Han
Chinese characters — a logographic script of tens of thousands of signs, each writing a meaningful syllable, read as hanzi, kanji and hanja across East Asia.
This plaque reads Han as type — stroke order, radicals as construction, brush to punchcut to screen. Characters as meaning are the subject of the deep collection at hanzi.design →
Curatorial note
Han characters are one of humanity's few independent inventions of writing — they owe nothing to the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet that seeded most of this building. Emerging as divination marks on oracle bones around 1200 BCE, the script grew into a system of tens of thousands of characters, each standing for a meaningful syllable rather than a sound-segment.
Its reach is as much horizontal as historical: the same characters were adopted to write languages unrelated to Chinese — Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, Vietnamese chữ Hán — where they keep their meaning but take on entirely local pronunciations.
A character does not spell a word; it is one — and it can be read aloud in a dozen unrelated tongues.
This Han Wing holds only the comparative frame; the deep collection — forms, readings, radicals, reform — lives with our partner institute, hanzi.design.
One character, many tongues
山 across East AsiaA character carries a meaning; each language supplies its own reading. The sign 山 means "mountain" from Beijing to Tokyo to Hanoi — but it is voiced differently in every tongue that borrowed it.
How a character is built
Radicals, phonetics, and the six categoriesCharacters are indexed by ~214 Kangxi radicals; the great majority are 形聲 phono-semantic (a meaning element joined to a sound element), and the traditional analysis names six categories (六書). The script has two main standards — Traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) and Simplified (mainland China, Singapore): 馬/马 · 龍/龙 · 學/学 · 門/门.
Specimen — Noto Sans SC
Waterfall on baseline gridIn the building
In the Reading Room
The Deep Collection
This wing holds only the comparative frame. For the characters themselves — forms, radicals, readings, and reform — visit our partner institute, hanzi.design.
Plaque sources: The Unicode Standard (CJK Unified Ideographs) · ISO 15924 (Hani · 500; Hans · 501; Hant · 502) · standard references on Chinese script history and the 六書 analysis · ScriptSource (SIL). Character counts and user figures are estimates; the deep collection is held by hanzi.design. Compiled 2026-07.