Coded Language

Michael Wood praises a pioneering study of the transformation of Chinese script, and how this helped fuel the growth of the nation into one of the world's superpowers

- By Michael Wood. Photographs by Chineseposters.net, Fieldcraft Studios and Adam Wilson

Kingdom of Characters

by Jing Tsu

Penguin, 336 pages, £20

I remember my astonishment when I first saw a Chinese colleague using her QWERTY keyboard to write Chinese characters. Her speed was incredible. When she clicked on any letter, she initiated an algorithm based either on a letter's phonetic sound or root shape: a predictive text where the algorithm guessed what she was looking for using the Pinyin Romanization. Here was a glimpse of the future. And it was Chinese. Kingdom of Characters tells how the script reached this point, and it is a fantastic story.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom was that China would have to abandon its character-based system of writing and embrace the alphabet in order to move into the modern world and be a part of global trade, learning and technological progress. The alphabet, it was said, was the sine qua non of the Enlightenment - the conceptual technology at the bedrock of western science. But was it? Today, China is an IT and AI giant, and the Chinese script a world script.

This book is a delight: eye-opening and illuminating. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand the relationship between Chinese script and civilisation, and indeed anyone who is keen to learn more about the rise of China today. Most of all, it's a cracking good read, a brilliant story packed with pioneers, inventors and visionaries who should take their place alongside the heroes of Bill Bryson's wonderful A Short History of Nearly Everything. And, of course, it has many larger than life characters.