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How far back does the history of Chinese literature extend?

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Scene from Romance of the Three Kingdoms — Chinese literature *Zhang Fei on the Long Sloped Bridge Turning Away One Million Wei Troops with a Powerful Stare*, woodblock colour print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1884. It depicts a scene from the novel *Romance of the Three Kingdoms*.

Chinese literature possesses an uninterrupted history spanning more than 3,000 years, with its origins dating back at least to the 14th century BCE.1

While the earliest extant examples of Chinese writing—inscriptions on bones and tortoise shells from the late Shang dynasty (18th–12th centuries BCE)—are primarily brief, factual records of divination, they are significant as the direct ancestors of the modern Chinese script. These early inscriptions confirm that by the Shang period, music and dance were already integrated into cultural life, though the specific songs from that era have been lost.2

The tradition of written literature as it is recognized today began to take more definitive shape with works such as the Shijing ("Classic of Poetry"), which compiled songs dating from the beginning of the Zhou dynasty. Throughout its long history, Chinese literature has maintained a remarkable continuity, largely because the Chinese language remained the official medium of communication even during periods of foreign conquest.1