Kingdom of Characters

Every year or so I travel to China with my family, to see my wife’s parents, siblings, nephews and nieces in the town of Fanshi. In the month before we leave I have another go at polishing up my Mandarin.

And every time we get to my wife’s home town I have absolutely no idea what anyone is saying.

This isn’t only because my Chinese is extremely poor (although it is). It is because in Fanshi - a couple of hours from Beijing¹ by road - people speak Fanshi hua.² This is a different dialect to mandarin and although I am told it is “very similar” it might as well be Norse or Old English for all that I can understand it.

The only two things I can confidently say in Fanshi hua are “good food!” and “I’m full up now”, which gives you a good idea of what we tend to get up to.

If you travel another few hours further down the road you will find another dialect that - to my untrained ear - sounds totally different again. And bearing in mind that China measures about 3,000 miles from North to South this means a lot of different dialects.

In the British context this would be like travelling from London to Oxford and needing an interpreter. The prevalence of dialects in China may be partly due to geography: the mountains are high and no-one knows what the emperor is going on about.

However the big structural advantage of Chinese is the script which remains (basically) the same wherever you go in China.

So while historically a Chinese person may have struggled to speak to his regional neighbours, he or she could easily write to them. Command of the Chinese script was and still is an admired status symbol.

Historically the trouble has been that, a hundred years ago at the start of the 20th century, to most people a written page was gibberish.

This is the context for Kingdom of Characters: A tale of language, obsession, and genius in modern China by Jing Tsu.

In China at 1900 we have:

• a cherished script that only a minority of the population can read
• a huge number of different spoken dialects or languages

In addition:

• a bunch of newfangled and aggressive nation-states undermining Chinese autonomy
• an outmoded Chinese imperial system that seems structurally unable to resist these outsiders despite a massive population.

Modernising the Chinese language was to many reformers the way out of this mess. If the Chinese people could talk to each other and read the newspaper this could be the seed that leads to the sprouting of a strong and unified nation-state.

What’s in the book?

Jing Tsu goes through the various efforts to make this happen and ensure that new technologies such as the telegraph, newspaper printing and the computer were compatible with the Chinese language.

Each chapter focuses on a particular technology and one or two individuals who were driven to make sure that Chinese worked with that tech.

A typewriter for Chinese

For example, a Chinese typewriter was seen as a critical part of a modern Chinese nation. But given you have thousands of basic units (characters) compared to the 26 letters in the western alphabet, this is going to create some challenges. You can’t just keep adding keys to a standard typewriter.

Spinning the wheel

The first ever attempt, built in 1897 by Western missionaries, was a big disc with as many characters on it as possible, set out in concentric rings. A pointer arm hung over the top of the character wheel. The operator spun the disc and moved the arm towards the centre or the edge of the disc to select the character they wanted to type, then the arm whacked the letter out onto a piece of paper beneath.

Here is a picture if you are having trouble visualising it:

Image source: internet archive - Thomas Mullaney on The Movable Typewriter

The trouble was that it was slow to select each character - touch typing was impossible - and that you were limited by how many characters you could fit on the wheel (about 4,500 characters in this case).

Proto-typewriter

After describing a few alternative attempts, Jing Tsu introduces internationally renowned author and typewriter obsessive Lin Yutang.

In 1947, after years of effort he finally created a machine he was happy with. The key was finding a way to compose characters using their top bits (one set of keys) and their bottom bits (another set of keys). After pressing two keys simultaneously the user was presented with a list of eight potential characters (sharing the top half and bottom half that you selected). Finally you selected the number of the character you first thought of.

Happy, but now broke - Lin Yutang had spent all of the royalties of his books on producing a prototype typewriter - Lin touted his machine to anyone he thought might be interested. Although it never made it to production, an American company paid him some money to have a closer look at the thing, then gave it to the US Air Force who had a poke around and stuck it in a drawer.

Ultimately different typewriters developed by other people were used in China instead.

Defunct

This points to a central problem with Kingdom of Characters. On the one hand it is a celebration of individual ingenuity and perseverance to create the systems and the technologies that make the Chinese script compatible with the modern age. But on the other hand these are such a glaring and obvious problem to overcome that it was absolutely inevitable that some solution would be found.

So for Lin Yutang, while he dedicated his life to creating a Chinese typewriter (and gets a dedicated chapter in the book) his solution wasn’t in the end used and if he had just spent his book royalties on booze, birds and fast cars instead it would have had no impact on China or the world.

Added to this: as technology has continued to develop, the solutions to the pressing problems of the past seem less important.

Photo what now?

For example it was a revolutionary breakthrough (we are told) that allowed the Chinese script to work with phototypesetting technology. What is phototypesetting technology? I’m still not totally sure except that it is something to do with newspaper printing and was made obsolete with the development of computers - with newspapers themselves surely to follow.

So reading about the marvellous efforts of the ingenious Chinese engineers to catch up with the West in their phototypesetting endeavours, a decade or so before everyone threw the whole lot in the bin, while not really knowing what phototypesetting is in the first place, all feels a bit... redundant.

Unicode spats

We do get brought up to the modern computing age with the integration of Chinese characters into the international system of Unicode, which allows computers all over the world to communicate messages in any language you want.³ But again it is still not really that exciting, apart from a bit of squabbling between Chinese and Taiwanese delegates over whether two similar characters should get their own Unicode reference number or have to share one.

Curiously Jing Tsu doesn’t mention programming languages themselves and to what extent Chinese script is used within them. From what I can gather, at the moment this is still English dominated: i.e. a professional Chinese programmer would tend to program in the English language even if the comments were made in Chinese or pinyin.

Conclusion

So overall while I thought the book had a great premise, was right in my interest zone of Chinese language, 20th century history and techno stuff, it unfortunately often felt irrelevant and a bit boring.

review

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