Kingdom of Characters Micro-Review
“It is China’s first and last Great Wall”
I’ve never been to China. Nor do I speak Chinese. And generally have learned as much from singing along to Mulan as anything else. Yet as TikTok and Taiwan face uncertainty in the global ideological pissing contest, I wanted to learn more.
Enter Jing Tsu’s Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. The author is a professor at Yale, a Guggenheim Fellow, and holds a PhD from that school in Cambridge. The book, like her, is impressively academic. It explores the pioneers and politics of dragging an ancient language into modernity without sacrificing traditions or capitulating to the West.
Kingdom of Characters is an eye-opening case study of their technological advancements through the tales of unsung linguistic heroes. Consider the cost of ink or lack of a Morse code: The struggle is real when the printing press or “universal” QWERTY keyboard mean nothing for thousands of characters that aren’t a, b, or c.
This book is fascinating, thought-provoking, and covers plenty of culture and history that Disney missed along the way. It could be considered the nerdier Eastern cousin to Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses, except a history of China in 6 innovators. However, it can be slow and redundant at times. Tsu probably didn’t want to go too fast for a reader like me.
