Chapter 250: The Method of Character Creation

This matter gave Baifeng a sense of crisis; perhaps it was just this unintentional act of his, done for his own convenience, that had cut off the future of the entire tribe. Cangjie was to create characters, but while Cangjie was in this era now, the characters had not yet been created. Even if they were, they would be the most primitive form of pictographs, having little to do with the characters he was teaching.

After Baifeng suddenly realized this, he began to frantically remedy the situation. The first to be remedied was Yu, because this question had been raised by Yu in the first place. He asked the Tribal Chief how these characters came to be, whether they were taught by the gods, and why, whenever he asked about one, the Tribal Chief could write it out, and never get them mixed up.

Baifeng fell silent. On this matter, Baifeng felt he could not, and dared not, hide anything at all. Cangjie had created characters; he possessed the most fundamental theory of character creation, while all he himself had were the finished products. It was just like the Bomb in the hands of the tribesmen; they only knew the Tribal Chief could use this thing to release Heavenly Thunder, but they did not know how this thing came to be.

Thus, Baifeng began to give Yu a crash course in the knowledge within the "Explanations of Graphs and Analysis of Characters." In truth, Baifeng did not know much either, but because he had previously been a fanatical enthusiast of calligraphy and seal carving, he understood some of various seal scripts. He could also write the seal script for common characters, and had even studied some bronze inscriptions and Yinxu oracle bone script. These were the closest to primitive pictographs; only by using these characters as a foundation to teach Yu the method of character creation could he allow Yu to understand.

For example, the character "Luo" (net/to catch): if you learn the simplified version, you have no idea what its principle of creation is, but if you put it into the traditional form, it is easier to understand. There is a "罒" on top, and "糹" and "隹" below, but it is still unclear; it is just that the composition is a bit clearer. If it were oracle bone script, it would be too cumbersome—it depicts a grid with a bird trapped underneath. The seal script is the clearest: a net, with the silk radical inside indicating the material of the net, and "隹" being the shorthand for a bird. A net trapping a bird is "Luo."

Baifeng explained it to Yu this way, and Yu just listened with his mouth wide open, feeling as though his worldview had been impacted. He had not expected that what he thought were things from the gods were created in this way. Baifeng spent several days explaining everything he could remember to Yu, character by character, and Yu also obtained a "Dictionary" comparing seal, traditional, and simplified characters.

During this period, the character lessons for the children were suspended. Fortunately, these children had just started school and were only learning characters like sun, moon, water, fire, and earth, which were not much different from seal script, so there was plenty of time to re-teach them. Teaching the method of character creation would not only achieve Baifeng's goal but also help the children learn to recognize characters.

Later, Yu began to create characters himself, but because Baifeng had already taught him almost all the common characters, he began to frantically search for new things, then created characters based on the method of character creation and his own understanding, bringing them to Baifeng to look at after he finished.

Baifeng was startled by Yu's comprehension. He had frantically created dozens of characters, but most were completely meaningless. Only a few characters, after Baifeng made slight modifications, became exactly the same as the traditional or seal script versions; there was even one that did not need to be changed at all.

Seeing that Yu could apply the method of character creation like this, Baifeng finally set his mind at ease. Even if people of later generations really used his characters directly, they would still know the principles and could continuously add reasonable new characters, and he would not have cut off the future of the entire tribe.

In fact, Baifeng especially wanted to meet Cangjie to see what the characters he created were actually like and how big the gap was compared to oracle bone script. It was hard for him to imagine how a person could create characters from nothing. Perhaps many people think creating characters is simple, but it is actually not. Changing the method of recording events from drawing pictures to fixed characters was a great pioneering achievement. The person who determined the principles of this change was an incomparably great person.

And when Baifeng taught Yulong and Changle characters, he even used Pinyin. Although this thing was newly created by later generations, its practicality was very strong, especially for teaching. However, this was the secret of Baifeng's own family. Baifeng wanted to record some of his knowledge in the form of books to pass down to future generations, and at the same time, to protect the interests of his descendants, the books were encrypted, which had to rely on Pinyin, with Chinese characters used for annotations where there was ambiguity.

Of course, this knowledge was used to maintain their rule and improve the tribe's productivity; he would certainly not keep it to himself. What he kept hidden was politics and economics.

Economic theory was something dynasties throughout history had never figured out. They dared not spend money and dared not let money circulate; in reality, only when money is spent can it be called money.

The Baifeng tribe had no money, but the equivalent was grain. After the tribe became wealthy to a certain degree, grain would become currency, or rather, currency would only have the possibility of appearing when trade with other tribes became frequent enough.

The institution that allowed Baifeng to know how many people were in the tribe and how many children had reached school age was their Household Registration Department. This department was the most relaxed in the Baifeng tribe and also the simplest in structure. Originally, this department was intended to be placed within the Finance Department, but if that were the case, the functions of finance would be too redundant, so it was separated.

This department managed the population statistics of the entire tribe, including the number of tribesmen, the number of Free Persons, and the number of Slaves. Every single person had to be registered, and their occupations had to be recorded as well.

The book they used for registration was jokingly called the Life and Death Ledger by Baifeng, because it also had to record everyone's age. As long as it could be remembered, it would all be noted down; this was to let Baifeng figure out the age distribution of the tribe's population.

After a simple count, Baifeng figured it out: their entire tribe was a very young tribe. There was not even anyone over fifty years old; the oldest batch was only in their early forties—those were the women Baifeng had exchanged for earliest, who were said to be about to die of old age and be abandoned, but the children they had given birth to now were already in school.

Besides this, they also had to calculate the contributions of the tribesmen, because they had to rely on contribution points to judge whether to give rewards to tribesmen and whether to change the status of Free Persons and Slaves. If they relied solely on Baifeng to keep track, and the Finance Department to manage it, the burden would be too heavy.

This work of the Household Registration Department, which did not have much to do with them, was actually a workload Baifeng specifically added because he saw they were too relaxed, and it also lightened the burden on himself and the Finance Department.