Kingdom of Characters

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A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the process. What does it take to reinvent the world's oldest living language? China today is one of the world's most powerful nations, yet just a century ago, it was a crumbling empire with literacy reserved for the elite few, lagging behind Western technology. The most daunting challenge was linguistic: making the formidable Chinese language—an ancient writing system daunting to both natives and foreigners—accessible in a globalized, digital world. This narrative follows the innovators who adapted the Chinese script and its underlying value system to the technological advances shaping the twentieth century and beyond, from telegrams to smartphones. It highlights the exiled reformer risking death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language and the imprisoned engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters. Generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists, and revolutionaries recognized the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences. With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, this account offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth century's most dramatic transformations.