The official language of China, known in English as Mandarin, is spoken by the largest number of people in the world. Mandarin is referred to by the Chinese as putonghua or "the common language," but in some regions in China, people also speak Cantonese, Shanghainese, Sichuanese or any one of a number of minority languages and dialects. Still, the vast majority of these same people share the same writing system, which is commonly called "Chinese characters." So even though a word may be pronounced differently in Hong Kong, Shanghai or Beijing in the native dialects of those cities, it's written in exactly the same way.

Chinese characters evolved over thousands of years from early pictographs to the complex and beautiful system we see today. The art of calligraphy is revered; how someone forms their writing is said to reveal much about them and their character, much as any artwork does the artist. Many old and commonly held beliefs about characters (such as allegedly being incompatible with the computer age, or all being "little drawings" of what they represent) are untrue and in fact Chinese characters show no sign of going out of fashion.

Knowledge of how to say even a few words in Mandarin will greatly increase the pleasure of any trip to China. For written Chinese, it is commonly accepted that recognition of around 3,000 of the most frequently used characters is enough to "get the gist" of a newspaper or similar publication.