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alijm's review
very very cool!!! I love you linguistics. Especially loved the library card chapter and the breakdown of what it's like to search for a word in a chinese dictionary. But every chapter was awesome and cool to see the entire arc from verbal to written unification to unicode
claremorg's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
I really enjoyed this book! I know relatively little about China’s history or language, but found this book accessible, interesting, and well-written and very well researched. It did a great job of describing the evolution of Chinese language alongside geopolitical events and occurrences that really helped paint a picture for how China accomplished what it did despite challenges in a little over a century.
This was a unique read for me and I’d recommend it to anyone!
This was a unique read for me and I’d recommend it to anyone!
highestiqinfresno's review against another edition
4.0
A fascinating history of Chinese language modernization from the mid-19th century to the present. Tsu successfully maps debates about simplifying Chinese to China's fraught history moving from the Qing period through the Republic and finally PRC eras. This is not merely an intellectual history, however. Tsu also examines the way that interest in technological development - typewriters, telegraph, and computers - galvanized language reformers and added fuel to conflicts between traditionalists who viewed Chinese language (and the complex calligraphy of Chinese characters) as a vital part of Chinese cultural identity and modernizers who saw the ways linguistic complexity isolated China from the rest of the world and made the democratizing goal of mass literacy difficult. For those familiar with the work of Jonathan Spence, they will find many continuities between "Kingdom of Characters" and Spence's histories examining China's long struggle with modernity. The last chapter didn't work for me - it is a bit too ambitious acting as a conclusion, epilogue, and case study - but Kingdom of Characters is a must read for those interested in the history of modern China.
dcfelk's review
informative
slow-paced
Somehow simultaneously deeply unsatisfying and deeply interesting. Timelines and figures are confusing, and the narrative lacks criticality.
naico's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
3.0
I think that especially in the final chapter about encodings this book fails to explain the solutions properly. Maybe because of that the fight between the two participants of the IRC meeting feels confusing: it's 2018 and they're fighting about a concept of variants that existed since the 1970s.
The chapter about typewriters could benefit from more illustrations to highlight the differences between the machines.
The passage about 'critical thinking' in the introduction feels off. It reads as if the author is mocking the concept, and yet she doesn't expand upon the alternatives, thus leaving one wondering "what's so wrong for you in the way I think?"
Overall, an educational read
The chapter about typewriters could benefit from more illustrations to highlight the differences between the machines.
The passage about 'critical thinking' in the introduction feels off. It reads as if the author is mocking the concept, and yet she doesn't expand upon the alternatives, thus leaving one wondering "what's so wrong for you in the way I think?"
Overall, an educational read
whitesaucehotsauce's review
2.5
Great subject matter, but it’s held back by some of the usual pop nonfiction trappings - each chapter being an independent essay, forced narrative bits etc. There is still a lot of good stuff here and ultimately I’d recommend giving this book a chance if you’re interested in the subject matter since you’ll probably never have another chance to learn about e.g. the challenges of Chinese telegraphy in such detail.
jeb1945's review
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Though this book is accessible to a general reader it is not a compelling read. The names, places, events of Chinese language politics and scholarship are very difficult to follow. The general thread showing the difficulty of modernizing Chinese character script, the struggle to bring Chinese language into the modern means of communications (from telegraph, typewriting, printing, and digital) and the preeminence of Chinese in the world today. The story is fascinating but it was difficult for a non-Chinese to keep track of dozens of names of key innovators over a 120 years development of Chinese language characters and technology. China aims at no less a goal than making Chinese the dominant language of the future world.