Jing Tsu is the John M. Schiff Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures & Comparative Literature at Yale, where she specializes in Chinese literature, history, culture, science and technology, and politics. She is a member of the Council on East Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and an affiliate faculty at the Jackson School of Global Affairs. A Guggenheim fellow, she has held fellowships and distinctions from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton. She moved to the US from Taiwan at age 9, and now lives in New York City.
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*
An absolute joy to read. This stunning, meticulously researched
book is the detective story of Chinese characters. Jing Tsu has
seamlessly fused the craft of the linguistic historian with the
artistry of the storyteller - including cliff-hangers
*David Crystal, author of THE STORIES OF ENGLISH and HOW LANGUAGE
WORKS*
An amazing story! How Chinese speech and script go to be
standardized and made fit for the age of printing, data-processing
and the internet is a true adventure story, told with brio and
passion in this eye-opening book. It's a complicated tale, to be
sure, and the solutions found verge on the miraculous. But the
false starts, forgotten heroes, the rejections of the past and
returns to tradition that are clearly laid out in this book also
map out a cultural history of modern China. Immensely instructive
and thoroughly enjoyable
*David Bellos, author of IS THAT A FISH IN YOUR EAR?*
Writing about writing is hard; writing about Chinese writing in
English is devilish. Strokes, logographs, ideographs - even the
basic terminology can cloud the mind like a calligraphy brush
loaded with too much ink. Jing Tsu's brilliant solution is to focus
on characters - not the ones written from left to right, top to
bottom, but the actual living, breathing, thinking individuals who,
since the start of the twentieth century, did everything they could
to adapt the Chinese language and writing system to the modern
world. In Kingdom of Characters, Tsu introduces us to a cast of
unforgettable figures: the wanted fugitive who pushes for Mandarin
as China's national tongue; the engineer and bamboo expert who
develops a Chinese typewriter; the railway administrator who tries
to figure out how to send telegrams in a language without an
alphabet. Along the way, Tsu tells an essential story of modern
China: a country at once transformed and yet deeply traditional
*Peter Hessler*
Kingdom of Characters is an eye-opener. It approaches a central
topic in modern and contemporary Chinese culture through a unique
perspective, combining scholarship with vivid historical narrative.
Jing Tsu wears her erudition lightly and gives us a fascinating and
moving story. It shows the passionate struggle of generations of
pioneers, who tried to find ways of reshaping and preserving the
Chinese written script. It's a story of desperate strife,
unflagging dedication, and ultimately, triumph
*Ha Jin*
Kingdom of Characters is a deeply engaging and revealing narrative
of the Chinese language in modern times: its graphic and phonetic
transformations, conceptual debates, technological innovations, and
political contentions. Jin Tsu has brought together a series of key
moments concerning Chinese modernity, from the first Chinese
typewriter to the digital Sinosphere, from the script reform to the
voice revolution. Meticulously researched and beautifully written,
this book is indispensable for anyone interested in the sound and
script of modern China
*Professor David Wang, Harvard University*
Interesting and very readable
*Asian Review of Books*
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