Robert Redfield, an American anthropologist, proposed a pair of concepts that were similar to “the wise above and the foolish below”—the great tradition and the little tradition. His clear division of the two was widely adopted and sometimes adapted into “elite culture and popular culture”, which became a popular tool of cultural analysis. Given the long and complex history of Chinese culture, it is necessary to modify Redfield’s concepts and define the cultural tradition that emerged in the wake of the development of Chinese characters as the small tradition, and the cultural tradition of the preliterate age as the big tradition.