Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese is the literary language of the Chinese cultural sphere, fixed in its classical form on the usage of the late Zhou period and continuing as the written standard of administration, scholarship, and history for more than two millennia thereafter. It is the language of the dynastic histories, and it is in those histories, above all the Hou Hanshu, the Weilüe, and their successors, that the Chinese record of the western world survives: the reports of envoys, the routes of the silk trade, and the names by which the Han court knew the distant empires at the other end of Eurasia, Rome among them.

The language is written in Chinese characters, a logographic script in which each graph stands for a morpheme rather than a sound, so that a written form is stable across centuries of changing pronunciation and across the many spoken varieties of Chinese. A name recorded in the histories is therefore preserved as a sequence of characters whose Han-period reading must be reconstructed; the conventional modern Mandarin readings, given here in pinyin, are a reference label rather than the sound a Han observer would have spoken.

@misc{onomastikon-classical-chinese,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Classical Chinese},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/classical-chinese}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}