Some refer to the written Chinese language as ideographic: that is, structured according to a system in which each symbol represents a particular idea or concept, whether abstract or concrete. That’s true of certain Chinese characters, but only a small minority. Most of them are actually logographs, each of which represents a word or part of a word. But if you dig deep enough into their history — and the history of other Asian languages that use Chinese-derived vocabulary — you’ll find that some started out long ago as pictographs, designed visually to represent the thing to which they referred.