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As it is said in legend, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, there was a high ranking official called Wang Yirong whohad the hobby of collecting antiques and also had profound understanding of ancient Chinese characters. One day whenhe was ill, he was prescribed to take a dose of Chinese traditional medicine. To his surprise, among the therapeuticmaterials, there was one substance called dragon-bone. On these bones, he discovered some symbols carved by knife.This aroused his great curiosity. He bought all the dragon bones from that drug store and sent someone to trace theorigin of them. He tried to purchase a lot of these kinds of dragon bones at all costs. Later he came to know that thesedragon bones were originated from Xiaotun Village of Anyang City, Henan Province, which is called Yin ruins, thecapital city of late Shang Dynasty. These inscriptions on dragon bones were symbols used in the late Shang Dynasty.These Chinese characters happened to be used some three thousand four or five hundred years ago.
According to the historical data, during the Ying Emperor period, the Ying people had a superstitious belief inghosts and spirits. They practiced divination on minor and important occasions. In modem terms, to divine means totell fortune. The fortune telling included what the weather would be like？ What the year's harvest would be like？ Whya person was ill or had a bad dream？ That's why they were called oracle inscriptions.
Because all the contents of the divination were carved on tortoise shells or bones of ox and sheep and otheranimals, people later called them "oracle bones" .
So far, there is a collection of 4000 oracle bones, among which 1000 of the characters can be deciphered.Although this kind of language is basically complete, there are still many strokes and radicals not yet known.