Kingdom of Characters review: a ‘delightful mix of history and linguistics’
Jing Tsu’s ‘enchanting’ book tells the story of the Chinese language over the past 150 years

This “enchanting” book tells the story of the Chinese language over the past 150 years, and the “revolution” through which it, and its “intricate and arcane” script, were brought into line with the demands of the modern world, said Michael Sheridan in The Sunday Times. It is a “delightful mix of history and linguistics”, shot through with its author’s love for the “enigma and beauty” of the world’s oldest living tongue.
Jing Tsu, professor of East Asian languages at Yale, is an excellent guide to the complexities of the language – which once made literacy the privilege of a tiny elite in imperial China, hobbling communications across the empire and contributing to its humiliation by foreign powers in the 19th century. She gives lively pen portraits of the 20th century reformers – “brilliant, eccentric, wilful and wayward geniuses” – who simplified and adapted it for use with modern communications technologies, from Morse code to the internet, enabling China’s national resurgence.
In 1900, only one in ten people in China could read and write, said Cindy Yu in The Spectator. The many varieties of the language (such as Mandarin and Cantonese) hampered communication, and written Chinese reflected the state of the language as it was spoken 2,000 years ago. But as Tsu shows in this “authoritative” account, the biggest problem was the writing system itself, which uses tens of thousands of characters, “stand-alone ideographs” that are not phonetic and cannot easily be organised in dictionaries.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A Chinese typewriter from 1899 used levers to choose between 4,000 characters on a table-sized disk. Telegrams could only be sent by assigning each character a six-digit number, so that a 25-word message took half an hour to encode, compared with two minutes in English. Efforts to render the language in the Roman alphabet were resisted by cultural conservatives, and complicated because many words in Chinese sound the same and are distinguished only by tone and context.
In the end, the Communists kept hold of Chinese characters, but in simplified form, and developed “pinyin”, said Gaston Dorren in The Guardian. This was a way of rendering Mandarin Chinese in the Roman alphabet – enabling a billion users to type on alphabetic keyboards today. Tsu focuses a little too much on the “also-rans”, those whose plans for linguistic reform did not prevail; and the “linguistic nuts and technological bolts” are often “less than crystal clear”. Even so, the book makes for a “lively”, “colourful” and pleasingly fact-filled read.
Allen Lane 336pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99
The Week Bookshop
To order this title or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk, or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835. Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
June 25 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Wednesday's cartoons include war on a loop, the New York City mayoral race, and one almighty F-bomb
-
How generative AI is changing the way we write and speak
In The Spotlight ChatGPT and other large language model tools are quietly influencing which words we use
-
How long can Nato keep Donald Trump happy?
Today's Big Question Military alliance pulls out all the stops to woo US president on his peacemaker victory lap
-
Anne Hillerman's 6 favorite books with Native characters
Feature The author recommends works by Ramona Emerson, Craig Johnson, and more
-
Book reviews: '1861: The Lost Peace' and 'Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers'
Feature How America tried to avoid the Civil War and the link between lead pollution and serial killers
-
Brian Wilson: the troubled genius who powered the Beach Boys
Feature The musical giant passed away at 82
-
Grilled radicchio with caper and anchovy sauce recipe
The Week Recommends Smoky twist on classic Italian flavours is perfect to grill, drizzle and devour
-
Echo Valley: a 'twisty modern noir' starring Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney
The Week Recommends This tense thriller about a mother and daughter is 'American cinema for grown ups'
-
Larry Lamb shares his favourite books
The Week Recommends The actor picks works by Neil Sheehan, Annie Proulx and Émile Zola
-
Stereophonic: an 'extraordinary, electrifying odyssey'
The Week Recommends David Adjmi's Broadway hit about a 1970s rock band struggling to record their second album comes to the West End
-
Shifty: a 'kaleidoscopic' portrait of late 20th-century Britain
The Week Recommends Adam Curtis' 'wickedly funny' documentary charts the country's decline using archive footage