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ume_yoshi's review
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
A fascinating global history of China and the Han script. A glorious tale of many nerdy heroes who made China what it is today.
natkbaca's review
4.0
As a caution up front, having studied Chinese for a number of years and worked in Chinese text processing professionally, I was drawn to this work in a way that others might not be. Overall however, I found it to be a fairly interesting and approachable investigation into the stories behind what seem on the surface to be a dry set of topics. It’s a far-reaching work, covering everything from typewriters to telegraphy to modern text encoding, but the coverage is generally both accurate and engaging, if occasionally lacking in detail in particular places.
The reason for the one star off is the seeming acceptance at face value at the westernizing rhetoric of the 1920s May 4th reformers, and the less than critical approach to categorizing the supposed battle with modernity that the Chinese script has undergone. Those looking for a more scholarly and nuanced depiction of this question should pick up Thomas S. Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter: A History. This other fascinating work certainly thematically overlaps with this one for several chapters, but delves deeper regarding the question of who technology was built for and why. What it gains in subtlety though it does lose some in approachability.
In any case, I still quite enjoyed this book, and would recommend it both to those already familiar with Chinese and its technological challenges and those looking to understand more.
The reason for the one star off is the seeming acceptance at face value at the westernizing rhetoric of the 1920s May 4th reformers, and the less than critical approach to categorizing the supposed battle with modernity that the Chinese script has undergone. Those looking for a more scholarly and nuanced depiction of this question should pick up Thomas S. Mullaney’s The Chinese Typewriter: A History. This other fascinating work certainly thematically overlaps with this one for several chapters, but delves deeper regarding the question of who technology was built for and why. What it gains in subtlety though it does lose some in approachability.
In any case, I still quite enjoyed this book, and would recommend it both to those already familiar with Chinese and its technological challenges and those looking to understand more.
sumatra_squall's review against another edition
3.0
From the subtitle of the book "A Tale of Language, Obsession, and Genius in Modern China", I thought this book would be a more riveting read than it actually was. It begins promisingly enough, recounting how former mandarin Wang Zhao, wanted for treason by Empress Dowager Cixi after advocating for reforms, disguises himself as a monk to return to China from Japan in 1900. Wang would eventually develop a Mandarin Alphabet that sought to create a script that would allow ordinary people to recognise and notate their own speech exactly as it sounded in writing - this would allow people living in different regions, each speaking their own regional dialect, communicate across "dialectal, regional and possibly national divides".
In each chapter, Jing lays out how efforts over the decades to standardise, categorise and indeed, reshape the Chinese language so that it could plug into modern technologies of printing, data processing and telecommunications. From Wang's efforts to notarise Chinese speech, the book moves into efforts to establish a national language and standard tongue (initially, it looked like southern speakers would win given their numerical advantage but Wang managed to institute a one province one rule vote which gave the advantage to northern vernacular Mandarin-speaking provinces).
Chapter Two - Chinese Typewriters and America (1912) - details efforts to create an ideographic keyboard. While the Roman alphabet only has 26 letters which can be manipulated into endless permutations, how might one create a keyboard capable of producing thousands of Chinese characters which for centuries had been organised on the basis of anything from two to four hundred radicals?
Chapter Three - Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy (1925) - details efforts to try to encode the Chinese language as efficiently as possible for the purposes of telegraphy. Morse code's combinations of dots and dashes were meant to accommodate the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9. To communicate in Chinese, the characters had to be translated into a combination of letters and numbers (which would then be translated in turn into dots and dashes), an extremely costly exercise both in terms of time, effort and message length. Moreover, assigning combinations of numbers and letters to Chinese characters meant that "there was no...meaningful correlation between characters and their codes...a Chiense sender would essentially have to grapple with his or her native language as a foreign code". Might the solution be to develop "an alphabetic capacity...from the Chinese script itself"?
Chapter Four - The Librarian's Card Catalog (1938) - then goes into efforts to reorganise the language for systematic and efficient use. We learn about Lin Yutang who proposed indexing characters by stroke and stroke order, and who created a keyboard that could produce Chinese characters.
Chapter Five - When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) - details China's efforts under Mao to simplify the Chinese script and to Romanise it, in order to lower the threshold for reading and writing Chinese characters for the masses. The challenge of Romanising the Chinese language, with all its homophones, is illustrated by Zhao Yuanren's 92-character parable about Sir Shi who had a wildlife fetish and mistakenly tried to eat ten lions made from stone. There are 31 different characters in the tale but when Romanised without tonal differentiators, basically goes "shi shi shi shi shi....". Wade-Giles, Latin New Script, New Romanization were some of the earlier efforts before pinyin was ratified by the National People's Congress in Feb 1958.
Chapter Six -Entering into the Computer (1979) - covers efforts to input the Chinese language into a computer, to "represent each character in a language that the machine and its human operator could both understand". Zhi Bingyi's solution was to break each character up into at most four component parts, each of which could be alphabetised (via pinyin). This could be done for both characters and phrases.
Finally, in Chapter Seven - The Digital Sinosphere (2020) - Jing details efforts to unify the coding for Han characters under the Unicode initiative, and the battles involving China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan to have their characters recognised as the standard, rather than as variants.
Overall, Kingdom of Characters was an informative read but perhaps it was the challenge of condensing a century's worth of developments and characters into slightly over 200 pages, or trying to string together these myriad developments into some kind of coherent narrative arc, I found the book a bit of a struggle to get through.
In each chapter, Jing lays out how efforts over the decades to standardise, categorise and indeed, reshape the Chinese language so that it could plug into modern technologies of printing, data processing and telecommunications. From Wang's efforts to notarise Chinese speech, the book moves into efforts to establish a national language and standard tongue (initially, it looked like southern speakers would win given their numerical advantage but Wang managed to institute a one province one rule vote which gave the advantage to northern vernacular Mandarin-speaking provinces).
Chapter Two - Chinese Typewriters and America (1912) - details efforts to create an ideographic keyboard. While the Roman alphabet only has 26 letters which can be manipulated into endless permutations, how might one create a keyboard capable of producing thousands of Chinese characters which for centuries had been organised on the basis of anything from two to four hundred radicals?
Chapter Three - Tipping the Scale of Telegraphy (1925) - details efforts to try to encode the Chinese language as efficiently as possible for the purposes of telegraphy. Morse code's combinations of dots and dashes were meant to accommodate the letters of the alphabet and the numbers 0 to 9. To communicate in Chinese, the characters had to be translated into a combination of letters and numbers (which would then be translated in turn into dots and dashes), an extremely costly exercise both in terms of time, effort and message length. Moreover, assigning combinations of numbers and letters to Chinese characters meant that "there was no...meaningful correlation between characters and their codes...a Chiense sender would essentially have to grapple with his or her native language as a foreign code". Might the solution be to develop "an alphabetic capacity...from the Chinese script itself"?
Chapter Four - The Librarian's Card Catalog (1938) - then goes into efforts to reorganise the language for systematic and efficient use. We learn about Lin Yutang who proposed indexing characters by stroke and stroke order, and who created a keyboard that could produce Chinese characters.
Chapter Five - When "Peking" became "Beijing" (1958) - details China's efforts under Mao to simplify the Chinese script and to Romanise it, in order to lower the threshold for reading and writing Chinese characters for the masses. The challenge of Romanising the Chinese language, with all its homophones, is illustrated by Zhao Yuanren's 92-character parable about Sir Shi who had a wildlife fetish and mistakenly tried to eat ten lions made from stone. There are 31 different characters in the tale but when Romanised without tonal differentiators, basically goes "shi shi shi shi shi....". Wade-Giles, Latin New Script, New Romanization were some of the earlier efforts before pinyin was ratified by the National People's Congress in Feb 1958.
Chapter Six -Entering into the Computer (1979) - covers efforts to input the Chinese language into a computer, to "represent each character in a language that the machine and its human operator could both understand". Zhi Bingyi's solution was to break each character up into at most four component parts, each of which could be alphabetised (via pinyin). This could be done for both characters and phrases.
Finally, in Chapter Seven - The Digital Sinosphere (2020) - Jing details efforts to unify the coding for Han characters under the Unicode initiative, and the battles involving China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan to have their characters recognised as the standard, rather than as variants.
Overall, Kingdom of Characters was an informative read but perhaps it was the challenge of condensing a century's worth of developments and characters into slightly over 200 pages, or trying to string together these myriad developments into some kind of coherent narrative arc, I found the book a bit of a struggle to get through.
latad_books's review against another edition
4.0
This was a fascinating look at China's relatively recent past (from the end of the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellions) to the present day, through its bid to keep pace with the progress of communication technology worldwide for trade and other purposes.
A number of clever people devoted themselves from that period to ongoing efforts currently. analyzing the huge set of written characters that required years of study and practice to master to determine ways in which Chinese speakers could quickly communicate across the country, and worldwide.
For those of us who use a 26-character alphabet, it's perhaps not that easy to understand the efforts various linguists, librarians, scholars and others went through but each of their achievements is pretty outstanding.
A number of clever people devoted themselves from that period to ongoing efforts currently. analyzing the huge set of written characters that required years of study and practice to master to determine ways in which Chinese speakers could quickly communicate across the country, and worldwide.
For those of us who use a 26-character alphabet, it's perhaps not that easy to understand the efforts various linguists, librarians, scholars and others went through but each of their achievements is pretty outstanding.
jszhn's review against another edition
2.0
So when I was young, I took weekend Mandarin classes at the local Catholic elementary school with all the other young Chinese kids. We used a textbook written in Simplified Chinese where in the appendices some small mentions of Pinyin and simplified systems approved in the 1950s and 1960s. Lovely. I'm sure everyone knows how Chinese was simplified.
Kingdom of Characters is a book about the Chinese script. It doesn't just talk about the simplification process in the 20th-century — it also talks about typewriters, romanisation schemes, and the Chinese language's integration into modern encoding schemes between the 19th-century to the present-day. This is mostly the gist of the book. The author is pretty comprehensive in her coverage of developments and gaps between each event are no more than a few years. The coverage of typewriters in particular is really nice, because it's mostly a review of engineering history, and kinda shows how much engineering one little thing can have impacts on language and writing.
The author, Jing Tsu, is a tenured professor at Yale. As she grew up speaking Mandarin, native names and terms are pronounced well (very welcome). Being in the West does shape some of the writing here. There's a slight gleam of anti-communism each time something involving the PRC to the point of annoyance (the usual gist of it is that "something something Chairman Mao the people can't say anything about it"). What she cannot do is deny the achievements of the CPC's simplification and Pinyin adoption and its impact on literacy rates and convenience. This much is clear, even if she's a little anti-communist about it. There's also a very sensationalised editorialised tone throughout the book. This is a popular history book so there's probably not much I can do about it.
Maybe I just hate audiobooks.
2.5/5
Kingdom of Characters is a book about the Chinese script. It doesn't just talk about the simplification process in the 20th-century — it also talks about typewriters, romanisation schemes, and the Chinese language's integration into modern encoding schemes between the 19th-century to the present-day. This is mostly the gist of the book. The author is pretty comprehensive in her coverage of developments and gaps between each event are no more than a few years. The coverage of typewriters in particular is really nice, because it's mostly a review of engineering history, and kinda shows how much engineering one little thing can have impacts on language and writing.
The author, Jing Tsu, is a tenured professor at Yale. As she grew up speaking Mandarin, native names and terms are pronounced well (very welcome). Being in the West does shape some of the writing here. There's a slight gleam of anti-communism each time something involving the PRC to the point of annoyance (the usual gist of it is that "something something Chairman Mao the people can't say anything about it"). What she cannot do is deny the achievements of the CPC's simplification and Pinyin adoption and its impact on literacy rates and convenience. This much is clear, even if she's a little anti-communist about it. There's also a very sensationalised editorialised tone throughout the book. This is a popular history book so there's probably not much I can do about it.
Maybe I just hate audiobooks.
2.5/5
caffeinated_gills's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
4.5
A fascinating part of history I knew very little about. This is going to be one of my most recommended books for sure (I like more unique histories).