A professor of mine's mentioned that Chinese lacked a punctuation system until in recent history from Western influence. Apparently, one could know where to stop based on the writing. However I can't imagine that, as the decades passed from the creation of a text, scholars would still be able to read it without trouble. Were there any attempts to develop punctuation?
https://pic4.zhimg.com/80/a27879b20868212e863737fb02b942cb_hd.jpg
2 recognizing pauses and separate sentences is a basic skill, like the old saying 识文断句 to describe scholar (edit: educated people)， 识文 means knowing the characters， 断句 means separating sentences
3 classic chinese (written chinese) is a very "compact" (short), and relatively easy to read without punctuation.
While this is a fine question for /r/askhistorians, you may want to ask it on /r/asklinguistics as well.
