EAN: 9780141985312

KINGDOM OF CHARACTERS - JING TSU KARTONIERT (TB)

A PULITZER PRIZE FINALISTA 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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