The origin of Chinese characters (zi字) is shrouded in mystery, yet it is assumed that the earliest characters originated as pictures of objects and were used for divination, fortunetelling and as oracles. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of oracle bones were unearthed in the area of Anyang安陽 (Henan Province), the site of one of the capitals of the Shang dynasty. After the different writing systems in ancient China were standardized by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221-207 BC), Chinese script gradually evolved to the form used today. One of the most comprehensive character dictionaries ever compiled was the Kangxi Cidian康熙字典 containing 47,035 characters plus about 2000 variations, published in 1716. While in the PRC many of the Chinese characters were simplified in the 1950s, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have left the traditional characters unchanged.

In China today, knowledge of 3000 characters is considered sufficient for daily use. These 3000 characters, published in a list compiled by the ROC Ministry of Education in 1997, enable the user to recognize 99 percent of the characters seen in mainstream Chinese media publications. Besides a table of the traditional 214 Chinese radicals (bushou部首), this file shows the 3000 most common Chinese characters in the order of their frequency (most frequent characters on top, least frequent characters at the bottom)—in their traditional form (fantizi繁體字); simplified form (jiantizi簡體字); pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin漢語拼音; to which of the 214 radicals the character in its traditional form belongs; and whether the character is also a family name (xing姓) and/or a measure word/classifier (liangci量詞).