As we wander into the realm of Chinese art, trying to trace its course from the beginning of the Chinese civilization, we need to ask one question: how do we make out its origins? While it might be easily dismissed as dumb, this question poses more challenges to historians than one might possibly imagine, for the history of Chinese art stretched, at the very least, as far back as 6,000 years ago, but the embryo of Chinese characters, the oracle bone script of the Shang dynasty, only appeared about 3,000 years ago. And the 60-century timeline here only went up to the time of the Yellow Thearch (Huangdi 黃帝) and Flame Thearch (Yandi 炎帝); it could be lengthened to 8,000 years if the mystic era of Nüwa 女媧 and Fuxi 伏 羲 were considered. To the pain of the pursuers, the difficulty of reconstructing the prehistory of Chinese art is heightened by the rarity of oracle bones and worse still, the ambiguity of the simplistic writing they bore, which makes the interpretation of this script an ever-growing arena of debate.