Of Barking Dogs, the Pall of Death, and (Cheer up!) Monotonous Days of Language Study
Plus a Coding Challenge of Daunting Complexity
On a shelf across from me lies my pair of fifty-year-old textbooks from a second-year university course in Japanese. Modern Japanese: A Basic Reader (Harvard University Press, 1967) evokes memories of a ten-week summer course in which I leveraged the rough and street-smart Japanese of my youth into fulfilling my language requirements. It served that purpose. And I learned hundreds of kanji (Chinese characters), which I then proceeded to lose in the shuffle and redirection of life.
Within easy reach on my left is A Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese, which now supports my occasional forays into resurrecting those kanji of old. But alas! My memory is no longer as supple as it once was. Though it does arouse my sympathy for my great grandparents as they tackled Chinese in 1890, and from a cold-start Virginian tongue.
For new missionaries in China, advice on language learning was not hard to come by. In 1853, the missionary Eliza Bridgman breezily advised: “To habits of daily intercourse, it is thought by some who have been long in the field, should be added a few hours of study on the written character. This exercise, if it is not too long at one time, is pleasant, and will afford a variety of occupation.”1
But she cautioned against over-indulging in study:
The health of several persons has been seriously injured, and some have lost it entirely, by too close in-door application, to Chinese during the first or second year of a residence in the East, and then too, if a feeling of discouragement takes possession of the mind in the outset, it acts like an incubus—induces sedentary habits, and often the individual disheartened, sinks under the pressure of disease, or returns to his native land.2
The Presbyterian missionary Elias B. Inslee, whose first experience in China was in the 1850s, was a man of rugged character and pronounced opinions. He sharpened Bridgman’s line of thinking by advising missionaries to lay off learning the written characters. Samuel Woodbridge reported that in Inslee’s view, “the study of the written language was a snare of the devil to keep missionaries from learning the spoken dialect.”3
Writing around 1919, Samuel Woodbridge reflected on his early experiences of language study. And if he had communicated this to Sophie and Jimmy Graham while he coached them Mandarin in 1890, he would have scuttled their enthusiasm. He speaks of the “desolation and utter loneliness … like a pall of death” that descends on new missionaries in an “unhealthy Chinese city, surrounded by indifferent or suspicious neighbors.”
The monotonous days of language study, whose tedium is relieved by no diversion except mail from home, sometimes two months late; the silence of the unlighted city at night, broken only by the bark of a dog or the sound of some heathen service or festivities; the thought that one is unwelcome and out of touch; the physical helplessness; the dark outlook; these things would often drive the missionary to blank despair, did he not habitually look to God and realize that he bears a life-giving message to lost and dying men.4
The Chinese script, which confounded many Westerners, was the pride of Chinese civilization. It had long ago been adapted by the Japanese and Koreans. But for China as a whole, the formidable difficulty of achieving even basic literacy had indeed created a divide between the educated, literary class, and the uneducated, illiterate masses. The literacy rate in 1890 hovered around fifteen or sixteen percent of the population. And rural China held those numbers down, for it was a mass of “character-blind” illiteracy.5 But for many the written language was imbued with an aura of authority, embossed with the revered legacy of the past. For the written language endowed legitimacy on those who had mastered it.
But we should not forget that rural life fed on face-to-face relationships that scarcely required the mediation of written language.6 As a people, the Chinese participated in an oral world that was rich in traditional wisdom, lore, and legend, much of it embedded in song, poetry, drama, and recitations.
Nevertheless, for the illiterate, opportunities to reach beyond the village, to gain access to deeper sources of learning, to master the classics, and ascend the echelons of power—or even to engage in commercial transactions beyond their local ambit—these were severely curtailed, if not closed. For the rural millions—those “Old Hundred Names”7 —the currency of everyday life was in speaking and hearing and seeing, and so following in the precepts and footprints of those who had passed this way before.8
Meanwhile, on the wider stage of history and nations, something else was going on. And it was consequential. In the nineteenth century, the advent of the telegraph—that primitive Internet of foreign relations, military defense, banking, and trade—underscored China’s language barrier. A phonetic system or twenty-six-letter alphabet could be readily communicated by telegraphic dots and dashes. Not so the elaborate idiograms, which taxed memories, carried multiple meanings, and were traditionally shaped by brush and ink.9
The Chinese characters represented by the Romanized spelling yi numbered around two hundred, though each of these as characters could be distinguished by sight. For the telegraph, the solution was to construct a cumbersome table of thousands of characters, each with a four-digit code assigned it. And while this system worked, the telegraphic dots and dashes were multiplied, the labor intensified, and the pricing was punishing.
Table of Chinese characters with four-digit telegraph codes (in Chinese numbers).
As a portal of intercultural communication, the system of Chinese characters presented a labyrinth of potential wrong turns. Nevertheless it was so deeply a part of Chinese culture that it was inconceivable that, as a matter of late-breaking and Western-imposed urgency, it should be set aside for a phonetic alphabet. Or that it should be flattened and shaped on the anvil of an inglorious Romanized script. Modernizing reforms of the written language would come, but they would come on Chinese terms.10 For even the conquering Manchus of the seventeenth century had submitted to the yoke of the Chinese language.
And yet…. If the telegraph had introduced a barrier, the advent of the computer keyboard raised the stakes to a perilous degree. For now China was in imminent danger of being left behind! For a fascinating podcast telling the story of the QWERTY keyboard’s adaptation to entering Chinese characters into computers, listen to Radiolab on The Wubi Effect .11
Meanwhile, for our nineteenth-century missionaries—a People of the Book—the difficulties of literacy remained. And they were to be overcome by dint of hard work.
Eliza J. Gillett Bridgman, Daughters of China; or, Sketches of Domestic Life in the Celestial Empire (New York, 1853), 34.
Bridgman, Daughters of China, 35.
Samuel Isett Woodbridge, Fifty Years in China (Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1919), 51.
Woodbridge, Fifty Years, 37-38.
Fei, Xiatong, From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society (University of California Press, 1992), 78.
Fei, From the Soil, 81-86, 91.
“Old Hundred Names” (lao baixing) is a Chinese expression for “common folk,” those who are known by the one hundred common surnames.
Fei, From the Soil, 94.
Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books, 2023), 9-10.
This is the fascinating story told by Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.
A hat tip to Andy Le Peau for pointing this out to me! See too Jing Tsu’s Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.