into four categories in the book of “Jiaguwen Heji”, e.g. Classes and country, society and production, cultures and others.

The method of divination then was to drill a hole on the interior side of the tortoise shell and put the shell on a fire to see what cracks would appear on the obverse side. By interpreting the cracks the soothsayer predicted the outcome of an event. After each divination, the dates, the events and the results would be written down and carved on tortoise shells or bones. And the collection of these became the earliest recorded historical materials in China, from which modern scholars have divined “what things were like in Shang Dynasty”.

In the oracle inscriptions, one finds many pictographs in their primitive picture forms. Put together, they show that a well-structured script with a complete system of written signs was already formed in that early age. Later on, the area around Anyang became dry, and tortoises grew scarce, so people began to use bamboo strips instead for divination. From this grew the practice of asking the gods about the fortune by drawing bamboo sticks, as one may see today at certain temples – a practice that has its remote root in the superstition of the Shang people.