EAN: 9780141985312

KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS - JING TSU KARTONIERT (TB)

A PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST  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  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 globalized  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 twentieth 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 twentieth century's most dramatic transformations.

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