Unicode Fonts for Ancient Chinese Oracle Bone and Bronze Scripts
(WIP)
Born of Heaven's breath and Earth's reply, WindMark traces the invisible current that shaped some of the earliest written symbols from one of world's most ancient and persisting cultures. From the oracle's smoke to the bronze's echo, it carries the quiet pulse of change, the unseen rhythm through which meaning takes form. Each glyph is a whisper of the Flow in motion: the mark of wind made visible.
Some quick background / the basics if you're not already steeped in this stuff, basically the oracle bone script was one of the earliest known forms of Chinese writing, dating to around 1200–1000 BCE. Symbols were carved onto ox shoulder blades and turtle shells and used for divination, and questions were inscribed, the bones were heated, and the resulting cracks were interpreted as answers.
A few centuries later, the same writing tradition continued on bronze vessels used for rituals and record-keeping, roughly between 1000–700 BCE. Instead of being carved, these inscriptions were cast directly into the surface of the metal.
Together, these two sources show the beginnings of written Chinese as it developed thousands of years ago, preserved today through archaeological discoveries and digital archives. (After oracle bone then bronze script came seal script, then clerical script, to "regular" script, ultimately to the simplified/traditional characters we have today).
WindMark is a distilled, practical introduction to China's earliest scripts, the oracle bone and bronze inscriptions, as they survive through modern records. Drawing from the meticulous digital archive of Richard Sears' website, hanziyuan.net, which he started putting together in the early 2000s, which later grew through community contributions, this font selects representative forms from the many ancient glyph samples he documented (we used his drawings as inspiration and redrew them on our own).
So basically each WindMark glyph in the two fonts here is a cleaned and redrawn version of one of those early inscriptions, chosen to convey the essence of the ancient sign rather than reproduce every archaeological variation. Some oracle or bronze glyphs exist in only a single instance, others appear in dozens of discovered forms. WindMark offers one clear, approachable version of each, allowing one to see at a glance what early Chinese writing kind of looked like, making it easy to perhaps put each glyph side-by-side with its modern Chinese characer counterpart and see some basic relationships quickly, pretty much :).
It's not meant as an academic reconstruction, but as a visual bridge, a way to appreciate the ancient aesthetic and spirit of the world's first Chinese characters without getting lost in the technical layers of paleography. For full scholarly reference and authentic glyph records, visit hanziyuan.net, pretty cool.
| font family | # glyphs | description |
|---|---|---|
Wind Mark Bone |
751 | Oracle bone script |
Wind Mark Cast |
1349 | Bronze script |
See ./base
folder for font files for now.
There are a total of 2100 glyphs across both fonts in what we've curated. Each script's glyphs are mapped to related/corresponding Chinese Unicode codepoints....
Made by ClueSurf, meditating on the universe ¤. Follow the work on YouTube, X, Instagram, Substack, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and browse more of our open-source work here on GitHub.