Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

Description

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

A New York Times Notable Book of 2022

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 reinvented the Chinese language, among them an exiled reformer who risked a death sentence to advocate for Mandarin as a national language, a Chinese-Muslim poet who laid the groundwork for Chairman Mao’s phonetic writing system, and a computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup from the floor of a jail cell. 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.Praise for Kingdom of Characters:

“Rigorous and engaging. . . . Languages, as this book makes clear, convey worlds.” —New York Times

“A lively and insightful history of the intersection of China’s information technology systems and its language revolution. The book is a richly documented, riveting, and scholarly rigorous transnational account of how Chinese evolved from a hard-to-learn script entrenched in the beleaguered Middle Kingdom in the 19th century to a global language in the 21st century.” —Science

“A fascinating book” —The Economist

“A lively chronicle of the inventors who gave their all to make the Chinese script compatible with modern life.” —The Guardian

“Enchanting… [Tsu’s] love for the enigma and beauty of Chinese shines through in this delightful mix of history and linguistics… A pleasure to read.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Erudite and beautifully written.” —Rana Mitter, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“A well-told story about those who created modern China not through the barrel of a gun or a little red book but through dictionaries, libraries and printing presses.” —The Spectator (UK)

“Stimulating.” —Nature

“Interesting and very readable.” —Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books

“Pioneering” —Physics World

“[A]n immersive history of the effort to transform the written Chinese language’s vast and complex set of characters into a modern communication technology . . . Tsu sheds light on the intriguing interplay between Chinese language and politics. Sinophiles and language buffs will be fascinated.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“Tsu’s humanistic, big-picture sensibility makes an otherwise obscure thread in the history of information technology vivid and compelling.” —Booklist

“An engaging, relevant work that delves into the linguistic past in order to predict China’s future success in the world.” —Kirkus (starred review)
 
“In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu introduces us to a cast of unforgettable figures. She tells an essential story of modern China: a country at once transformed and yet deeply traditional.” —Peter Hessler, author of Oracle Bones and River Town
 
“Jing Tsu wears her erudition lightly and gives us a fascinating and moving story.  It shows the passionate struggle of generations of pioneers.  It’s a story of desperate strife, unflagging dedication, and ultimately, triumph.” —Ha Jin, author of Waiting and War Trash
 
“A deeply engaging and revealing narrative of the Chinese language in modern times. Meticulously researched and beautifully written.” —David Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature, Harvard University   
 
“Seldom have I read a book about modern China so informative, revelatory and enjoyable.” —Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and The Man Who Loved China

“An absolute joy to read. This stunning, meticulously researched book is the detective story of Chinese characters. Jing Tsu has seamlessly fused the craft of the linguistic historian with the artistry of the storyteller—including cliff-hangers.” —David Crystal, author of How Language Works and The Stories of English
Jing Tsu is John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale.  She specializes in Chinese literature, history, and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, and received her doctorate in Chinese studies from Harvard. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton institutes.

Introduction
 
  Few contemporary societies take their writing culture as seri- ously as China. The oldest living language spoken by the most people, at the same time ancient and modern, Chinese is currently used by more than 1.3 billion people—not counting those around the globe who learn it as a second language. 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 “i” and completed the twenty-six-letter set.

Chinese heads of state are probably the only political leaders in the world who can still be seen demonstrating their cultural prowess at official occasions, in their case by dashing off a few characters or auspicious phrases with an ink brush. Deng Xiaoping was reputedly a bit shy, but his immediate predecessor and onetime rival, Hua Guofeng, devoted his late life to the practice, and former president Hu Jintao was fond of displaying his penmanship in public. Mao’s calligraphy still sits prominently on the masthead of the country’s official newspaper, the People’s Daily, and recent computerized handwriting analysis showed that Xi Jinping’s style is remarkably similar. Such showmanship not only serves as a daily reminder of the leader’s legitimacy but also rein- forces the importance of a cultivated skill that has been the hallmark of China’s ruling elite since the time long before nations. Calligraphy, in fact, is one of the few practices of the Chinese tradition that survived the country’s twentieth-century revolt against its feudalistic past.

It’s hard to imagine an American president or European head of state opening an official state ceremony or visit with a show of penmanship. But in the Chinese context, literacy means something more than just knowing how to read and write. It has traditionally signaled many things: the mark of being steeped in the classics and wisdom of the ancients; a meditative craft through which to cultivate a higher self; an elite medium through which to express one’s inner character, thoughts, and emotions.

Deciphering Chinese is not only an insider’s art; it has also been a cross-continental pursuit. For more than four centuries, devoted followers of the Chinese language in the West have tried to peer into the secrets behind its ideographic capture of reality, speculating about its provenance and complex physical structure. Extravagant claims and theories met with enthusiastic reception in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Europe and twentieth-century America. Kings, clerics, adventurers, scholars, modern poets, and theorists of language were drawn to its strangeness and exceptionality, looking for a key to unlock its secrets through grammar and compositional laws. Sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries labored to learn it, seventeenth-century savants were fascinated by it, and eighteenth-century Sinologists fetishized it.

How an entire civilization outside of Christendom evolved to have a writing system as complex and massive as the Chinese script has been an enduring linguistic mystery for outsiders. This inquiry poorly masks a deep suspicion: How can a people who read and write in characters ever think the way we do? Even in the late twentieth century, views like this were touted by Western experts in different fields. Alphabetic thinking, social theorists would say, explains the advent of the scientific revolution in the West. A modern theorist of networks and the digital age sees the alphabet as a conceptual technology that forms the bedrock of Western science and technology. A scholar of ancient Greece saw the signs much earlier at the fount of Western civilization, where “the alphabetic mind” was responsible for all the West’s accomplishments. Joseph Needham, a renowned British historian of Chinese science, spent his life’s work defending scientific inventions in ancient China against claims like these, but he also recognized that the Chinese language remained the greatest barrier for Westerners to understanding the minds of the Chinese. It is China’s first and last Great Wall.

The Opium War of 1839 to 1842 marked the beginning of a new course for China. During a series of crises and confrontations with the Western world that would keep China in an inferior position well into the early years of the twenty-first century, the demise of the Chinese script was foretold by many. Still, the Chinese were hesitant to accept the prospect of a future without their written language. They saw how the Chinese language, like the empire, might not be viable in a modern world increasingly transformed by various branches of Western science and new modes of electricity-powered communication, beginning with the telegraph. But the Chinese language had been the fundamental building block of China’s cultural universe. So rooted was the script in the country’s history and institutions over the millennia that it was diffi- cult for the Chinese to consider abandoning it. From the grassroots to the highest level of the modern state, intellectuals, teachers, engineers, everyday citizens, eccentric inventors, duty-bound librarians, and language reformers embarked on one of the most extraordinary revolutions of the millennium in search of a solution. That is the subject of this book. The rude awakening of Western cannons firing at the gates; a teetering empire and the last throes of the imperialistic order; an urgency to modernize taken into overdrive by a new political ethos—all these shifts compelled the Chinese to embark on a parallel course: to get their language on the same footing as languages using the Western alphabet.
 
 
Bridging the chasm between two radically different scripts and systems of language seemed impossible at times, and the onus was mostly on the Chinese to modernize—or, what amounted to the same thing for most of the twentieth century, to westernize. The scale of the transformation was daunting. This important process lies at the core of China’s modern identity, but the burden of this assimilation may be hard to imagine for those who have not experienced it. Languages make worlds. Those who attempt to cross over into one that is different from their own often experience the same hesitation, doubt, and uncertainty China did as a nation. To gain entry into a language, one has to cross several thresholds.

Six months before my family emigrated from Taiwan to the United States, my mother started teaching us English. My siblings and I, then ages nine to twelve, learned its basic alphabet on ruled pages in spiral notebooks—which we had never seen before. I was ecstatic to find out that there were only twenty-six letters. The inside edge of the top joint of my middle finger had grown a thick callus from gripping the pencil every night, tracing the complicated contours of written Chinese characters in square-ruled practice books. Alphabet letters’ simple curves and lines were much easier to reproduce on paper, compared to the thousands of characters that had been drilled into our heads in school. Under my mother’s expectant eye, we practiced the English alphabet as diligently as we did Chinese calligraphy, using imported BIC pens that landed hard and easy on paper instead of the soft ink brushes with hairy tips that were nearly impossible for a nine-year-old to control with patience. I adjusted my habits of writing—from going right to left and vertically to left to right and horizontally. “D” was easy, “Q” my favorite—because their lowercase versions were the least like their uppercase selves. The sticks and lines became habitual, and we quickly graduated to cursive. My father had hoped I would one day become a journalist like the NBC anchorwoman Connie Chung, then the first professional Chinese American woman seen nightly on screen in every household in the United States. English, it seemed, was the only thing that stood between me and my conquest of American network television.

The determined effort to learn English was overkill, it turned out. My siblings and I learned to write the alphabet letters in no time. It was, to use an English idiom that took me many years to get right, a walk in the dark (park). There was just one problem: I had no feeling for the Western alphabet. I strained to relate to its form, despite the ease of picking it up. The written form was strangely empty of expressive- ness, and the sounds attached to the letters felt arbitrary and emotionally flat without the tonal fluctuations of Chinese—the sounds I was born into.

After arriving in Monterey Park in Los Angeles, an enclave known as “Little Taipei,” English remained foreign despite learning it in context. My elementary school was full of Asians I had never seen before—Vietnamese, Cambodian, some Japanese and Korean. No one spoke English except in English class, where we struggled to move our tongues and mouth muscles in unnatural ways.

Every stage of English was a new experience. Bit by bit, how I made sense of the world through language changed. The transformative moment came in college, where the stakes of analyzing and thinking in English grew greater. “Critical thinking”—that unique acrobatics of tthe mind that is often taken as the universal and only acceptable set of thought procedures in making coherent, logical arguments—made me realize how decisively I had to leave Chinese behind in order to immerse myself in English and know it from the inside. I never had to think so hard in dogmatic ways in Chinese to arrive at sense-making. The two language worlds did not accord; they clashed. Chinese had a prior claim to every experience that was expressive, intuitive, and creative to me, while English felt like a corrective device that straightened and twisted me to fit a new mold. It was not enough to just master writing, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. To think in English, I had to breathe and live a worldview that was expressed and constructed in that language.

For the Chinese language to survive adapting to the Western alphabet, it had to do a lot more. Luckily, an equivalent journey from English to Chinese isn’t necessary to follow this story, but it does help to bear in mind a few essential points about Chinese ideographic writing. It is fundamentally unique, distinct from any other writing system in the world, and it is built from individual dots and lines that form clusters of patterns with a distinct contour. There are six basic properties of the Chinese script that are distinct from the Roman alphabet and the focal points of its modern transformation into a technology.

First of all, a character is a written unit that bears meaning. It is roughly equivalent to what we mean by a word in English, but—as we shall see—also more and less than that. Characters often appear in pairs to convey a full sense, and each character carries only one syllable. Characters are known by many different names, some more disputed than others: logographs, pictographs, semantograms, pictograms, sinographs, and—what the Chinese call them—hanzi (“Han characters,” named after the dynasty that first standardized them). Like an alphabetic word, a character indicates both meaning and sound, though to a different degree of direct correlation and emphasis. While written Chinese was for a long time described as pictographs—one of its more misapplied names—no more than 3 percent of characters are historically pictorial or properly ideographic. Even for that small quantity of characters, it is a bit of a stretch to say they depict objects the way pictures do, because script is an agreed-upon system of symbols that represents, rather than captures, reality. The character 日 is not really a spitting image of the sun, which is round rather than rectangular in shape, and 山 might strike you more as the top of a pitchfork unless someone tells you that it is a pictorial representation of “mountain.” I use “character” and “ideograph” interchangeably in this book as a re- minder of how misnomers like these nonetheless carried the authority of truth in their own times.

Second, characters are made up of strokes—continuous lines of any length, including dots, that are the basic elements in the composition and writing of an ideographic character. Strokes are written in a specific order established by the practice of calligraphy: left to right, top to bottom. Though the number of stroke types varies depending on the purpose, eight have been considered fundamental. The character 永, “eternity,” has been used for pedagogic purposes to teach these strokes because it happens to embody all eight: dot, horizontal, vertical, hook, rising, downward left slant, downward right slant, folding.

When you look at a character, it is clear that the strokes are not randomly thrown together. Most characters are made up of distinct parts, smaller clusters of intersecting strokes that are sometimes simple characters themselves. A component refers to those parts that, when combined with other clusters of stroke patterns, form a more complex, stand- alone character.

A particular component that is shared by and recurs in other characters has historically been given a weightier, unique status. This special part is known as a “radical.” Like “character,” the name “radical” has also been contested. Some consider it misleading, because a radical is not the root of a character in the way English has root words; it is not a stem to which prefixes and suffixes can be attached. Also known as “semantic classifiers” or “indexers,” radicals are used to organize and categorize characters, as in a dictionary.

Finally, Chinese is a tonal language, which means the same syllable can be sounded at different pitches, or tones. Because characters carry only one syllable, tones evolved to help differentiate between characters that have the same syllable and are pronounced the same way. But there are limits to what tones can do, with the result that there are a lot of homophones in Chinese—characters that not only share the same pronunciation but also, less frequently, share the same tone. Depending on a region’s dialect, tones also change.

Behind the grand narratives of great powers and national humiliation that occupy the contemporary understanding of China’s encounter with the West is a deeper entanglement of their script worlds. The Chinese have gone to extremes to develop and to become modern on their own terms. Key to this path was tapping into the global communications infrastructure, from telegraphy to typewriters and computers, built in the Roman alphabet’s image. In a dramatic series of language skirmishes and clever one-upmanships, of unexpected feats and crushing failures, Chinese and foreigners wrestled, struggled, and threw in their lot with the future of the Chinese script. At a time of major political and social upheavals inside and outside China, their words, ideas, and deeds exerted pressure on the center of history from the fringe. Across four centuries and spanning three continents, native speakers and foreigners alike have been engaged in a singular, shared pursuit: to crack the Chinese code in order to modernize its script. Behind every written character that can be learned and 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 for the Chinese language, their ambition opened up a world of discovery and revolution—and bold, perilous adventure.

US

Additional information

Weight	9.2 oz
Dimensions	0.9000 × 5.2000 × 8.0000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09780735214736
ISBN-10	0735214735
Author	Jing Tsu
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	LAN004000, LAN009010
Subjects	LAN004000, Mandarin, translation, chinese history, history books for adults, history of china, gifts for history buffs, historical books, best books, nonfiction books best sellers, best books 2022, linguistics, china history, best book list 2022, LAN009010, mao, typewriters, Jing Soo, Jing Su, chinese characters, chinese language ebooks, pulitzer, china, culture, education, communication, innovation, technology, Chinese, ancient China, future, history, asian, revolution, asia, olympics, history books, world history, design, internet, language
Format	General Trade