The study of Chinese vulgar characters is one of the important contents in the study of modern Chinese characters, and it is also one of the important contents in the study of the dissemination of Chinese characters. Based on the 81 poems and more than 300 folk characters in the Vietnamese Chinese document “Giới Hiên Collected Poems”, this paper explores the nature of Chinese vulgar characters and related issues. The nature of Chinese vulgar characters can be characterized from the perspective of Chinese character shape, structure and function: Vulgar characters are used by the civil community, with different forms of different forms, different components of the composition of the word, often used to record and correspond to the orthography of the Chinese character. Clarifying the nature of “vulgar characters” is of great significance to its ontology research, modern Chinese research, and Chinese character dissemination research.

Chinese characters in Vietnam have a long history, more than one thousand years. This paper with three main parts is aimed at doing a research overview of Vietnam’s Chinese characters over the years. In the first part, the birth and the usage of Chinese characters will be presented through the analysis of formation circumstances as well as the historical position of the characters in Vietnam. In the second part, the paper will introduce the social, cultural and educational background, the unearthed literature and handed-down literature, and anonymous literature as well as the arrangement and the research of the characters over each period in the history. In the last part, the achievements and the failures of researches on Vietnam’s Chinese characters by far will be pointed out as the foundation of future researches, which are to improve the status of Chinese characters socially.