Chinese symbol history 1
Chinese language characters are hieroglyphic diagrams that imitate shapes of real objects. However, there has been several thousands of years of Chinese symbol history. So you may not be able to find easily today"s modern Chinese characters resembling things because they have been symbolized and regulated for the sake of easy writing.
Creation of Chinese characters

According to the records of ancient books, one of Yellow Emperor"s Chancellors Cang Jie (盲禄鈥溍┞⑩€? created Chinese characters. He lived at 6000 芒鈧€?7000 years ago and was said to have four eyes. Ancient book "Huai Nan Zi" said, "In the past, Cang Jie created characters, because of which grains fell from sky and night ghosts cried."

After the creation, Chinese characters have experienced four major periods in the development. They are Tortoise Shell and Bone Inscriptions, Bronze Inscription, Seal Script and Regular Script. The shapes and structures of the Chinese characters in each period are different.
The evolving process of Chinese symbol for "home" (氓庐露)The current Chinese character for "home" is written like this:.

The way of writing this character at Qin-shi-huang"s time (1st Qin Dynasty Emperor, 259 B.C.) is:. You can see that its top part is obviously a house roof.

Then what is the thing in the house? Actually it is the charcter for "pig". See the way of writing this character in West Zhou Dynasty (1046 B.C.): . Oh, this is really a picture of a pig. So here you will understand the Chinese symbol meaning of the character "Jia"(home), which means a house with a pig inside. This was exactly the way of life in primitive period of one who had a home: having a shelter, and breeding some livestock.
The way of writing this character in the Inscriptions on Tortoise Shells and Bones is like this:.
Actually at that time, there were several variations of writing the pig inside, one of which even has bristles at the back!