Kingdom of Characters (Pulitzer Prize Finalist)
The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
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3.8 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tsu, a professor of East Asian language and literature at Yale, debuts with an immersive history of the effort to transform the written Chinese language's vast and complex set of characters into a modern communication technology. Noting that Chinese ideographic writing is "fundamentally unique, distinct from any other writing system in the world," Tsu details how China's struggle for sovereignty during the 19th century, when the opium wars resulted in harsh trade agreements and territorial losses, sparked innovations and reform efforts by Chinese scholars, politicians, and inventors who believed the written language was a barrier to development. Tsu describes efforts to develop and promote the Mandarin alphabet, adapt characters for telegraphic transmission, and develop a typewriter to replicate characters. Communist leader Mao Zedong's efforts, meanwhile, to simplify Chinese characters and make the language easier for Westerners to learn dramatically improved the country's literacy rate and eventually reduced the number of characters from tens of thousands to 2,235. Tsu also explores the history of typesetting and modern printing in China, and the evolution of Chinese characters in the internet age. The level of detail occasionally slows the book's pace, but Tsu sheds light on the intriguing interplay between Chinese language and politics. Sinophiles and language buffs will be fascinated.
