Short answers, pulled from the story.
A collection of oracle bones was discovered being sold as dragon bones for medicinal purposes in 1899. These fragments contained the oldest attested Chinese writing dating back to the reign of Wu Ding between 1250 and 1200 BCE.
The scholar Xu Shen published the Shuowen Jiezi dictionary in the 2nd century CE analyzing character creation methods. He identified six categories including pictographs indicatives compound ideographs phono-semantic compounds loangraphs and a sixth unclear category called zhuan.
Chancellor Li Si standardized small seal script throughout China following the founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. By the Han dynasty from 202 BCE to 220 CE clerical script had matured to obscure pictographic origins in favor of easier writing.
The Unicode Standard published in 2025 defines over 90,000 Chinese characters within its Basic Multilingual Plane. Each distinct graph receives a number while rendering choices remain with the engine displaying the text.
Premier Zhou Enlai ordered the formation of a Script Reform Committee in 1951 following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China. The 1956 scheme was largely ratified by a revised list of 7,000 characters promulgated in 1964.