Written Chinese is a writing system that transcribes the varieties of Chinese language using logograms — known as characters — and other symbols such as punctuations. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rather, the writing system is morphosyllabic: characters are one spoken syllable in length, but generally correspond to morphemes in the language, which may either be independent words, or part of a polysyllabic word. Most characters are constructed from smaller components known as radicals or pianpang that may reflect the character's meaning or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of thousands of characters; college-educated Chinese speakers know approximately 4,000 characters. This has led in part to the modern adoption of complementary phonetic transcription systems such as Pinyin and Bopomofo to transliterate the pronunciation of each character.
Chinese writing is first attested during the late Shang dynasty (c. 1250 – c. 1050 BCE) in the form of oracle bone script, but the process of creating character-like symbols is thought to have begun centuries earlier during the Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age (c. 2500–2000 BCE). During the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC), Chinese characters evolved into the more mature bronze script and seal script varieties, the latter of which were standardized under the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) and further consolidated into the more convenient clerical script (a process known as libian) during the subsequent Han dynasty (202 BC–220 AD). Over the following millennia, these characters have evolved into well-developed styles of Chinese calligraphy, from the formal regular script to the more casual running script and cursive script, as well as standardized printing-oriented typefaces such as Song, Fangsong and gothic. As the different Sinitic varieties diverged, a situation of diglossia developed, with speakers of otherwise mutually unintelligible varieties able to communicate through writing using Literary Chinese. In the early 20th century, Literary Chinese was replaced in large part with written vernacular Chinese, largely corresponding to the grammar of modern Standard Chinese, a standard form based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. Although most other Chinese varieties are not written in their own vernacular styles, there are local traditions of written Cantonese, written Shanghainese and written Hokkien, among others.