Coded language

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 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.