Cangjiepian

Cangjiepian
Cangjie portrait, four eyes signify awareness
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	倉頡篇
Simplified Chinese	仓颉篇
Literal meaning	Cangjie's Chapters
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Cāngjiépiān Wade–Giles Tsang-chieh-p'ien Yue: Cantonese Jyutping Cong1kit3pin1 Southern Min Hokkien POJ Chhongkhiatphiⁿ Middle Chinese Middle Chinese Tshanghangphjien  Old Chinese Baxter-Sagart ˤaŋ[g]ˤaŋspʰen
Korean name
Hangul	倉頡篇
Hanja	창갈편
Transcriptions McCune–Reischauer Ch'angkalp'yŏn
Japanese name
Kanji	倉頡篇
Hiragana	そうけつへん
Transcriptions Revised Hepburn Sōketsuhen

The Cangjiepian, also known as the Three Chapters (, Sancang), was a c. 220 BCE Chinese primer and a prototype for Chinese dictionaries. Li Si, Chancellor of the Qin dynasty (221-206 BCE), compiled it for the purpose of reforming written Chinese into the new orthographic standard Small Seal Script. Beginning in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-221 CE), many scholars and lexicographers expanded and annotated the Cangjiepian. By the end of the Tang dynasty (618-907), it had become a lost work, but in 1977, archeologists discovered a cache of (c. 165 BCE) texts written on bamboo strips, including fragments of the Cangjiepian.

The eponymous Cangjiepian title derives from the culture hero Cangjie, the legendary Yellow Emperor's historian and inventor of Chinese writing. According to Chinese mythology, Cangjie, who had four eyes and remarkable cognizance, created Chinese characters after observing natural phenomena such as the footprints of birds and animals (Yang et al. 2008: 84-86). In Modern Standard Chinese usage, the Cangjie method of inputting characters into a computer is more common than with the ancient Cangjiepian proto-dictionary.

In the name Cāngjié or Cāng Jié, cāng 倉/仓 means "storehouse; warehouse" and is sometimes written 蒼/苍 "dark green; blue; gray; ashy", which is a common Chinese surname. The character 頡/颉 is only pronounced jié in this name, and is usually pronounced xié "stretch the neck; fly up (of birds)".