Cangjiepian
Chinese dictionary (c. 220 BCE)
The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (三倉, sāncāng), was a c. 220 BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 221 CE), many scholars and lexicographers expanded and annotated the Cangjiepian. By the end of the Tang dynasty (618–907), it had become a lost work, but in 1977, archeologists discovered a cache of (c. 165 BCE) texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of the Cangjiepian.
Title
The eponymous Cangjiepian title derives from the culture hero Cangjie, the legendary Yellow Emperor's historian and inventor of Chinese writing. According to Chinese mythology, Cangjie, who had four eyes and remarkable cognizance, created Chinese characters after observing natural phenomena such as the footprints of birds and animals.
In Modern Standard Chinese usage, the name "Cangjie" is most commonly known and used in the Cangjie method of inputting Chinese characters into a computer, rather than for the ancient Cangjiepian proto-dictionary.
In the name Cāngjié or Cāng Jié, cāng 倉/仓 means "storehouse; warehouse" and is sometimes written 蒼/苍 "dark green; blue; gray; ashy", which is a common Chinese surname. The character 頡/颉 is only pronounced jié in this name, and is usually pronounced xié "stretch the neck; fly up (of birds)".
“Cangjiepian” enters the record as chinese dictionary (c. 220 BCE). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cangjiepian, Chinese and dictionary can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15912099. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cangjiepian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.