Creating Characters

The warm monsoon carried moist vapor as it drifted from the tranquil Caribbean Sea.

It crossed untamed islands, crossed savage rainforests, crossed the plains of the Huastec, then rose along the Mexican Plateau, brushed over the flourishing Valley of Mexica, and became a soft, gentle rain.

The fine rain drifted over sky and open field, over mountains and forests, past the sturdy Mountain City of the Otomi People, and reached the camp of the Mexica Warrior among the hills.

Then it fell softly, dampening the cloth curtain of a wooden hut. Droplets traced tender arcs and reflected in a youth's eyes.

The youth raised his brush in thought, then drew a pictograph for water—five curved blue lines—and beneath it wrote the character "water."

Xolotl looked at the wooden board before him, covered in blue diagrams and writing. The images and text were arranged in two rows: the first held various pictographs resembling Oracle Bone Script, while the second held traditional Chinese Characters.

Seeing that the board was full, he removed it from the earthen platform before him and set it onto the neatly arranged stack of boards at his side.

Then he picked up a brush made from hair, dipped it into indigo Maya Blue ink, and before he could begin racking his brains, noticed that there was little ink left.

He called Bertad over and sent him to the priests' quarters for more Maya Blue dye. If there was not enough, he was to mix some on the spot using wild indigo leaves and palygorskite clay.

After Bertad left, Xolotl let out a long sigh. He felt as if every scrap of his wisdom had been drained away. He needed to rest for a while and recover a little energy.

The siege had already lasted two weeks, and he had finally found some free time. So Xolotl began a long-planned and exceedingly important undertaking: creating characters.

In Xolotl's eyes, the Aztec—and indeed all of Mesoamerica—were still in an era of recording events through drawings. The first shoots of pictographic writing had only just emerged, like the Pictographic Script for "war" that he had learned from his father: a shield and a club. Or "death": a corpse wrapped in white cloth.

These Pictographic Script symbols were still at the budding stage of pictographs, far more primitive than the fully developed Oracle Bone Script of Yin Shang with its Six Principles. They were likely on the same level as the Xia Seal Script said to have existed in legends of the Xia Dynasty. From this, one could infer that when the ancestors of the Americas split from Eurasia, they had still been in a prehistoric age before even the germ of writing.

By Xolotl's experience, Aztec Pictographic Script "characters" were far too arbitrary. Their writing and interpretation changed according to the user's whims, while cultural authority remained tightly imprisoned in the hands of the priests.

Writing was the cornerstone of a state; culture was the root of a state.

For Xolotl, whose ambitions reached high, the empire's lack of writing was intolerable. He intended to mend that flaw with his own hands.

At first, Xolotl had been brimming with ambition, intending to imitate the myths and create an entire writing system himself. Yet the idea lasted only ten minutes before it ground to a halt on the very first character.

So Xolotl turned to the writing system he knew best and loved most: Chinese.

His thoughts wandered for a long while, and he felt that a Mexica Empire using Chinese Characters would be quite wonderful too. "The Huaxia Aztec Celestial Empire unifies the Americas"—merely imagining it made his blood surge.

Then he encountered a difficult problem: "The development of writing is not achieved in a single stroke."

For the Mexica People, whose Civilization had only just begun to rise, it was impossible to start straight away with simplified characters. A Mexica Warrior might understand "heaven and earth dark and yellow," yet he had not learned "the universe vast and primeval." He could see "the sun and moon waxing and waning," but would not understand "the stars spread in ordered ranks." As for abstract terms like "science," "economy," and "culture," he had not even laid the foundation for such concepts.

Chinese Characters themselves represented a way of understanding the world and society. They came from pictographs, from the simplest perceptions of the world, and only through different eras—through the integration of thought and the evolution of culture—did they move from the concrete to the abstract. Every interpretation in the Shuowen Jiezi was a kind of understanding of the world held by the ancestors.

Xolotl did not wish merely to introduce Chinese Characters as a tool, like the Spanish of later Mexico. What he wished to merge in was the already mature Huaxia culture that rested upon writing. This would, on the one hand, accelerate the development of Aztec Civilization as a whole, and on the other, temper the excessively bloody culture of human sacrifice.

Of course, this creation of characters did not mean completely abandoning the native Pictographic Script or utterly casting aside the local Nahua Language. In truth, that was impossible. Xolotl's character creation was merely a means of accelerating the formation of writing; it could not change a people's habits. After all, those using the writing would still be the original people!

Even in New Spain, conquered in blood by colonizers and forcibly assimilated into Spanish for centuries, the Spanish in use still contained a great many Nahua Language spellings. And once they began using pictographic writing, the priests of the Alliance would likewise introduce native pictographic symbols and localize them in ways that suited their habits.

What he would do was introduce Chinese Characters with a complete structure as the bones, add Kana simplified from native Pictographic Script, then introduce phonosemantic characters from Nahuatl, thus saving thousands of years of evolution. This was akin to Hangul of Goryeo, Kana of Fusang, Chữ Nôm of Vietnam, and Tangut Script of Western Xia: all were fusions of Sinicization and localization. Once mature writing had been established, it could serve as the foundation for swiftly carrying out political, religious, and cultural reforms in the Alliance.

"Where King Wen's teachings reached, even wandering maidens stood like ministers. None dared pass with disrespect; they paused to straighten their caps and tassels."

Xolotl recited several lines of poetry, then felt that comparing himself to King Wen and the warriors to wandering maidens was a little too shameless. He smiled and continued meditating deeply.

Xolotl now had a concrete writing template in hand: traditional Chinese Characters.

What he needed to do was use the semi-pictographic traditional Chinese Characters as a basis, work backward to more pictographic Oracle Bone Script, Seal Script, or invented pictographs, and construct a logical process of concrete objects—pictographic Oracle Bone Script/Seal Script—semi-pictographic traditional Chinese Characters. Finally, he would extend abstract conceptual meanings from the semi-pictographic traditional Chinese Characters.

After a while, Xolotl heard someone lift the cloth curtain over the door. He raised his head and saw Bertad entering with a clay jar of dye, followed by Avet, whom he had not seen for several days.

"Xolotl, what have you been busy with lately?"

As soon as he entered, Avet asked with a smile.

"There have been quite a few feasts in camp these past days, but I never saw you."

"A feast is nothing more than eating roasted venison and drinking Tequila. Supplies have been tight lately, so there has not been much good food anyway."

Xolotl smiled, a gleam flashing in his eyes.

"I've been busy with something important lately. Avet, help me out when you have time."

Then the two sat cross-legged beside the earthen platform, with a deerskin blanket spread beneath them.

"Look at these boards."

Xolotl pointed at the stack by his feet.

"What are these?"

Avet looked at the two rows of images and writing on the board, and his brows immediately rose.

"These are characters! The upper row consists of various images, and we have learned quite a few of them from the Sacrificial Disk. The lower row is writing, a summary of what the images mean. These characters have fixed forms of writing and a structure for forming characters. Based on the images, you can try to guess what the characters mean."

Avet's interest was instantly piqued, and he began to study them carefully.

"On this board, the top row shows a person, an eye, a mountain, a river, a tree, two trees, three trees, and a fish?"

Xolotl glanced at it. The lower row read: "person, eye, mountain, water, tree, grove, forest, fish."

"That's right. The characters below are a standardized written form and a concentrated meaning of the pictographs above. Look: one tree character is a single tree, while two tree characters make a great stretch of woodland, and three tree characters make the forest behind us. The repetition of the tree character is not a count of one, two, and three, but an expansion into the meaning of a broad space."

"Then on this board, the images show a person holding something round, land in the middle of a river, fruit growing on a tree, hair above an eye, and a person raising his head to look at the sky? These images are derived from the previous board?"

"Exactly. So the characters below are related to the previous ones as well. In order, they are melon, isle, fruit, brow, and heaven. Melon comes from the person character, isle from the water character, fruit from the tree character, brow from the eye character, and heaven also comes from person."

"Avet, look at this one too. The thing that grows from the earth and bears round pods is 'bean.' When the beans grow luxuriantly, with many shoots and leaves, that is 'abundance,' meaning a rich harvest. This skull shape is the 'bone' inside our bodies. 'Abundance' extends from a harvest to mean something large and full, and when 'bone' and 'abundance' are joined together, the bone is expanded into something large and full—that is your body, 'body.'"

"And this one: one line is 'one,' two lines are 'two,' three lines are 'three.' A short line above a long line is 'up,' while a long line above a short line is 'down.'"

The two grew more and more engrossed in their conversation, until night approached and the room darkened.

"Xolotl, these characters are very interesting. At the beginning, they are all things one can see and touch. Then, as they gradually combine, they become things one cannot see or touch. Yet when I look at the characters you speak of for these unknown things, I somehow feel that I can understand them."

"That's because you're too clever."

Xolotl laughed and asked.

"What do you think of these characters?"

"By the Main God's witness, they're excellent!"

Avet praised them gladly and sincerely.

"Then how about this: I tell you the meanings of the characters, and you draw the corresponding images?"

Xolotl coaxed him step by step, hoping to seize a reliable laborer.

"Sure. Things have been fairly quiet these days. I'll play with you for a while."

"Suppose—just suppose—this isn't play. Suppose I want to use these characters with fixed meanings to replace the priests' record-keeping images. What do you think?"

For a moment, there was silence. The wooden hut was so still that a pin dropping could be heard.

Only after quite some time did Avet answer with a faint smile.

"Xolotl, I'd like to live a little longer. And I'd like you to live a little longer too."