The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (, sāncāng), was a BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 221 CE), many scholars and lexicographers expanded and annotated the Cangjiepian. By the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907), it had become a lost work, but in 1977, archeologists discovered a cache of (c. 165 BCE) texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of the Cangjiepian.
Title
The eponymous Cangjiepian title derives from the culture hero Cangjie, the legendary Yellow Emperor's historian and inventor of Chinese writing. According to Chinese mythology, Cangjie, who had four eyes and remarkable cognizance, created Chinese characters after observing natural phenomena such as the footprints of birds and animals.
In Modern Standard Chinese usage, the name "Cangjie" is most commonly known and used in the Cangjie method of inputting Chinese characters into a computer, rather than for the ancient Cangjiepian proto-dictionary.
In the name Cāngjié or Cāng Jié, cāng 倉/仓 means "storehouse; warehouse" and is sometimes written 蒼/苍 "dark green; blue; gray; ashy", which is a common Chinese surname. The character 頡/颉 is only pronounced jié in this name, and is usually pronounced xié "stretch the neck; fly up (of birds)".
The piān 篇 in Cangjiepian originally meant "bamboo strips used for writing (before the invention of paper)", which was semantically extended to "sheet (of paper/etc.); piece of writing; article; chapter; section; book". The sinologists Li Feng and David Branner describe pian as "separate textual unit". The original Cangjiepian, like most Qin and Han era books, was written on bamboo and wood strips.
History
In the traditional history of Chinese lexicography, the first proto-dictionary primers were the Eastern Zhou dynasty Shizhoupian "Historian Zhou's Chapters", the Qin dynasty Cangjiepian, and the Han dynasty Jijiupian. The Chinese lexicographers Heming Yong and Jing Peng say these texts that arranged characters into categories "acted as the catalyst for the birth of ancient Chinese dictionaries".
During the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), there was a wide and confusing variety of unstandardized Large Seal Script characters, with the same word being written in several different ways. After Emperor Qin Shi Huang had conquered all other Warring States and unified China in 221 BCE, he adopted a language-reform proposal made by the Legalist Li Si and promulgated a decree of Shutongwen 書同文 "Writing the Same Character". It mandated using a consistent writing system based on the Small Seal Script, which was comparatively simpler and easier to write than Large Seal Script. In a logographic language like Chinese, correct character writing is fundamental for efficiency of information transfer.
The emperor ordered his chancellor and two other ministers to compile a standard Small Seal character wordbook in three parts. The 7-chapter Cangjiepian compilation was overseen by Li Si, the 6-chapter Yuanlipian 爰歷篇 "Explanation of Difficult Words" by Zhao Gao, and the 7-chapter Boxuepian 博學篇 "Extensive Knowledge of Words" by Humu Jing 胡毋敬. They simplified, standardized, and disseminated a national standard script for the first time in China. These three textbooks were officially issued and circulated during the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE).
Scholars in the early Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) combined these three Qin texts into one book, and transcribed the original Small Seal script into the standard Han Clerical script. Ban Gu's Book of Han records, the teachers and learned people in the towns and villages combined The Cangjie Primer, The Yuanli Primer, and The Scholarly Primer [i.e., Boxuepian] under one cover and segmented the book into fifty-five chapters, each chapter containing sixty characters. This new textbook retained the original title The Cangjie Primer. This 3,300-character Cangjiepian, commonly called the Sancang 三倉 "Three Cangs", became popular and was widely recognized as the standard textbook for character learning. Scribes at the beginning of the Han were expected to be able to recite 5,000 characters, which is more than the original Cangjiepian.