China

People in China began writing about 1500 BC, more than a thousand years later than people in West Asia or Egypt, but earlier than anyone in Europe, Africa, or Central America. The earliest writing that we know of from China was on animal bones, which are called "oracle bones" because priests used them to tell the future. The writing on these oracle bones is the same writing that people use in modern China, just in an earlier version. The signs they used came from pictures, like earlier Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian cuneiform

People in early China also wrote on strips of bamboo wood. Later on, people also wrote on silk cloth. The earliest Chinese literature that we know of probably comes from the later part of the Western Chou Dynasty about 800 BC (the same time as Hesiod in Greece) and was written on silk. This is the I Ching, a fortune-telling book, like the earlier oracle bones.

Around 100 BC, people in China invented paper to write on. Paper was cheaper to write on than silk, so more people wrote and copied books during the Han Dynasty

During the Tang Dynasty, about 700 AD, people in China invented wood-block printing, which was easier than copying out books by hand and made books much cheaper than they had been before. Many more people learned to read, and many more people wrote books. The poet Bai Juyi wrote a famous poem, the Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

Oracle Bone around 1500 BC