Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu

There are so many problems with Mandarin as a written language, and this is a book that chronicles the ingenious ways around that. In 1900, China was a great power in steep decline. More than 80% of the population could neither read nor write, including most women. Nobody except officials spoke a standard language, and the numerous varieties of Chinese made communication beyond regional borders impossible. that was not unique to them, but the real trouble lay elsewhere: in the Chinese writing system itself. Ancient, revered and the vehicle of a great civilization, the character-based script had downsides that were becoming more and more pressing in a technological age. The main thing to understand is that it’s nothing like an alphabet, which typically consist of 20 to 40 letters that represent single sounds. Such a low number makes for convenient keyboards. It also keeps code sets for telegraphy (such as morse) and computers sweet and simple. Chinese characters, on the other hand, represent meaningful syllables, and there are many thousands. Quite a challenge, then, to build a mechanical typewriter, or to remember the correct morse code for each one. Moreover, the letters of an alphabet have a fixed sequence, and any user can rattle them off. Characters have no such order. And while workarounds were developed for the sake of dictionaries and catalogues they were error prone and time consuming. So how to fix that? This chronicles the steps towards the language of modern China. It is fascinating.