Stroke order is the order in which the strokes of a Chinese character are written. A stroke is a movement of a writing instrument on a writing surface.

Chinese characters are logograms constructed with strokes. Over the millennia a set of generally agreed rules have been developed by custom. Minor variations exist between countries, but the basic principles remain the same, namely that writing characters should be economical, with the fewest hand movements to write the most strokes possible. This promotes writing speed, accuracy, and readability. This idea is particularly important since as learners progress, characters often get more complex. Since stroke order also aids learning and memorization, students are often taught about it from a very early age in schools and encouraged to follow them.

The Eight Principles of Yong uses the single character 永 ('eternity') to teach eight of the most basic strokes in regular script.

In ancient China, the oracle bone script carved on ox scapula and tortoise plastrons showed no indication of stroke order. The characters show huge variations from piece to piece, sometimes even within one piece. During the divination ceremony, after the cracks were made, the characters were written with a brush on the shell or bone (to be carved in a workshop later). Although the brush-written stroke order is not discernible after carving, there exists some evidence that it was not entirely idiosyncratic: a few of the characters, often marginal administrative notations recording the provenance of the shells or bones, were not later re-carved, and the stroke order of these characters tends to resemble traditional and modern stroke order. For those characters (the vast majority) which were later engraved into the hard surface using a knife, perhaps by a separate individual, there is evidence (from incompletely engraved pieces) that in at least some cases all the strokes running one way were carved, then the piece was turned, and strokes running another way were then carved.

In early Imperial China, the common script was the small seal script. About 220 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first to conquer all of China, imposed Li Si's character consolidation, a set of 3300 standardized small seal characters. Its graphs on old steles—some dating from 200 BC—reveal indications of the stroke order of the time. However, stroke order could still not yet be ascertained from the steles, and no paper from that time is extant.

The true starting point of stroke order is the clerical script which is more regularized, and in some ways similar to modern text. By looking at the clerical style steles' graphs and the placement of each stroke, one can see hierarchical priority between the strokes, which indicates the stroke order used by the calligrapher or stele sculptors.^{[citation needed]}

Regular script is the most recent major script style, allowing one to more easily guess the stroke order used to write on the steles. The stroke order 1000 years ago was similar to that toward the end of Imperial China.^{[citation needed]} For example, the stroke order of 广 is clear in the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716; but in a modern book, the official stroke order (the same) will not appear clearly. The Kangxi and current shapes have tiny differences, while current stroke order is still the same, according to the old style. However, the stroke orders implied by the Kangxi dictionary are not necessarily similar to nowadays' norm.

Cursive and semi-cursive script show stroke order more clearly than Regular Script, as each move made by the writing tool is visible.