The earliest Chinese written language appeared in the Shang Dynasty (17th- 11th century BC). At that time, people believed in ghosts and practiced divination on important occasions. They inscribed divination words on tortoise shells or animal bones, and painted them red to symbolize good luck or black to symbolize potential disasters. The words were inscribed with knives. Some of them are big, some are small, some are complicated and some are simple, but they are all well defined.

Examples of shell and bone writing were not found until Emperor Guangxu's reign during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), thousands of years after they were made. The discovery occurred in Anyang, Henan Province, which was the Shang Dynasty. In 1899, the banks of the Huangshui River in Henan Province collapsed, and many tortoise shells with carved patterns on them were revealed. At first, people regarded the shells as dragon bones and used them as medicine. The following year, a merchant named Wang Yirong developed and interest in the shells, and went to Henan to collect more of them. Later a scholar, Liu Er, continued the collection. They collected more than 5,000 pieces, which were given the name of Jiaguwen (scripts on tortoise shells and animal bones).

Philologists, who subsequently researched more than 100,000 shell and bone pieces, discovered the structure of Jiaguwen had changed into legible characters complete with recognized signs. The shell and bone writing had shown a certain degree of maturity. Of the more than 4,500 distinct characters in these pieces, some 1,700 have been identified.