The story goes that in 1899, Qing-dynasty official Wang Yirong and his friend Liu E (author of the novel The Travels of Lao Can) were playing around with some "dragon bones" bought from a Chinese herbal medicine shop when they realized with astonishment that these were incised with many images resembling written characters.
話說西元一八九九年，清朝官吏王懿榮與朋友劉鶚（《老殘遊記》作者）把玩中藥店買回的「龍骨」，赫然發現上面刻有許多類似文字的圖樣。