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 processWhat does it take to reinvent the worlds oldest living languageChina today is one of the worlds 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 Chinas most daunting challenge was a linguistic one to make the formidable Chinese language a 2200yearold 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 valuesystem 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 worldshaping consequences.With largerthanlife characters and a thrilling narrative Kingdom of Characters offers an astonishingly original perspective on one of the twentieth centurys most dramatic transformations.