UK Edition
Review
How on earth do you send a telegram in Chinese?
Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu shows how a script unsuited to the modern world was saved by ruthless reform – and some bizarre technology
“Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi, shi shi shi shi”: “Stone house poet Sir Shi was fond of lions, and vowed to eat 10 lions.” Ninety-four words later – all of them “shi” – the 1930s linguist-poet Zhao Yuanren brought Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den to a close. He had achieved two things. First, he had shared the joyously fantastical tale of poor Sir Shi, who set out to eat lions but instead found himself biting into stone reproductions. Second, by publishing the poem with Chinese characters set alongside a Romanised transliteration, Zhao had made painfully plain the challenges involved in rendering a logographic, tonal language using the Latin alphabet.
As Jing Tsu shows us in this fascinating, at times necessarily complex book, such were the hurdles faced by Chinese and Chinese-American linguists, engineers and others seeking to secure for Chinese languages – Mandarin in particular – the prominence they deserved in the modern world. In the second half of the 1800s, communication technologies were beginning to emerge that possessed enormous strategic and economic potential. But most were conceived with English-speakers – or at least users of the Latin alphabet – in mind.
How do you create a typewriter capable of handling tens of thousands of Chinese characters? How do you send telegrams in Chinese, when Morse code has been devised to handle Latin letters and Arabic numerals? A country being preyed upon by European imperial powers had its global woes significantly compounded. And a further question was being asked in China: should we even try to make this work? Was it possible that, by virtue of its relative efficiency, the Latin alphabet was inherently more suited to modernity? In which case, might Romanisation be the way to go – as long as the problem so memorably highlighted by Zhao could be ironed out?
Kingdom of Characters takes us on a tour through these puzzles and debates, from the late 1800s to the present day, in an entangled story of language, engineering, politics and commerce. Tsu makes the problems personal by asking us to stop and think about how easy life is with A-B-C: 26 simple letters, their sequence mastered in the time it takes a child to learn a rhyme. Compare that with the technical knowledge required of Chinese speakers just to pick up a dictionary – radicals, stroke counts, reference tables.
Having shown us the mountain, Tsu introduces the pioneers such as Zhao who set out to scale it. A recurring theme is cosmopolitan youngsters, desperate to see China modernise, but bumping up against the hubris and self-interest of Europeans and Americans, in person and in the logic of their inventions and the global infrastructure that they were steadily shaping. The inequities were many and varied.
Telegrams, for instance, could only be sent in Chinese by assigning each character a number between four and six digits long. “Whereas English could be English, and Italian mostly Italian,” writes Tsu, “Chinese had to be something other than itself.” Nor was this solely a cultural indignity. It cost time and therefore money: coding a 25-word message in Chinese took at least half an hour, compared with two minutes in English. It might cost lives, too, if the relaying of battlefield decisions failed to keep up with the enemy.
Among the proffered solutions was a Chinese typewriter from 1899 that took the form of a flat, rotating disk the size of a table. A seated operator had to use a winch, lever and pointer to select, one at a time, from 4,000 commonly used Chinese characters laid out across the surface. It was both an impressive feat of engineering and an object that, had it been created a few decades later, might have doubled as conceptual art: the Franken-typewriter, symbolising the contortions forced upon China by geopolitics.
Socialism and Romanisation seemed natural bedfellows to Mao Zedong, who saw China’s future strength in its farmers and factory workers rather than phalanxes of languid, berobed calligraphers. Building on decades of earlier work, “pinyin” – the official Romanisation system for Mandarin Chinese – was published in 1958. The Communists kept hold of characters as well, but in a simplified form that allowed the defeated Nationalists hunkering down on Taiwan to claim that they were the guardians of true, traditional Chinese culture.
Taking us all the way into the computer age, this is a book that leaves readers not just wanting, but perhaps needing, more: more illustrations, more explanation, more insights into everyday life. How, for instance, does an internet built on the Chinese script help the state filter out foreign material and gather domestic data? Do young people in China see their language as a means of getting things done, or is it a source of national pride in itself? Still, this is a valuable study of how the friction between Chinese and modern technology has been turned from mutual frustration into a near-perfect and highly profitable harmony – part of the broader story of how, as Tsu puts it: “China got its cultural confidence back.”
Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu is published by Allen Lane at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, visit Telegraph Books