Short answers, pulled from the story.
Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Unlike alphabet letters that represent sounds, characters generally represent morphemes, the basic units of meaning in a language. Most characters break into smaller components, with phonetic components hinting at pronunciation and semantic components indicating meaning.
The oldest attested Chinese characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during the 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang, Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. They were first documented in 1899 after specimens were sold as "dragon bones" for medicine, and over 150,000 oracle bone fragments have been found to date.
More than 100,000 Chinese characters have been identified, and writing the frequently used vocabulary of a language requires roughly 2,000 to 3,000 characters. Analyses of mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Japanese, and Korean sources put the total number of characters in the modern lexicon at around 15,000.
Traditional characters are orthodox forms that have not undergone simplification, while simplified characters were standardized and adopted in mainland China during the 1950s and 1960s. Mainland China, Malaysia, and Singapore use simplified characters, while Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau use traditional characters.
In Japanese, Chinese characters are known as kanji, and in Korean they are known as hanja. By the late 20th century, characters had largely been replaced with alphabets in Korean and Vietnamese, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Sinitic language typically written using Chinese characters.
According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie, a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor. He is said to have taken inspiration from animal tracks, landscapes, and the stars, and on the day the first characters were created, grain rained from the sky while ghosts and demons wailed.