emily’s Reviews > Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China > Status Update

‘—1949—the speech he delivered was in a rustic Hunanese accent as thick as the earth he stood on—did not speak a word of Putonghua—derived from the northern-based Beijing Mandarin—An important monument in the history of simplified Chinese writing—created by women—gave women both literacy & a means of private communication with one another—stitching in embroidery—for instance, was persecuted as witchcraft for a time—’

‘1938—Du was—at Sun Zhongshan library—sirens screeched through the air—but they would not cut off its cultural bloodline—a train of librarians clandestinely escorting carts of books across five provinces—12 million civilians—would be remembered—Du found himself in exile—shed tears as he recorded the siege of Guangzhou. Not all was lost—he consoled himself—He had rescued some of China’s most precious written volumes—’

‘—put aside aeronautics—returned to Shanghai—to speak about—his Chinese-language typewriter—It was the homecoming of a lifetime—to dethrone its elites & tend to the salvation of the masses—to cast off—high literary language of the past—Sun ZS appointed him to the post of foreign affairs secretary—Nanjing—Despite the chaos, he managed—Beneath the manipulation of numbers—was a more important conceptual reorientation.’

‘Behind every written character that can be learned & used today stands a group of human characters who went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that could happen. With no guidance other than their obsessive love—The red pines were in bloom—For centuries pirates—trolling the South China Sea—Because of—hundreds of dialects—what was transcribed in the narrow alleys of Beijing did not work in the ports of Guangdong—’

‘Calligraphy—is one of the few practices—that survived—20th-century revolt against its feudalistic past—But in the Chinese context, literacy means something more than just knowing how to read and write. It has traditionally signalled many things—Deciphering Chinese is—a cross-continental pursuit. To gain entry into a language, one has to cross several thresholds—Depending on a region's dialect, tones also change.’