China’s modern IT History

[Randy W]

Why is the world’s largest collection on China’s modern IT history in the US?
Thomas S. Mullaney recounts how his unparalleled collection of early Chinese information technology came about and his failed quest to repatriate the items

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Containing more than 2,500 archival items – including dozens of rare Chinese typewriters, word processors and computers – it covers Chinese-language telegraphy, typewriting, mimeography, bookmaking, mainframe computers, encoding systems, software, operating systems, printers, monitors, fonts, phototypesetting, input systems, word processors, personal computers and more.

It even covers relatively obscure aspects of modern Chinese IT, from the largest collection in the world of Samizdat-style self-published Chinese “zines” to China’s decision in the 1910s to import Western-style punctuation marks, and to the country’s overhaul of government stationery and other kinds of bureaucratic paperwork.

 . . .

Why is this collection called the “Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection”?

  . . . 

Was I the tomb raider of Chinese computing history? Was I opening Stanford up to the kind of criticism usually levelled at institutions like the British Museum?

 . . .

For the first eight years or so, I rummaged through hundreds of second-hand bookshops, junk stores, eBay listings (and their Chinese equivalents), scouring for materials related to Chinese telegraphy, typewriting, printing, word processing, computing and more.

Every time I found something new, I would do what historians are trained to do: read it closely, think about what other sources might be needed to triangulate, make hi-res scans of any graphics I may need to reproduce, cite it in my footnotes, and return it to the shelf.

 . . .

It was only in about year 10 that it hit me: I had inadvertently amassed the world’s largest unified collection on the modern history of Chinese and East Asian information technology.

All to say, I decided this angry TikToker deserved a response, but it was going to take a lot more time and space than TikTok allows. Therefore, my anonymous, angry friend, here is your answer.
Drawing of the first Chinese typewriter in history, invented by Devello Sheffield (1899). Photo: Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection (Stanford University)

So I tried to learn more about Chinese museums that housed collections on Chinese calligraphy and book history, thinking they might be interested in extending their “communications-based” collections forward in time. There was a problem, however: museums that collect Chinese works of calligraphy or woodblock prints tend to think of them as art, not technology. When I shared pictures of typewriters, telegraph code books, Chinese encoding systems, the response was uniform: we focus on art. This isn’t art. Try a science and technology museum.

Chinese telegraph code book (close-up). Photo: Thomas S. Mullaney East Asian Information Technology History Collection

 

Thomas S Mullaney

Thomas S Mullaney is a professor of Chinese history of Stanford University, a Guggenheim fellow, and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author or lead editor of six books, including The Chinese Typewriter, Your Computer is on Fire, and the forthcoming The Chinese Computer - The First Comprehensive History of Chinese-language Computing.

 

 

[Randy W]

When it came to on-screen representation of Chinese fonts, Windows and Mac OS took two different approaches: The former was willing to warp style in the pursuit of clarity, while the latter preserved style even at clarity’s expense. Both, however, opted for Heiti.

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The Fonts That Made China’s Digital Revolution Possible
For centuries, the delicate and elegant Songti typeface dominated Chinese printing presses. But on the early digital era’s low resolution monitors, delicacy could be a drawback.

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This type of Chinese font is known as Heiti. Literally “black-style,” Heiti is the dominant family of digital fonts in use on Chinese phones and computers around the world. It is also starkly different from the more delicate Songti, or “Song Dynasty-style” typeface preferred by Chinese printers for books, newspapers, and other forms of literature for centuries.

 . . .

Around this time, however, the need for new, clearer typefaces was crystalizing alongside the emergence of the personal computer. When Apple and Microsoft started to localize their operating systems for Chinese consumers, Chinese-language digital fonts were mostly designed in a 16-pixel dot matrix. Simply put, what this means is that each Chinese character was designed to occupy a 16- by 16-pixel square. Yet these typefaces appeared too large compared to English-language interfaces, which generally used a smaller font size, anywhere from nine to 13 pixels.

To address this problem, Mac OS and Windows adopted the Beijing and SimSun fonts, respectively. Essentially low-resolution versions of Songti typefaces, Beijing and SimSun allowed developers to display characters at much smaller font sizes than before, though not without a loss in detail: Many of Songti’s distinctive Serif-like details disappeared as the characters shrunk in size.

In 2001, Apple set out to refresh its brand image, including by conducting a sweeping overhaul of its user interfaces. Over the course of the 1990s, new technologies like vectorial modeling — which used mathematical formulas to preserve the proportions of characters regardless of how many pixels were used — had greatly improved the utility and legibility of fonts, and the company wanted a new system font for its Chinese-language operating systems that could take advantage of these advances.

 

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

A fight between China’s design and calligraphy worlds has spilled over into its national legislature, after a minor political party asked the government to help eliminate tacky calligraphy-inspired fonts.

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Calligraphers Bring Regulations to a Font Fight
Calligraphy-inspired fonts are a threat to “the masses’ aesthetic understanding,” a minor political party argues.

 

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The proposal, submitted in late February, calls for an “authoritative art committee” to evaluate fonts in order to “ensure that jianghu fonts are eliminated,” and protect “the masses’ aesthetic understanding of calligraphy.” It calls for the government to purge the fonts from font libraries used by computers and publishers, and to introduce new fonts based on real calligraphy. The motion will be reviewed at China’s annual “Two Sessions” legislative meetings, which started today.

Jianghu describes the kind of font often seen on Chinese movie posters, resembling big, bold strokes of a wide brush, emulating the look of traditional calligraphy. The term — literally “rivers and lakes” — evokes the swashbuckling settings of Chinese historical fiction.

The dominant Chinese type font known as Songti or Mingti has its roots in traditional calligraphy, and many modern fonts were created by calligraphers. But jianghu fonts exaggerate the hand-written look.

Many calligraphers say they're hideous.

 . . .

Zhang feared that people would mistake calligraphy-style fonts for the real thing. “Jianghu fonts entering the font library are like a virus entering the blood,” he wrote. “It not only subverts the calligrapher’s pursuit of perfection, but also disrupts the whole society’s understanding of the beauty of calligraphy.”

 

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Behind the invention of “dot matrix typefaces” is a question that has obsessed Chinese-language font designers for 40 years: Just how small can Chinese digital fonts get before they become illegible, or worse, aesthetically unappealing?

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Chopsticks, Pixels, and the Pioneers Who Redesigned Modern Chinese
Early efforts to digitize Chinese characters faced an almost insurmountable problem: How do you turn blocky pixels into smooth strokes?

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Struggling to balance legibility and economy, designers wondered how the flicks and flourishes of Chinese characters could possibly be displayed using just a handful of dots.

Their first thought was to reconstruct characters using a combination of straight and slanted lines. According to the historian Tom Mullaney, in 1981, the Graphic Arts Research Foundation in Massachusetts published a prototype of a Chinese-language word processing system called Sinotype III. The typeface rendered characters as a series of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in a 16-by-16 dot matrix typeface — that is, a 16-by-16-pixel square. It was a historic achievement, but Sinotype III’s designers had seemingly no experience working with Chinese-language fonts, and their attempts to replicate the smooth lines of Chinese ideograms within a blocky grid of pixels left much to be desired, aesthetically speaking.

 

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Twelve years ago, a young type designer created a rudimentary font based on a photocopy of the Kangxi Dictionary. Within months, it was on everything from restaurant menus to propaganda posters.
http://ow.ly/50fi50KG5bZ

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How a 300-Year-Old Dictionary Birthed China’s Comic Sans
Twelve years ago, a young type designer created a rudimentary font based on a photocopy of the Kangxi Dictionary. Within months, it was on everything from restaurant menus to propaganda posters.

Details of The Kangxi Dictionary. Courtesy of The Palace Museum
 

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Whatever their current appeal, these characters had little aesthetic value to the people who made them. Invented during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), woodblock printing was a laborious process. To create a single-page woodblock, scribes first wrote the characters on paper before transferring the text in reverse onto a wooden block, which engravers then chiseled down to produce raised characters suitable for use in printing.

Woodblock printing became the default for “mass-market” literature and classic works of philosophy in medieval and early modern China. Even after the advent of movable type printing during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), printers continued to use woodblock presses for key titles like the Confucian Four Books and Five Classics.

 

 

[Randy W]

The All-Too Complicated History of Simplified Chinese
Often portrayed as the result of a revolutionary pro-literacy movement, many “simplified” characters have existed for hundreds of years.

Read more: http://ow.ly/9CQI50MsiCA

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The All-Too Complicated History of Simplified Chinese
Often portrayed as the result of a revolutionary pro-literacy movement, many “simplified” characters have existed for hundreds of years.

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The classic narrative is that simplified Chinese emerged from the People’s Republic’s language reform movement in the 1950s, part of an official drive to simplify characters in keeping with the way the socialist state revolutionized traditional culture and democratize literacy. In contrast, regions that stuck with traditional characters — Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan — ostensibly did so out of respect for tradition.

This binary distinction between simplified and traditional Chinese is misleading, however. The official “Table of General Standard Chinese Characters,” released in 2013, specifies 8,105 “standard” characters used on the Chinese mainland, of which less than a third came from the 1950s simplification scheme. In other words, if the simplified Chinese used on the mainland and the traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan were separately compiled into dictionaries, the similarities would outnumber the differences. Many characters in simplified Chinese were never simplified at all; some remain complex even after simplification.

 

 

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

MORE (new) simplified characters

The latest version of China’s standardized character set will be officially implemented on August 1, with a total of 88,115 Chinese characters and more than 17,000 rare characters newly added. These new characters will be able to input and displayed on computers, smartphones, and other informaition systems.

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China to ensure rare characters survive digital era

from the People's Daily/Xinhua

Photo taken on April 15, 2022 shows an engraved printing block containing Chinese characters in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province. (Xinhua/Li Bo)

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Chinese authorities and tech companies are working together to speed up the digitalization of rarely-used Chinese characters, which will allow them to be recognized by computers as the country's banks, hospitals, and government units move transactions online.

 . . .

Roughly 60 million people in China have names that contain rare characters, experts said, and a significant number of place names and ancient texts have difficulties being digitalized due to unrecognized characters contained within.

Earlier this month, a village in Yunnan Province soared to prominence as a local family name "Nia," meaning "a flying bird," could not be typed into computers, forcing many villagers surnamed Nia to replace with a similar character meaning "duck" when registering for ID cards.

Lin Sumiao, a lawyer based in Beijing, said her name, containing a rare character "su," was constantly shown as "Lin ? miao" on exam admission cards while she was in school, and the situation still happens when she prints flight boarding passes.

Lin is reluctant to change her given name as it carries special meanings. The character "su" consists of characters "geng" and "sheng," the latter part of the phrase "zi li geng sheng" meaning "to rely on oneself."

"The character contains my parents' wish for me to grow up into an independent soul," she said.

As an ideographic writing, the Chinese characters are difficult to be digitalized, as each character must be represented by a unique code and a unique font, said Huang Shanshan, director of the Chinese information lab of the China Electronics Standardization Institute.

 

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Learning Chinese is difficult. We understand. There are thousands of commonly used Chinese characters, and most of them are structurally complex. Now imagine being tasked with making those characters show up on an early computer screen — a low-powered device invented by and for users of the Latin alphabet. Where would you even begin?

From Aug. 16 to Sept. 28, Sixth Tone will present Hanzi Modern: The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Fonts, an exhibition dedicated to this history at the Zikawei Library in Shanghai. The exhibition begins with the emergence of new and updated Chinese typefaces in the late Qing dynasty and traces their development over the next century, from the modernization movement of the early 20th century and the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1950s to the rise of new, digital design firms in the 1990s and beyond.

Learn more:  https://ow.ly/w48N50PAJqo

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Event: The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Fonts
Sixth Tone holds an exhibition on the modernization of Chinese font design.

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The answer, somewhat counterintuitively, lies in the 19th century — the start of a nearly 150-year process of cross-cultural scientific and artistic innovation that helped bring an ancient language into the digital era.

From Aug. 16 to Sept. 28, Sixth Tone will present Hanzi Modern: The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Fonts, an exhibition dedicated to this history at the Zikawei Library in Shanghai. The exhibition begins with the emergence of new and updated Chinese typefaces in the late Qing dynasty and traces their development over the next century, from the modernization movement of the early 20th century and the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1950s to the rise of new, digital design firms in the 1990s and beyond.

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

How did Chinese characters, or hanzi, make the jump from woodblock printing to digital screens? On Aug. 15, Sixth Tone unveiled “Hanzi Modern: The Past, Present, and Future of Chinese Fonts,” an exhibition dedicated to the technology, culture, politics, and history behind Chinese fonts’ digital transformation.

Check the 360° video of the exhibition: https://interaction.sixthtone.com/feature/2023/The-Hanzi-Modern/index.html
(Interactive video)

 

Edited October 4, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)