Kingdom of Characters
- Author Jing Tsu
- Narrator Jing Tsu
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Run Time 11 hours and 19 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Asian history, Language: history and general works, Writing systems, alphabets.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- £7.99
- £6.99
- £5.99
- £4.99
- £3.99
Listen to a sample
What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a super-power 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, left behind in the wake of Western technology. In Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu shows that China's most daunting challenge was a linguistic one: to make the formidable Chinese language - a 2,200-year-old writing system that was daunting to natives and foreigners alike - accessible to a globalised, digital world.
Kingdom of Characters follows the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese script - and the value-system it represents - to the technological advances that would shape the 20th century and beyond, from the telegram to the typewriter to the smartphone. From the exiled reformer who risked death to advocate for Mandarin as a national language to the imprisoned computer engineer who devised input codes for Chinese characters on the lid of a teacup, generations of scholars, missionaries, librarians, politicians, inventors, nationalists and revolutionaries alike understood the urgency of their task and its world-shaping consequences.
With larger-than-life characters and a thrilling narrative, Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the 20th century's most dramatic transformations.
© Jing Tsu 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
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Enchanting… [Tsu’s] love for the enigma and beauty of Chinese shines through in this delightful mix of history and linguistics… A pleasure to read
Sunday Times -
Erudite and beautifully written
TLS -
Incredibly fascinating… Chinese is the oldest written language in the world, and this book is very much an aperture book. Look through its linguistic premise and a whole panorama of politics, technology and aesthetics springs into life… Remarkable
Scotsman -
Impressive… A well-told story about those who created modern China not through the barrel of a gun or a little red book but through dictionaries, libraries and printing presses. As the Chinese say, heroes are born out of turbulent times, and what China has undergone has been nothing if not turbulent
Spectator -
[Tsu] brings to life the individuals who gave their all to solve China’s problems with language technology, even as political and social turmoil was raging around them
Guardian -
How to permit what Joseph Needham admiringly called “the glittering, crystalline world” of China’s ancient ideographic script to run along the western-made telegraph wires, to be typewritten instead of brush-stroked, to make full use of Silicon Valley’s internet and the iPhone, is a story of both dazzling technical and political fascination and an ever-swelling global importance. Jing Tsu has crafted a tale of this achievement with flair, originality and extraordinary narrative power: seldom have I read a book about modern China so informative, revelatory and enjoyable
Simon Winchester
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