Each strip of wood or bamboo is said to be as long as a chopstick and as wide as two, with space for several tens of visually complex ancient Chinese characters arranged in a single column. For longer texts, many slips were sewn together with hemp, silk, or leather and used to make a kind of folding book.

The earliest surviving examples of wood or bamboo slips date from the 5th century BC during the Warring States period. However, references in earlier texts surviving on other media make it clear that some precursor of these Warring States period bamboo slips was in use as early as the late Shang period (from about 1250 BC). Bamboo or wooden strips were the standard writing material during the Han dynasty and excavated examples have been found in abundance. Subsequently, the improvements made to paper by Cai Lun during the Han dynasty began to displace bamboo and wooden strips from mainstream uses, and by the 4th century AD bamboo had been largely abandoned as a medium for writing in China.