If I Were a Kid in Ancient China by Lou Waryncia

Author:Lou Waryncia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China, Chinese, Kid, Children, Ancient, History, Life of a Kid
Publisher: ePals Publishing
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

The Five Virtues of Confucius

Confucius believed that a man needed to practice five virtues to become a true “gentleman” and a good public official:

Li

Li, or “ritual etiquette” (manners), is the most important virtue.

Ren

Ren stands for “benevolence” or kindness toward others.

Xin

Xin stands for “faithfulness.”

Yi

Yi stands for “righteousness” or honesty.

Zhi

Zhi stands for “knowledge” about right and wrong.

Confucius read to his students from “books” made of strips of bamboo stacked and tied together.

Did Chinese children have books like you do? Sort of.

The books read by the students of Confucius looked very different from your schoolbooks today. The Chinese character for “book” looks like a bundle of long, narrow strips held together by a thin cord. That’s what books were back then—bamboo strips with words carved on their surfaces. The strips were stacked up or joined like an accordion and then tied together with a cord of silk, hemp, or leather.

Scholars wrote their books with brushes made of bamboo or wood, and tips made of rabbit, goat, or deer hair. Ink was made by mixing water with soot from a fire.

To correct a mistake on bamboo, a writer would scrape the error off with a special knife called a xue. Whole layers could be shaved off and the strip used again.

Around a.d. 105, a court official named Cai Lun invented paper. Paper was made from a mushy pulp of wood, silk rags, bamboo, hemp, tree bark, or other fibers. The pulp was spread on a screen, then pressed flat and dried to make the paper. The use of paper quickly spread across China and helped advance Chinese culture.

What about the actual writing? Chinese handwriting dates back more than 3,000 years. The earliest surviving Chinese characters were scratched onto bones around 1200 b.c. Characters began as pictographs, or word pictures. For example, the ancient character for “water” resembled ripples of water. “Bird” was a stick-figure bird.

These characters were used continuously until 221 b.c., when China was united for the first time. The first emperor, Shi Huangdi, issued a standard set of characters to be used throughout the empire.

In ancient China, only rich boys learned to write. Students memorized dozens of characters each week. They painted word pictures with brushes and ink.

Chinese writing is done in columns of characters. The columns start in the upper right-hand corner, run down the page, and then across from right to left.

Modern Chinese writing has been simplified in the hope that the characters would be easier to learn. Although many characters have changed from their ancient forms, the traditional characters are still in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in China on occasion.

Although China’s 1.2 billion people speak about 3,000 dialects, they use one written language. People in different parts of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam read the same characters and know what they mean, even though they pronounce the characters differently. Even though they don’t speak the same language, people in China can always write something down if they are speaking to someone from a different part of the country or to someone from Japan or Korea or Vietnam, and they will be understood.

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