Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern

by Jing Tsu

What does it take to reinvent a language?

After a meteoric rise, China today is one of the world's most powerful nations. Just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, as the world underwent a massive technological transformation that threatened to leave them behind. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu argues that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: the century-long fight to make the formidable Chinese language accessible to the modern world of global trade and digital technology.

Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to a world designed for the Roman alphabet and requiring standardization, from an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup. Without their advances, China might never have become the dominating force we know today.

With larger-than-life characters and an unexpected perspective on the major events of China's tumultuous twentieth century, Tsu reveals how language is both a technology to be perfected and a subtle, yet potent, power to be exercised and expanded.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, China, Language, Linguistics, Asia, Science

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 18, 2022

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reverential Technology

Life is too short to learn Chinese. At least it was until Mao reduced the number of characters in the language from over 45000 to less than 3000 and introduced a Latinised form that reasonably tracked the official dialect (Mandarin). Until then, only the elite officialdom was privy to the power of its complex ideographs. And many of that elite after a lifetime of study knew the secrets of this beautiful script but almost nothing of its written content. At the beginning of the 20th century the literacy rate in the country was no more than 10%, and almost no one in that minority was engaged in scientific research, engineering, or material innovation.

Yet during a century of national trauma - including occupation by almost every European nation, the overthrow of the ruling Qing dynasty, political degeneration into warlord rule, invasion and destruction by Japan, the Communist revolution and its aftermath in events like the Cultural Revolution, and the terrible famine of The Great Leap Forward - literacy is now almost 100%, and the country’s scientific, engineering, and material achievements exceeds all others except the United States. Jing Tsu’s history of the transformation of the Chinese language records the development of the underlying technology of this dramatic transformation, the Chinese language itself.*

Chinese is of course ideographic. Like ancient Egyptian, it uses glyphs. But unlike Egyptian, which was transformed into Coptic using the Greek alphabet, it never became expressed phonetically. There was good reason not to take the phonetic plunge. The disconnection between symbol and sound allowed enormous linguistic variation over a vast empire while maintaining the ability to communicate without translation. While there was an official pronunciation, this was used only among the elite at the imperial court. Even the Manchu invaders of the 17th century adopted the script without understanding a word of it. And Mao decreed the Mandarin dialect although he couldn’t speak it at all.

Jing recounts the details of the technical changes in the language that adapted it to modern technology, first to the telegraph, then to the mechanical typewriter, and ultimately to the computer. These are not insignificant for a script as aesthetically nuanced as written Chinese, and for a pronunciation that requires the subtlety of tone to distinguish among the language’s many homonyms.** As a reference point, think of the difficulties involved in doing complex mathematics with Roman numerals. The temptation to simply abandon the traditional script was always present. But for me the most remarkable aspect of his story is the persistent cultural reverence for the ancient script itself. It was valued for what it was not for what it could do.

The men (and they are exclusively so except for the unnamed women who developed a esoteric women’s script in Southern China) who pioneered these conceptual, bibliographic and technological changes are cultural heroes. Their devotion to the Chinese language, on occasion to the point of death, is something usually associated with religion in the West. The debate about the condition of the language is much like that of an English Council arguing the most appropriate programme for the restoration of a Grade I listed building. That is, the discussion is typically about alternative aesthetics rather than merely economic or technical efficiency, which are considered constraints but not objectives. Few other modern countries have had China’s linguistic experience (Korea made the phonetic shift from Han characters in the 15th century; Soviet Tajikistan and other Arabic speaking republics experienced Latinisation in the 1920’s and 30’s; the ancient Phoenicians may have been the first when the Greeks and Jews alphabetised their ideographic symbols***).

In short, Chinese is revered not simply because of its antiquity, or its use by about a third of the world’s population. It is also an aesthetically beautiful object in its own right. Jing Tsu captures that beauty throughout her book.

*For a discussion of language as the fundamental technology see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

**Consider, for example, the difficulties involved in creating a Latin script of some fixed number of alphabetic characters. In principle this appears easy since most Chinese words are composed of only two sounds, a beginning consonant followed by a vowel (each of these sounds has its own character as well). Suppose an extended alphabet of say 30 consonants and 10 vowels were used to express these sounds. This combination would yield 300 possibilities, that is, less than 10% of the distinctive sounds required in the vastly reduced number of words in the current dictionary. In fact a character is not a word in the Western sense. Its context defines it as much as the glyph. This is correlated with the crazy-making structure of the Chinese dictionary as well as the more-than-arbitrary character of library subject classifications.

***See here for a discussion of the Western transition to phonetic script: https:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship]

I struggled through 35 pages of this, and found it repetitive, padded, and over-focused on irrelevant novelistic details, like the physical surroundings of a failed language reformer as he worked on his proposal. Did I mention repetitive?

[Kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a past beneficiary of controversial Confucius Institute scholarship I have a special place in my heart for Chinese culture and language. Because of that I tend to rate the books about China a bit higher than usual but unfortunately I can't give more than 3 stars to Kingdom of Characters because disappointment is just too big.

When I spotted this book on the list of finalist of Pulitzer Prize I was over the moon. I usually don't buy books but I knew I had to make an exception for this one. So I acquired it and kept it on my shelf till I could no longer contain my excitement. The book is separated into seven chapters that are arranged chronically. We start in 1900 with the efforts to unify Chinese language and then jump to 1912 and struggles to build a typewriter for Chinese users. 1925 follows with history of telegraphy, 1938 - developing an indexing method, 1958 - romanization, 1979 - making Chinese script digital and finally 2020 and ongoing effort to add all the Chinese characters to the Unicode. Unfortunately the neat way the chapters are arranged are only a trick to make you think that this book follows any chronology. In reality the story will be taking you back and forth through second half of XIX and first half of XX century. Every time I was getting invested in one timeline it was abruptly stopped to go back in time to give you an origin story of this device or that person and when I got adjusted another time jump was being made. I do not enjoy that and it made for a choppy reading experience.

The book tries to cover a really wide topic and it struggles with what it really wants to focus on - the language, the people involved or the technology? In the end everything feels rushed and surface level. Especially first chapter is very clunky and feels like it was aggressively edited and the huge chunks of text were replaced with only few sentences.

To add the insult to injury, author likes to repeat certain points multiple times per chapter. Chinese people saw that their script is outdated and there is an urgent need to modernize it. Did you get that? No? Let me repeat it again. Chinese people saw that their script is outdated and there is an urgent need to modernize it. Are you sure you understand? It's a very important point. You do understand? So let me just remind you again. Chinese people saw that their script is outdated and there is an urgent need to modernize it. Fortunately this issue was not as prevalent in later chapters so I was screaming internally only through the first half of this book.

In the end, Im quite disappointed. There is still a lot to be learned here but its going to be one of those history lessons that you know is important but also so damn boring.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really wanted to enjoy this book more than I did, since it discusses a number of issues I dealt with professionally for a number of years. Author Jing Tsu presents an interesting and ultimately convincing premise: that the once great Chinese empire fell far behind the rest of the world due to inherent and seemingly insurmountable problems with both its written and spoken language — i.e., the country's low literacy rate, and its multitude of mutually incomprehensible dialects. She then "follows the bold innovators who reinvented the Chinese language" through a series of political, technological and social changes over the past 120 years, including the decision on a common spoken language; the invention of the Chinese typewriter; how to send Chinese characters telegraphically using just a series of Morse code-like dots and dashes; the introduction of simplified characters to boost literacy among the “common people,” and finally how to solve the problem of inputting Chinese text on computers and then (most recently) digitally on smartphones and other devices.

So, fascinating problems all, and told through the stories of the impressive problem-solving individuals themselves, much like Sean Carroll did in his excellent book on the history of evolutionary science, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species. However, Carroll had the benefit of individuals like Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace and Leakey to write about; whereas Tsu is stuck with a group of inspired, hardworking, but otherwise dull academics, politicians, linguists and mechanical engineers. On top of which, while she presents each problem clearly and concisely, she drags on far too long and too technically with each solution, making this ultimately a slog to get through.

STILL…while most definitely not a book for a wide general audience, it did appeal to my personal interests and bring back a lot of memories for me in a number of ways. As I know I've mentioned way too many times on GR, I worked as a graphic designer in Taiwan from 1978-1993, during which time I not only dealt with such issues as spec'ing and then setting Chinese type (first mechanically, and then ultimately with computers, as I was there during the entire "computer revolution" Tsu discusses in Chapter Six); producing brochures and other literature with using traditional (Taiwan) and simplified (Mainland) characters; having to learn and understand both the pinyin and Wade-Giles romanization systems (as well as the totally indigenous "bopomofo" transliteration still used in Taiwan, which remains the best way to learn Chinese with proper pronunciation). So overall, an interesting book with a unique approach to a very specific topic — but just WAY too long, with WAY too much detail.

While I listened to this as an audiobook (and kudos for Tsu's self-narration, as this was the first book I've heard in a long time where the narrator actually knew how to pronounce Chinese words and names), I'd probably recommend the physical book (which I also borrowed), as it has a number of helpful photos and diagrams...just in case anyone else out there is still thinking of reading this.

[Nick Cao · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has received high praise from lots of people who don't understand a word of Chinese, which bamboozled me into buying it (and I note that many other reviews of this book on this website are similarly riddled with factual errors). Let me give a review from someone who does.

1. The book is riddled with factual errors. In one glaring mistake, the author claims that Peking is the Wade-Giles romanization of 北京/Beijing. Wrong! Peking is from a 17th century Jesuit missionary. WG would spell it as P'ei-ching.
2. The book is riddled with errors of omission: one gets the impression from reading the book that everyone learnt Mandarin from the 1920s onwards. In fact, many elderly people in China's south still do not understand Mandarin. Similar triumphalism appears everywhere.
3. The book is filled with fantasy: I find the use of novelistic language to portray historical settings is jarring in a purported work of non-fiction.
4a. The book tendentiously repeats Chinese nationalistic arguments: for example, the book presents foreign ownership of telegraph lines in China as an issue. The alternative would have been no telegraph lines.
4b. The book does not separate the interests of the Chinese state with the interests of the Chinese people: the unequal treaties clearly humiliated the Qing dynasty rulers. However, international trade raised the standard of living of many Chinese people!
4c. The book sanitizes Chinese history: the Qing dynasty enforced a Manchu-supremacist racial hierarchy on China, the Taiping Rebellion was huge, and the Great Leap Forward gets one short paragraph. Modern China has no soft power and resorts to wolf warrior diplomacy, but you won't find that in the book.
4d. The book doesn't really help you understand China: language standardization has facilitated massive internal migration in China in recent decades. The resulting economic effects are central to China's rising power, a topic promised in the first sentence of the blurb, but which gets basically no discussion.
5. The book's discussion of character simplification is facile: only that most simplified characters already attested in use before the PRC simplified characters, some statistics about literacy in the Mainland, and the 愛 vs 爱 cliché. No discussion of literacy rates in Taiwan/Hong Kong, who use traditional characters. No scientific evaluation of ease of reading (surely this must exist?).
6. The book ignores Hanyu Pinyin's strange spellings. Most Chinese people who use Pinyin-romanized Chinese names in Western settings have their names horribly mangled by non-Chinese people due to Pinyin's unusual spellings. E.g. I knew a guy called Qiang, actually pronounced "Chiang" but most people called him "Kwang".
7. There is lots missing from this book: Chinese used to be written vertically and right-to-left. Now it is written horizontally and left-to-right. Why did this occur? Has there been any innovation in the process of typesetting Chinese fonts? How has the Chinese language adapted to absorb new scientific and technological knowledge?

The discussion about typewriters and telegraphs and electronic input is nice. However, if this is the quality of China scholarship that we get in the West, god help us. If you actually want to learn Chinese, I recommend Duolingo.

[Danielle | Dogmombookworm · Rating 5 out of 5]

KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS |

Examines the challenges the Chinese written script posed over the past 100 years in keeping up with the fast pace of our technological advancements.

Putting aside the question of whether to abandon Chinese script altogether which has been hotly debated, Tsu examines the many situations in which the Chinese have had to consider how to systemize their written script so as to allow quick, efficient and accessible means to look up and use characters in modern times. Should one use stroke count, radical placement, quadrant and stroke count and placement? None of which is objectively as easy as the inherent ordered system of A- B - C. Language reform has been debated and revised over multiple millennium, from standardization over 2,000 years ago to more recently with character simplification under Mao.

Tsu delves into the battles for how the Chinese dealt with creating a typewriter, telegraphy (for sending telegrams), bibliographic classification system, and computing technology. How do you process text that is not alphabetic but is made up of thousands of characters before our digital age, pre-computers?

I found this book absolutely enthralling. It really is such an interesting topic and has been through so many thought debates.

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Its goal : revitalising vernacular speech—to bring speech to writing—They followed the pledge of—poet (from Jiayingzhou (嘉应州), now known as Meizhou (梅州)), Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪) : ‘Let my hand write what my mouth speaks (我手寫我口).’’

Immensely fascinating, but personally I felt it was stylistically and structurally 'difficult' (or at least I felt it wasn't structured in a way that made it 'enjoyable' to read, to an extent that made me want to give up (halfway through), and to be fair the last bits weren't as exciting (for me) as the earlier parts, so maybe I should've had). I wanted it to be written like something by Benjamín Labatut , but obviously that can't be done. RTC later, maybe.

‘As for the best model of this everyday speech, each delegate could only see the merits of his own spoken version. They all had a stake in promoting the dialectal or topolectal variant from their home provinces. The Guangdong delegates wanted Cantonese, while those from Sichuan fought hard for Sichuanese. The odds were stacked in favor of the southern speakers. Proportionally speaking, they had more representatives across similar dialect groups.

After the careful inspection of more than 6,500 samples collected from all over the country, factions emerged as the members moved to the more sensitive question of which geographical area would lead the standard pronunciation. Attendance dwindled as the deadlock persisted. It was not a contest for the fainthearted. Those with slightly weaker constitutions or who suffered from tuberculosis—a common affliction at the time—endured a few weeks of contentious lobbying before their health gave out. Some delegates fell ill from exhaustion and had to withdraw from the congress. Others spat up blood during the heated debates, unable to carry on after being cornered and humiliated by their opponents. Wang barely grunted through a violent flare-up of hemorrhoids from sitting for days on end. Blood, he later recalled proudly, soaked through his pants and trickled down to his ankles. Eventually, only the diehards remained.

One of the southern representatives made the appeal that no southerner could go about his business for a single day without using a particular inflection. To be a truly national pronunciation, then, his southern colleague argued, the standard had to bend toward the south. To prove his point, the man broke into an operatic demonstration. Wang had little patience for such theatrics. There was no way that the north, the seat of the nation’s capital, would cede to the south on the national tone question.

Wang called a separate meeting less than half a mile away at the oldest Anglican church—Inside those thick walls, under the famous three-tiered traditional pagoda bell tower sitting atop the sparse lines of Anglo-Saxon architecture, he carried out his mutiny. He instituted a new rule that carefully rearranged how the votes were counted. Each province would now cast only one vote, regardless of the number of delegates it sent. This manoeuvre didn’t just level the numerical advantage of the south, it transferred the advantage to the northern vernacular Mandarin-speaking provinces, which were greater in number. The other delegates protested when they found out what Wang had done on the sly, but it was too late.

His brute manoeuvring came to a symbolic and literal climax when he rolled up his sleeves and physically chased a southern delegate out—The delegate had said the word “rickshaw” to a neighbor in his thick southern Wu dialect. To Wang’s Mandarin ear, just a few seats over, it sounded awfully like he was calling Wang a son of a bitch—Wang jumped out of his seat, tried to grab the delegate by his collar—That episode was subsequently remembered as the most raucous exchange witnessed in the solemnly decorated halls of the ministry—the echo of—Wang’s obscenities—down the long corridors—Mandarin ultimately emerged as the truly viable sound pattern for the national phonetic alphabet.

To this day, when asked, a southerner will say—Cantonese would have been chosen over Mandarin. The world would now be striving to master the varied intonations of southern China instead of crisp Beijing-speak.’


‘An important monument in the history of simplified Chinese writing, which otherwise features so few women—still used today, created by women themselves. Nüshu, literally “women’s script,” was a simplified writing system that used fewer strokes and gave women both literacy and a means of private communication with one another. It came from a small area in the southernmost tip of Hunan Province, where diverse ethnicities have historically resided.

The script has been used for centuries and is believed by some to be as old as the oracle bone script, which contains the earliest examples of simplified writing. Women used this—to bypass the limits placed on them in traditionalist society and to create a world of literacy for themselves—they had limited access to written language and were restricted to the domestic realm, so nüshu was used mainly as an in-group, private form of communication.

Its very existence puts a crack in the otherwise continuous presentation of writing as a mark of authority, the state, and patriarchal rulers. Women’s—script powerfully took its inspiration from the stitching in embroidery—incorporated crisscross patterns into the interweaving strokes of its slender, tightly vertical form, rather than the usual, more complicated and square structure of characters. Alternative scripts in general were considered—unsanctioned, and heterodox. They diverged—were occasionally purged by the authorities. Women’s script, for instance, was persecuted as witchcraft for a time.’


‘ON OCTOBER, 1938—librarian Du Dingyou was ordered to evacuate the city of Guangzhou—Du was—over his disordered desk at the Sun Zhongshan University library, surrounded by uncataloged books and scattered notes. He had been expecting this day; the scent of burned concrete and wood from the first shelling of the university’s grounds six weeks ago still hung in the air—While the sirens screeched through the air, it was not thoughts of imminent destruction or his own mortality that churned in Du’s mind. His pressing thought was for all those dusty books on the shelves, in storage, and in the stacks. They were still under his stewardship. He felt no greater responsibility than to save—precious written records from destruction.

By the time the sirens had become a low howl, Du had made up his mind—he would personally shepherd the books to safety. For the next seventy-two hours, he packed up about three hundred thousand volumes from the library’s collection—They hacked apart the reading tables and removed the blackboards in chunks to cobble them into boxes. Amid the flying dust and debris, he later recounted, they did not pause to rest. Du ordered whatever would not fit in a box to be taken to the basement room and sealed in with concrete.

As the nation teetered on the brink of disaster, a train of librarians clandestinely escorting carts of books across five provinces might not have been the heroism one expected. The 2 million—who fought—and perished—and the 12 million civilians—would be remembered as—heroes by future generations, not this single cohort of—book stewards doing their job. Yet Du was not a typical librarian. He had been chiseling away at an important project for years. Its ultimate goal was to create a universal catalog system for China and the world.

The thought stayed on his mind the day he fled Guangzhou. This was not a librarianship for the fainthearted. At the end of the seventy-two hours, Du and his colleagues made it to the crowded dock, joining the mass of refugees shoving and hauling their earthly belongings. They boarded six boats on the south side of the Pearl River, just under the bridge. Staring along the winding gray water down to its southward bend, flowing toward an uncertain future—Du wrote profuse odes to the temple that consecrated this bond, the modern library. He even created a special Chinese character for the book depot, or library 圕 (pronounced tuan). The character for “book,” shu 書, is lovingly guarded by the enclosure wei 囗.’


‘Daoists used simplified characters to summon the spirit of past sages, while the Taiping—were the first to promulgate the official use of simplified characters in their documents, written records, and self-issued currency.’

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction, which details different aspects of how Chinese hieroglyphic writing met modern tech and how Chinese were able to both stick to its modified version and compete. I read it as a buddy read for September 2023 at Non Fiction Book Club group.

The very introduction of the book irked me: the author constantly uses the word language/tongue for Chinese even if (e.g. check Wiki or any other source with more or less serious overview on the subject) there is no Chinese language (singular), there are languages belonging to more than one group, which are more often than not mutually incomprehensible. However, just like Spain, England and Poland use a common Latin alphabet, they historically chiefly used the same writing system. The author explicitly agrees with incomprehensibility but does not highlight it. My personal opinion is that for ages the Chinese writing system was used as an imperialistic tool and while the PRC tries to portray itself as an anti-imperialist, I consider it one of the last unapologetic empires.

The rant is over, back to the book. It gives a bunch of fascinating stories about how Chinese writing meets Western technology. For example, Chapter 2 describes how the Chinese adopted Western tech of typewriters: To brute force it with each character getting a key is impossible, but it turns out that there was an alternative – index typewriters like this one

The two Chinese inventors independently created own versions, e.g. one like this:

This is only one story. There is another about using Chinese for telegraph and problems with it, yet another about their library and dictionary cataloging. The last one is especially fascinating – Chinese do not order their hieroglyphs, there is no equivalent to e.g. Latin alphabet, which makes a simple search of a word in a dictionary almost impossible, and multiple clever ways to solve this problem. There is much more, from adding Chinese to computer input and Unicode to (verbal) battles between the PRC and Taiwan about which hieroglyphs are a ‘basic form’ and which are variations. It shows multiple ingenious approaches which helped the writing to survive.

A very interesting book that gives a wealth of info and allows to view usual and ordinary things in a new light.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inputting and outputting character text by machine with Chinese characters presents a totally different set of challenges than is faced by writers in languages that use phonetic scripts, whether the technology used is woodblock printing, movable type, keyboards or computers. One solution to these problems would have been to convert Chinese to a phonetic script, and part of what this book covers is the waves of advocacy for that idea and the different systems of Romanization that have been tried, as well as efforts that have been made to develop a phonetic script designed specifically for Chinese. But there were many reasons not to go phonetic, including the ability of Chinese characters to be understood across Chinese dialects that are otherwise not mutually comprehensible, the unique nuanced expressiveness of Chinese characters, the long history of culture and empire associated with the Chinese writing system, and of course, not the least reason, national pride.

But then if you are sticking with traditional characters, how do you input and output them with machines? Outputting was a challenge in a world where you needed a separate lead slug to represent each of the thousands of characters. This problem was mitigated but not solved by the orthographic reform under Mao, but now with modern computer screens and inkjet and laser printers, outputting has become trivial. Inputting remains an issue. Early attempts at typewriters used limited character sets and managed the problem by constructing the characters from pieces, with many systems tried and then settling on one with tops, bottoms and middles that would be composited into whole characters. If you could manage to select a character representing an entire word with three keystrokes, it could in concept be more efficient than Roman alphabet keyboards, but in practice it is never as simple as that. Still, years of experimentation have produced systems that enable significant efficiencies, and computer algorithms for anticipating and suggesting the next word can help a lot.

The human part of the history presented in this book was interesting, but less compelling than the story of technological progress and the overcoming of political and social obstacles, but putting individual histories aside, there is something deeply human in the choice to retain the character writing system for its richness and cultural importance, rather than shedding it as soon as it became inconvenient to economic progress. Now with computers, the obstacles to using characters are greatly diminished so the choice doesn't feel self-defeating. And the world is a richer place by reason of having saved this system that provides an alternative method of expression that allows thoughts to be expressed in writing in ways that alphabetic systems sometimes cannot match.

[Hadrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

How many newsreaders or other figures in public life mispronounce Xi Jinping? The Chinese group of languages are widely spoken and adopted in foreign language teaching, but the writing systems and transliterations are still a high barrier to entry.

That said, the figures profiled in "Kingdom of Characters" would be amazed beyond belief to hear any of this. For decades, they struggled about how to standardize or 'modernize' the language, and reconcile it with the rest of the world and modern methods of communication. The book starts with the last decades of the Qing Dynasty, which fell in 1911, and continues to the present.

The book starts in the 1900s, with a former Qing official, Wang Zhao 王照 who developed a kind of alphabetic system using over 60 separate symbols to represent different sounds. The problem with an alphabetic system is the number of homophones, which made determining meaning from phonemes alone difficult. While his system was never formally adopted, it became a foundational effort for later systems used to promote early literacy and childhood education.

This question also ties into debates held in the early 20th century over which of the many regional varieties or "topolects" of Mandarin would be 'official' or promoted. The story goes that a delegate who called for a rickshaw was thought to have insulted one of the other guests - their dialects were so far apart - and so they got into a fight. Later, the election to promote Beijing dialect as the basis for standard Mandarin was won by a single vote.

Technology proved to be a problem for communication - so much so that the author Lu Xun had proclaimed that the system of characters should be abolished. Tsu describes the outlandish system for sending Chinese through telegraph - each character had a corresponding code of six digits compiled in a massive reference book, and each number would have to be set over the wire. As each individual letter or number was charged, sending anything in Chinese was also prohibitively expensive. She also briefly describes efforts to construct a Chinese typewriter, as I'd first discovered in The Chinese Typewriter: A History.

After that, there is the familiar story of the Chinese Communist Party introducing a Simplified character system and the Pinyin system of transliteration, before moving to modern methods of computer inputs and encoding systems, which have been a great boon for reading and writing, but also have their own problems with character variants.

While individually all of these subjects seem obscure, Tsu ties them all together into a story about language and modern technology, which I found a pleasant read.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I had read several reviews of Kingdom of Characters, I was still surprised that a book on the history of Chinese characters didn't cover the actual evolution of the characters themselves but rather began "in the first spring of the twentieth century" (p. 1) with the story of Wang Zhao, a key early player in the attempt to "revitalize and modernise" the Chinese language.

I'm assuming that anyone reading a review of this book is either Chinese or has spent time trying to learn the language so I'm going to skip explaining the problem of trying to invent a Chinese typewriter or figure out how to make it Morse Code-compatible, much less enable someone like me to be able to keyboard in Chinese characters (中国字) in a variety of fonts on their Mac with just a few easy-to-learn keystrokes. These three examples are the stories told, and I learned more than I knew before (and to be honest, more than I really wanted to learn) about the mechanics and logistics of software. I guess while interested in the challenges of organizing and 'alphabetizing' Chinese characters (whether for dictionaries or library listings, etc.)--which I found absolutely fascinating--what I had hoped for was the story from the beginning...how those characters evolved in the first place from those early pictograms carved on divination bones and bronze vessels to today's variations--of which there are many, ranging from the traditional 'complex' characters still found in Taiwan and Hong Kong, to the modernized 'simplified' Chinese characters of the PRC, Kanji in Japan, the regional variations.... It explained why I have four different Chinese dictionaries on my shelf and why I find one easier to use than the others (but the others still valuable from time to time), and that was interesting.

I would have preferred the author to have skipped the historical background bits (anyone reading this book is most likely already familiar with Chinese history from 1900 on--the when 'China became modern' part of the title that I obviously missed), and started the story earlier--at the very beginning, when the carving of a crescent moon meant a 'month' (月). And to have expanded more on the post-1900 changes: I had hoped to learn the reasoning behind the substitutions that replaced complex multiple-stroke components with simpler ones, for example the evolution of the component (当) so the original character for archives (which required 17 strokes and unfortunately my Apple character set doesn't include!) became (档). But I guess that wasn't the story the author wanted to tell; it was just the story I had hoped to read.

[Eren Buğlalılar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chinese script has a history that goes back to 3000 years and dozens of thousands of complex characters. For centuries, it had been carefully refined and utilised as a tool to maintain a centralised agrarian society using a class of well-educated bureaucrats, whose privileges depended on their command of Chinese script.

When the empires of the West began ramming the gates of Chinese empire during the 19th century, that feudal structure of the languages in this vast country has become a major impediment to the Chinese ruling classes' efforts to modernise the country.

European capitalists were able to take advantage of their inventions like telegram and modern printing press that relied mainly on Latin alphabet. Traditional Chinese script, on the other hand, was based on characters, very difficult to teach, did not have agreed standards and was not unified. Many thought that the Chinese script, by its nature was incompatible with modern technology and had to be scrapped.

Jing Tsu's book tells the story of efforts to save the Chinese script and modernise it in a way to make it compatible with the technology of the age: Telegram, printing press, and later on computers. You get to learn a lot of interesting ideas, solutions and meet with less-known inventors, scholars together with a pinch of Chinese political history.

The book has its flaws as well: It reads a lot like a history of great men, with geniuses and smart businessmen abound. The prose definitions of some complex typewriter or phototypesetting mechanisms usually go over the reader's head. And that particular style of popular-history-writing where historical characters sweat, "proceed with haste along the coastline" while hearing the sounds of flutes, or "steadies his breathing" was very irritating for me.

[Cynda Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because I was reading about language, I decided to participate in a buddy read of this book at GR Nonfiction Book Club.I am glad I did because the books shows how determined some Chinese people of various ethnicities and backgrounds strive to develop a language that could be used in a way similar to how Western countries use language go-to fit on a keyboard, to use telegraph service, to use cataloguing skills.

Group participation is not enough to make me read a book so different from what I know something about. I read this book because Chinese gains clout as an international language, so I want to have some kind of clue about the language.

Also the Chinese sphere of power meets and sparks with the US here of power at some points in Pacific. I might feel a little less lost if I know something however small about the Chinese language.

This book helped me to understand some of the technological challenges faced in fitting an ideogram-based language into a form that can be used when communicating in ways that Westerners do. To have a place among the Western countries, Chinese speakers and writers had to reformulated and reformulate the physical nature of Chinese so that they could develop and use typewriters, telegraphs, and cataloguing systems. Art had to give way to technology.

This book reminded me in some ways of The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage. A popular book can be a good way to start to develop something of an general understanding not a topic. I have no other way to judge this book as I do not know enough labour Chinese writing.

[Cailin Hong · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic “I can’t believe China is so good at harmonizing tradition and modernity” experience for me.

At the turn of the century, it was easy to see how Westerners (Hegel included!) could make essentialist claims that the Chinese language was incompatible with modern life. To participate in the global economy and have influence in international society, a country had to be able to leverage new technologies like the typewriter and telegram to access the latest news and promote new ideas. To do it competitively, it needed to mobilize the masses. There were so many theoretical problems to solve - standardization of dialects, promotion of mass literacy, integration with new technology, development of index methods to organize all that information - that seemed intractable, even before you added the political problem of getting millions of loosely-identified “Chinese” people to stack hands on any solution.

It’s shocking that in a moment when ancient civilizations were succumbing to Western powers everywhere from the Ottoman Empire to Vietnam, China didn't just throw its hands up and cast its lot with foreign language systems for the sake of hooking into new tech and preserving the state. Instead, at every turn they sought indigenous “innovations” that adapted existing cultural institutions to the imperatives of the time. One cool example was that when tasked with developing a transliteration system in the late 19th century, rather than pick up Wade-Giles, Chinese leaders looked to how Manchu rulers had Sinicized themselves and learned the language as "foreigners" centuries earlier. This had deeper cultural roots than the English system and would become bopomofo. Even pinyin was Chinese in the sense that it came at a mid-century juncture where China also considered exclusively adopting Traditional script or the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet. The choice to advance Pinyin alongside simplified characters balanced reverance for tradition with modern imperatives for a more accessible system better suited for promoting mass literacy. When the state committee announced the simplification system, they boasted that it was endorsed by ordinary Chinese people. Although sometimes allegiance to old ways seemed to prevent pursuit of more intuitive systems (radical-based indexing adopted in lieu of the alphabet still requires knowing the shape and stroke order of 200+ radicals), it's hard to deny that everything worked out in the end because we have computers that search for us now!

Today, a quarter of the world is producing data in Chinese text, so as the author points out, no technology can be truly global without catering to it. What an underdog story! While I was writing about Black No More I was thinking about the more common dichotomy between minority cultural pride and practical integration into hegemonic norms but I could see how a history like this could (problematically) be spun into a parable about the righteousness of cultural pride in every context or the indefatigability of Chinese culture. You can also see why, despite the norms of academia, so many people continue to associate modernity with the West. China was forced to transform itself to be able to inhabit a world with a linguistic foundation categorically unlike its own and it defies historical conditions to pretend that this world was fabricated by reactionaries.

I came away with a good definition of modernity too: 1) Mass democracy / literacy 2) adoption of new technologies 3) participation in international society 4) valorization of cosmopolitanism, efficiency, innovation.

Altogether, a great reminder that the West is an analytically meaningful (if not boring) category, Chinese culture has a concrete but historically specific meaning, language shapes the world, and grandiose social transformations and geopolitical upsets happen in ways their historical actors could only hope for but never predict.

[Hank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was almost 5 star amazing with a bit of a qualification. As a former Mandarin speaker, this was way more fascinating for me than for most, however it is an easy to read story about the writen chinese language sprinkled with a bit of tech, a bunch of politics and lots of discussion about how not having an alphabet makes many, many "things" harder.

Jing Tsu did a remarkable job of making a potentially, highly dry subject into an interesting story of China and it's growth into the modern world.

If you are deathly allergic to history, china or language this might not be for you, it was a bit dry in parts but overall a good read.

[Zulu Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

A blurb on the back of the book by Harvard prof David Wang calls this “A deeply engaging and revealing narrative of the Chinese language in modern times.”

David lied, people died.

To be sure, the author is clearly knowledgeable about the subject matter and has clearly spent a lot of time digging through some interesting primary sources; at times she manages to construct a moderately engaging narrative. Additionally, there are some interesting brief profiles of a few key people like Lin Yutang (though I was pretty disappointed that the indefatigable Zhou Youguang only received one passing mention in a short paragraph).

That said, I felt by turns bored, frustrated and generally disappointed with this book. In fairness, perhaps I’m just not interested enough in some of the subject matter (like for example much of the portion on the nitty gritty of the people involved with digitizing Chines characters in the “Entering the Computer Age” chapter), but then, given the breadth of what’s covered, it’s hard for me to imagine what audience would find everything here engaging. I’m pretty into the languages and history of China, for instance, and I felt either bored by the overly remedial introductory parts and flowery semi-speculative historical reconstructions, or out of my depth during the computer parts (save for the bit on Unicode, which the author manages to make more interesting with a sudden switch to first person narrative).

Probably this book should have been a bit shorter and more tightly written. As is often the case, greater efforts at brevity (or more aggressive editing) would have really paid off I think.

Separately, although perhaps this goes beyond the scope of what the author wanted to cover, but, heck, why not: it really might have been interesting to at least dedicate a chapter or two to seriously getting into the deep history of Chinese characters and covering some relevant historical episodes over a period of millennia. It might also have been cool to really dig a little deeper into the characters themselves, maybe picking one character and charting how it changed over time. Get into the weeds, man. It’s not like the author was that worried about losing the layman’s attention/interest anyways. There are so many super interesting and consequential episodes in the story of how Chinese characters developed that it seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity to dedicate as much space as the author did to, like, computer stuff in the 80s. But again, maybe I’m just not the target audience.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, it offered a succinct, informative, readable summary of the modernization of the Chinese script throughout the 20th century, including the ingenuity needed to adapt typewriters and typefaces and keyboards and computers and catalog systems to the unique parameters Chinese's long list of characters requires. The dilemma is that Jing Tsu's style isn't much of a style, and it reads like more of a collection of profiles rather than a cohesive, internally structured history. There are even moments of redundancy and overexplanation that possibly reveal Tsu's cracks: this was probably originally written as separate essays and then compiled and edited as a book. At least, it feels that way in an unsatisfying way. So, all in all, worth it for the names (oh, side note, this book relies too much on a Great Men consideration of historical development) and facts but not as thrilling as a literary text.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

So… Jing Tsu tries, and there are interesting moments, but this book is boring as hell, which is so frustrating because it’s set in such a politically and historically rich time. Maybe it’s because Tsu is more interested in technical aspects & doesn’t challenge a “progressivist” capitalist narrative of China’s “modernization.” She tries to cast scientists and entrepreneurs as heroes but they’re stale and one-dimensional despite the authors attempts at dramatization. Philosophically and linguistically the book is pretty empty. The book is chock full of clichéd notions like how “China had to catch up with the global pace” and “China was decades behind the West” but does not consider how these technological shifts impacted peoples lives or ideologies. (Also, it’s a huge pet peeve of mine when history is written with nations/countries as subjects. Like “China” or “Taiwan” don’t have desires or actions— their peoples governments/classes do!! i feel like this framing lends to a nationalist rather than material or class analysis.) Especially towards the latter half the book is solely concerned with Chinese tech “entering markets” or entrepreneurs making “lucrative innovations.”

[Christine Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kingdom of Characters is a superbly written and extremely illuminating book, not just about the Chinese written language but also about the tumultuous history of China’s modern era and how inextricably linked language is culture and identity.

This is a really well written book. Each chapter deals with a specific period of modern Chinese history and a specific aspect of the ongoing quest to make a 6,000-year-old language consisting of over 50,000 unique characters more accessible and more adapted to continually changing technological advances. And each chapter is well organized, clear, and immensely readable.

Jing Tsu has succeeded in writing an absolutely fascinating book that makes modern Chinese history both accessible and memorable. It also makes connections between the evolution of a systematic written language and the development of a country whose story is full of complicated political and social nuances that Jing Tsu brilliantly makes clear.

[Queralt✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel this book would have conveyed its message better if it was 20-30% shorter. There seem to be a lot of meandering and going over details that weren't really relevant to anything. This happened especially when talking about who invented what; I get that the invention is an important development for the Chinese language and China, but I'm not sure why the chapters had to feel biography-ish.

Regardless, it was very interesting to learn about how the first keyboards/typewriters in Chinese came to be and the process for it; as well as later developments.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

How did China enter the world of typewriters, and much later, that of computers?

How and why was Chinese script simplified? How, why and when did Pinyin replace Wade-Giles for the modern Latinized phonetic transcription of Chinese? How did this affect Mandarin's relationship to other Chinese dialects, such as Cantonese, and how did this all tie with rising literacy?

It's all here in a light-hearted romp, tied with Nationalist and Communist politics and more.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

It does feel a bit mean to say it, but you do start to wonder when your impressions are so apparently different to those of many others, but do the five star reviews come from readers who... and, again, I hesitate to cast aspersions, plus of course ad hominems against readers of a book do seem a bit mean, not to mention beside the point in a review, but, well... dare I say it... from readers who don't know anything about Chinese? Or really anything much about Chinese history, either?

On the plus side Kingdom of Characters does manage to introduce some very interesting figures from modern Chinese history, and does often give us a decent sense of their struggles and frustrations, and some of the intransigences (in the society around them, in the incomprehension of others, in the very form of the language itself) they faced in trying to bring Chinese characters and telecommunications technologies together efficiently. Whether or not you know anything about 汉字 just think for a moment about the problems of indexing a non-alphabetic and in practice non-finite set of ideographs that are all semantically unique (give or take) but many are homophones. Kingdom of Characters is about a fascinating and very important (not least in the sense of 'having import for a vast number of people') topic that is no doubt poorly understood by the average reader, especially readers who are not themselves educated native speakers of Chinese. However...

As a popular history book it's really not great, with lots of padding and speculation, artificial cliffhangers inserted, seemingly random changes of decade and perspective, unnecessary repetitive passages and overblown claims.

As a layperson's guide to Chinese characters it leaves a lot out, mixes up its own terminology, lacks appropriate diagrams let alone sufficient examples of characters to illustrate the sometimes banal but sometimes actually quite important or subtle points that are being made.

The author actually lost me on the first page of the Introduction, commenting on the relative stability of Chinese:

Its written form has remained largely unchanged since it was first standardized more than 2,200 years ago. By comparison, the number of letters in the Roman alphabet fluctuated until the sixteenth century, when the letter "j" split from the letter "i" and completed the twenty-six-letter set.

This is such a silly (and unnecessary) comparison. Apples and oranges doesn't begin to get to the heart of it. For starters: over the same period of time the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Chinese characters ever created fell out of usage, and most are completely unknown today outside of a tiny handful of antiquarians (see p.275). Look at Roman inscriptions from the Republican period - you might not be able to understand the Latin language but the capital letters are identical to the capitals used today (the lack of a "j" notwithstanding). Look at Han dynasty inscriptions and documents - there are different styles and conventions to the characters from different periods within that dynasty alone. Sure, there was a major change from the pre-Qin "seal script" to the early Han "clerical script" (which involved all kinds of simplifications) but the clerical script itself also underwent subsequent, gradual changes, and although the clerical characters are much easier for modern folk to read, and certainly much closer to the characters that appear on the pages of our Chinese language textbooks or our screens as we type today they are simply not identical. That difference might largely be 'aesthetic' or a question of varying component balances, or the typical angle of the shorter strokes, and the character might be perfectly legible, but "the written form" (terribly vague phrase anyway, that takes no account of personal calligraphic styles vs handwriting changes among Latin script users, etc) is simply not the same. And this is to say nothing of the (often tiny, but very real... and, again, just look at the Roman letters from 200BC and compare them with those in a book published in Britain in the 19th century or those you were taught at school or those that appear in your newspaper today) changes that occurred to a significant number of characters over the subsequent millennia as scribal error, personal preference, scholarly quibbles and defective woodblocks affected the written form - changes that JT herself details in the (rather interesting) section on the most recent international efforts at digitizing and cataloguing 汉字 (see for example pp.269-72).

[Sahitya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this book my Twitter timeline when one of the authors I follow recommended this one, and I also realized that the author of book contributed an essay in one of my favorite SFF anthology, The Way Spring Arrives. Since the pandemic began and I started getting into cdrama or webnovels, I’ve had a fascination for the Chinese language and so I definitely knew I had to read this book. And it was so unlike anything I’ve ever read.

Due to my not very extensive non fiction reading, I have some idea about 20th century Chinese history, especially the civil war and what came later. But my knowledge is limited to the political implications and some personal stories. So, reading the progress of those same events of history, but in conjunction with the evolution of Chinese language was a fascinating prospect.

Only after I started watching dramas did I understand the complexity of the Chinese language, it’s ideographic script which is so unlike the western alphabet, and just the huge number of characters present which make it so difficult to learn - which is probably why only the elite knew it and around 90% of the population was illiterate at the turn of the 20th century. This singularly complex language posed a very drastic impediment to China being able to compete with the western nations on an equal footing and the author chronicles the life and work of many scientists, engineers, linguists and scholars who dedicated their lives to breaking down the characters into its components which could be then used to create typewriters, Telegraph code, a character indexing system, a new romanization system, typesetting and retrieval mechanisms to propel the country into the digital age and finally being a part of Unicode. The paths these men followed to accomplish their goals were not easy and they faced many hurdles but their dedication to their language and it’s history, and their desire to ensure their country is able to make technological advances without compromising on its language was commendable to read about. Imperialism has destroyed cultures and languages and so much more across many countries, so it’s really amazing to see the decades of work to preserve and evolve the Chinese language to keep up with modern times be so successful.

It takes a lot of determination to keep going when a common refrain in those days was that China couldn’t develop if it kept using its language. Language is truly more than just words, it’s a culture and memory of the people and preserving any of our native languages from being erased by the hegemony of English is a task deserving of applause. And as the author mentions, in this digital age, information is warfare and language is an important component of it. And China has managed to come a long way - from depending on western technologies and trying to catch up to them to having the most internet users in the world - and is now ready to dominate in the artificial intelligence and other futuristic fields. Let’s see what role this language revolution will play in China’s quest for global domination and will they be successful.

As for the book, this may not be for everyone and some may find it dry and the science behind some of the technologies boring, but this is a bigger story about language and it’s power and the people who understood it, and I really appreciated the author’s bringing this part of history to us readers. I’m more intrigued about languages and the roles they play in our lives now and I’m excited to read more books about this field. And who knows, maybe I will be able to find some books about the history of my native language too.

[Caleb Loh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Chinese character-based script has come close to extinction on numerous occasions, including in the 1910s when Chinese self-confidence was at its lowest, in the 1930s when elite circles were thinking of international synthetic languages like Esperanto, and in the 1950s when pinyin was conceived as a full replacement for characters. Chinese was perceived, even by scholars like 鲁迅, as too cumbersome for mass literacy. The characters have only persisted because of adjustments that have made it possible to sustain itself: standardisation of the pronunciation, 笔画, and 笔顺; simplification of the characters; the use of Bopomofo and other Romanisations to teach Chinese; and the use of unique technological innovations which allowed the characters to be compatible with telegraphy and typewriting, both designed for alphabetic systems.

Writing about Chinese in English and talking about design considerations in text makes it a bit strange to read

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Said in so many words what could have been so much more enjoyable in fewer words. Missed the first major portion of the history of chinese characters, but painfully details every human detail of the 20th century for some reason.

[Negar Gh · Rating 3 out of 5]

They could cut out 20% of this book and it would get 4 stars.

[Bon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I tried to stick with it, got to 30% before DNFing. It's a lot of dense history that is tough to make into an interesting listen, but would otherwise be fascinating! Maybe as a documentary...

[✎ madalaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cool topic and every chapter I was like omg this will be interesting but then it just wasn’t :/ idk what it was, but this just wasn’t interesting or fun to read

[kex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am obviously biased, but I think Chinese is the most fascinating written language. This book was super interesting, especially the more linguistically and politically focused elements! Really wild to think that something as foundational as pinyin, which I really depend on to type in Chinese, wasn’t even invented until relatively recently. Even the systematized way that students use to learn how to read/write Chinese nowadays took so many years of history and organization. Really mind-blowing stuff, so entrenched in history, and so many hard-fought battles to preserve the Chinese script, rather than abandoning it for a more “efficient” written language. I was less interested in the more engineering/technology focused aspects of the book, which is why it took me forever to finish this (I got stuck on the chapter about trying to invent a Chinese typewriter), but it really picks up after that.

[I' · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this one! So interesting and well explained.

Being able to listen to the audio book only adds to the experience as everything is pronounced correctly instead of how my "brain voice" would do it if I was the one reading it.

The book focuses on the process and innovations that adapted the Chinese script to the technological advances so it mainly focuses on the last 150 years. I would have totally love to read a historical evolution of the script since its initial development throughout history. But I do imagine that would be quite a lengthy book. Regardless, if you are interested by the topic it is one that I would totally recommend.