Writing in China was created over three thousand years ago. As with some other cultures, such as those of the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Hittites, many Chinese characters evolved from simple pictographs that illustrated a person or thing.

Since its beginnings, written Chinese has changed a great deal. While pictographs were a convenient means of representing nouns, they were not applicable to adjectives and verbs. Today, only a small number of Chinese characters are pictographs. While other forms of characters include ideographs and compound ideographs, the majority of Chinese characters are phonetic compounds, which have an element that conveys meaning and another indicating pronunciation.

The Visible Traces exhibition includes examples of the Dongba pictographic writing system of the Naxi people. For educators, the Curriculum Studio features the following related resources:

The chart "Samples of Pictographic Symbols" has been adapted with permission from Demystifying the Chinese Language by the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE; 1980) and A Study of Writing by Ignace J. Gelb, fig. 54, p. 98 (1963 edition); The University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1963. Copyright 1952, 1963 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.