64 Kennedy, “A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese,” 589.
65 Ibid., 588–591. Li extended the corpus to analyze 1,497,182 Chinese characters. Lu-Ho Rural Service Bureau (Luhe xiangcun fuwubu) [潞河鄉村服務部], ed., 2,000 Foundational Characters for Daily Use (Richang yingyong jichu erqian zi) [日常應用基礎二千字] (n.p., 1938 [November]), Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, Papers of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction, MS COLL/IIRR.
66 Kennedy, “A Minimum Vocabulary in Modern Chinese,” 591.
67 Zhou Houkun, “Patent Document for Common Usage Typewriter Tray (Tongsu dazipan shangqueshu) [通俗打字盤商榷書],” Educational Review (Jiaoyu zazhi) [教育雜誌] 9, no. 3 (March 1917): 12–14. See also Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity, http://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/d/dong-jingan.php
68 Zhou Houkun, “Diagram Explaining Production of Chinese Typewriter (Chuangzhi Zhongguo daziji tushuo) [創制中國打字機圖說],” 28, 31. Praising his Christian missionary predecessor by name, Zhou made clear his opinion that “the honor of being the ‘inventor of the first Chinese typewriter’ should go to [Devello Sheffield].” At the same time, however, Zhou claimed autonomy on behalf of his own invention, declaring his unawareness of the American’s machine during his development process.
69 “Diagram Explaining Production of Chinese Typewriter (Chuangzhi Zhongguo daizji tushuo) [創制中國打字機圖說],” Zhonghua gongchengshi xuehui huikan 2, no. 10 (1915): 15–29; “Chinaman Invents Chinese Typewriter Using 4,000 Characters,” New York Times (July 23, 1916), SM15.
70 Ibid.
71 Thomas Sammons, “Chinese Typewriter of Unique Design,” Department of Commerce Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Commerce Reports 3, nos. 154–230 (May 24, 1916): 20.
72 Ibid.
73 “It Takes Four Thousand Characters to Typewrite in Chinese,” Popular Science Monthly 90, no. 4 (April 1917): 599.
74 See Abigail Markwyn, “Economic Partner and Exotic Other: China and Japan at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 444, 454–459.
75 Temporary Catalogue of the Department of Fine Arts Panama-Pacific International Exposition: Official Catalogue of Exhibitors, rev. ed. (San Francisco: The Wahlgreen Co., 1915), 32.
76 Key information comes from Qi Xuan’s exclusion act case file. A Chinese Exclusion Act Case File was a dossier created when a person of Chinese ancestry (both citizens and noncitizens) entered the United States, and then expanded upon during any subsequent reentry. Such records were maintained between the years 1884 and 1943, initiated as part of federal anti-Chinese immigration restrictions enacted during the Arthur administration, and finally repealed in 1943. Exclusion Act dossiers typically included photographs, certificates containing basic demographic information, and interrogation transcripts.
77 Elsewhere, Qi Xuan is reported to be a student in Shanxi Province. See “A Chinese Typewriter,” Peking Gazette (November 1, 1915), 3; and “A Chinese Typewriter,” Shanghai Times (November 19, 1915), 1.
78 In his article on Qi Xuan’s machine, C.C. Chang refers to a Professor “Brayns,” but this is almost certainly a typo. Employment and faculty records from New York University at the time make reference, however, to a “William Remington Bryans,” professor of engineering at NYU at this time. See C.C. Chang, “Heun Chi Invents a Chinese Typewriter,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 10, no. 7 (April 1, 1915): 459.
79 The second cylinder was surfaced with paper, upon which was written a key to locate these glyphs, organized into 110 groups.
80 Heun Chi [Qi Xuan], “Apparatus for Writing Chinese,” United States Patent no. 1260753 (filed April 17, 1915; patented March 26, 1918).
81 Medhurst, China: Its State and Prospects, 558.
82 Robert S. Brumbaugh, “Chinese Typewriter,” United States Patent no. 2526633 (filed September 25, 1946; patented October 24, 1950).
83 Wang Kuoyee, “Chinese Typewriter,” United States Patent no. 2534330 (filed March 26, 1948; patented December 19, 1950).
84 For a terrific and vividly illustrated introduction to early twentieth-century graphic design in China, see Scott Minick and Jiao Ping, Chinese Graphic Design in the Twentieth Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990).
85 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
86 Chang, “Heun Chi Invents a Chinese Typewriter,” 459.
87 “4,200 Characters on New Typewriter; Chinese Machine Has Only Three Keys, but There Are 50,000 Combinations; 100 Words in TWO HOURS; Heuen Chi, New York University Student, Patents Device Called the First of Its Kind,” New York Times (March 23, 1915), 6.
88 Official Congressional Directory (Washington, DC: United States Congress, 1916 [December]), 377.
89 “4,200 Characters on New Typewriter,” 6.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 “The Newest Inventions,” Washington Post (March 21, 1917), 6.
93 See, for example, “An Explanation of the Chinese Typewriter and the Twentieth-Century War Effort (Zhongguo daziji zhi shuoming yu ershi shiji zhi zhanzheng liqi) [中國打字機之說明與二十世紀之戰爭力氣],” Huanqiu [環球 The World’s Chinese Students’ Journal] 1, no. 3 (September 15, 1916): 1–2.
94 Chang, “Heun Chi Invents a Chinese Typewriter,” 459.
95 Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, May 16, 1919, in Zhang Yuanji quanji [張元濟], vol. 6 (juan 6), 56 [“山西留學紐約紀君製有打字機,雖未見其儀器,而所打之字則甚明晰,似此周厚坤所製為優”]. “Mr. Ji, a Shanxi native studying overseas in New York, has built a typewriter. Although I haven’t seen the machine, the characters it types are quite clear. It appears this machine might surpass that of Zhou Houkun.” “Shanxi liuxue Niuyue Ji jun zhiyou daziji, sui wei jian qi yiqi, er suo da zhi zi ze shen mingxi, si ci Zhou Houkun suo zhi wei you [山西留學紐約紀君製有打字機,雖未見其儀器,而所打之字則甚明晰,似此周厚坤所製為優].”
96 H.K. Chow [Zhou Houkun], “The Problem of a Typewriter for the Chinese Language,” Chinese Students’ Monthly (April 1, 1915), 435–443.
97 Zhou Houkun, “Chuangzhi Zhongguo daziji tushuo,” 31.
98 Ibid. All usage is as it appears in the original.
99 Qi Xuan [Heuen Chi], “The Principle of My Chinese Typewriter,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 10, no. 8 (May 1, 1915): 513–514.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.
103 “New Invention of a Chinese Typing Machine (Zhongguo dazi jiqi zhi xin faming) [中國打字機器新發明],” Tongwen bao [通問報] 656 (1915): 8.
104 Zhou would receive 160 yuan a month, and thereafter be retained as a consultant following his move to Nanjing. As Commercial Press continued to develop the machine, Zhou would work for the press three months out of the year, receiving a total of 600 yuan for his services. Zhang Yuanji, diary entry, March 1, 1916 (Wednesday), in Zhang Yuanji quanji [張元濟], vol. 6 (juan 6), 19–20. This is the earliest entry referring to Zhou Houkun.
4
What Do You Call a Typewriter with No Keys?
The Chinese typewriter manufactured by the Commercial Press solves a serious problem in office administration in China. The machine has all the advantages of a foreign typewriter.
—Brochure for the Shu-style Chinese typewriter at the 1926 Philadelphia world’s fair
With its more than one hundred acres of botanical gardens, the Huntington in San Marino, California, transports hundreds of thousands of visitors each year into an otherworldly terrain populated by the Mexican Twin-Spined Cactus and the South American Heart of Flame. Inside, the library and museum draw scholars from around the world thanks to a world-renowned collection of rare books and artifacts on the American West, the history of science, and a range of other subj
ects. The Huntington also enjoys a rare distinction that few people are aware of: it is home to one of the oldest surviving Chinese typewriters in the world, the “Shu-style Chinese typewriter” manufactured by Commercial Press in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s (figure 4.1).
4.1 Shu-style Chinese typewriter, Huntington Library
The machine belonged to You Chung (Y.C.) Hong (1898–1977), a Chinese-American immigration attorney who served the Los Angeles Chinatown community. Establishing design patterns that would be followed by all mass-manufactured Chinese typewriters in history, it was a “common usage” machine featuring a rectangular tray bed containing approximately 2,500 character slugs. As in movable type printing, these character slugs were not fixed to the machine, but rather free-floating. If one were to remove a Chinese typewriter tray bed and turn it over, that is, the characters would spill out onto the floor, “pieing the type.”1 And, as with every Chinese typewriter ever mass-manufactured, it was a typewriter with no keyboard and no keys.
The tray bed of the Shu-style machine was divided into three zones based upon the relative frequency of characters: a zone of highest-usage characters, located centrally on the tray bed in columns sixteen through fifty-one; secondary usage characters, located on the right and left flanks of the tray bed, in columns one through fifteen and fifty-six through sixty-seven; and special usage characters, limited to columns fifty-two through fifty-five. Less commonly used characters, referred to as beiyongzi, were placed in a separate wooden box, a kind of lexical storage facility from which the typist could select characters and place them temporarily in his or her tray bed using tweezers. In this wooden case were housed approximately 5,700 additional characters.2
By the time of my visit in 2010, the characters on the tray bed of the Huntington Library’s specimen had long since rotted, exhibiting the consistency of weathered graphite or limestone. They had become so fragile, in fact, that when a curator demonstrated the typing mechanism to me, the gear accidentally shattered the faces of three of them. As for the characters located in the box of “lower-usage characters,” these had simply fused together into a mass of gray.
Even in this aged condition, though, the machine still bore the signature of what had clearly been a deeply personal relationship between the device, the typist who used it, and the man in whose employ this typist worked. As I moved around the machine, shifting my angle of view, fleeting constellations emerged from out of the brittle, charcoal-colored mass—shimmers of characters exhibiting greater reflectivity than their neighbors on account of being replaced more recently, likely because they had been used more frequently when the machine was still in service. Shifting to my right, and leaning toward the machine, the first shimmer of characters came to light: qiao (僑 “emigrant”), yuan (遠 “far away, distant”), and ji (急 “urgent”). With a slight adjustment of my orientation this first constellation melted back into the charcoal bath, and a second constellation came into view: zao (遭 “to encounter hardship”), xi (希 “to hope for, long for”), and meng (夢 “dream, to dream”). Each of these constellations was accompanied by more commonplace terms as well: yi (一 “one”), bu (不 “no, not”), shang (上 “atop”), and qu (去 “to go”). Not unexpectedly, one of the crispest characters on the tray bed was hong (洪), Y.C. Hong’s surname. Traces of the life this machine had lived still lingered, even decades later.
In this chapter, we leave behind the technical blueprints of inventors, linguists, and engineers, and explore instead the lived histories of Chinese typewriting. The Chinese typewriters in this chapter will not be prototypes nor the illusions of foreign cartoonists, but fully formed commodities that companies manufactured and marketed, that schools and training institutes explained and taught, and that typists used in the course of their careers. We will focus on the many worlds of the machine during the early twentieth century, from the advent of its mass manufacture at the Shanghai-based Commercial Press—the preeminent center of print capitalism in Republican China3—through the proliferation of Chinese typewriting schools in which young women and men studied this new technology and later employed it in a widening arena of government offices, banks, private companies, colleges, and even elementary schools. It is here that we will strain to see and hear the Chinese typewriter within its own linguistic context, attending to a history all but drowned out by the clichés of China’s technolinguistic backwardness we have examined thus far.
Even as we begin to observe the Chinese typewriter in these more local-level and intimate contexts, however, at no point will we find it entirely “at home” or in its “natural habitat.” Even with its unique mechanical design, its training regimens, its type and extent of usage, the gender makeup of the clerical workforce who used it, and the iconography and culture of the machine itself, at no point would either the Commercial Press machine or its later competitors ever have constituted the stable, accepted “counterpart” or “equivalent” of the Western machine—although not for lack of trying. Throughout the period, manufacturers, inventors, and language reformers alike remained acutely aware that the Chinese typewriter was at all times being measured against the “true” typewriter: the machines of Remington, Underwood, Olympia, and Olivetti, which steadily strengthened their hegemonic grip across the globe. Perhaps if the Chinese typewriter had never been conceptualized as a “typewriter” in the first place—if, instead, it had been described as a “tabletop movable type inscription machine,” or as some other niche apparatus disconnected from the larger, global history of modern information—constant comparisons between it and the “real” typewriter might never have been invoked. But this did not happen: the machine was a daziji—a typewriter—and by consequence was inescapably enmeshed within this broader, global framework.
During this period, the tensions between the Chinese typewriter and the “real” typewriter were pronounced. To function and make headway in the Chinese-language environments of government, business, and education, the Chinese typewriter would need to attend completely to the real-world necessities and practicalities of the Chinese language itself—and yet, as a “typewriter,” it would need to be legible to an outside world wherein resided the sole authority to decide which machines did or did not merit this title. The Chinese typewriter, and Chinese linguistic modernity more broadly, were thus caught between two impossibilities: to mimic the technolinguistic modernity that was taking shape in the alphabetic world, or to declare complete independence of this world and set out on a path of technolinguistic autarky. With neither option being feasible, Chinese linguistic modernity was caught irresolvably between mimesis and alterity.
From Movable Type to the Movable Typewriter: The Shu Zhendong Machine
Following the debut of his prototype, and particularly after he took up his position within Commercial Press in Shanghai, Zhou Houkun enjoyed a modicum of celebrity. On July 3, 1916, he demonstrated his machine at the Chinese Railway Institute in Shanghai, one of his first appearances as a representative of Commercial Press.4 Weeks later, Zhou continued his demonstrations at the Jiangsu Province Education Committee Summer Supplementary School, where the young engineer was praised for creating a machine that would print 2,000 characters each hour, rather than the 3,000 per day achievable by hand.5
Commercial Press remained hesitant about bringing Zhou’s device into production, however. While no sources clearly identify the reasons for this equivocation, one factor was undoubtedly the design of the apparatus itself. As examined in chapter 3, Zhou Houkun’s common usage machine featured a cylindrical character matrix upon which were etched Chinese characters in permanent and unchangeable form. In stark contrast to common usage as it functioned within its original context of typesetting, or even the earlier Chinese typewriter designed by Devello Sheffield, the characters on Zhou’s machine were completely fixed—impossible to adjust to different terminological needs and contexts. This posed a problem. As examined in the preceding chapter, there had been some hope that the tension within common usage might
be resolved—at least for the Chinese masses—by means of promoting greater usage of “foundational character” sets within the contexts of both formal and informal education. If mass literacy could be achieved by statistically determining a limited set of characters that people needed to know, or would tend to employ, then in theory it might be possible to design a “foundational” Chinese typewriter tray bed to form a perfect fit with this mass vocabulary. For specialists and professionals, however, a fixed set of 2,500 characters would never be enough. For those working in banks, police stations, or government ministries, day-to-day language varied widely, which meant that Zhou Houkun’s original, unchangeable design would inevitably limit the device’s utility. To transform the common usage model into a workable technolinguistic solution for Chinese typewriting demanded that these devices offer up a measure of flexibility and customizability.
As early as winter 1917, relations between Zhou and Commercial Press began to sour, with the engineer and his corporate patrons drifting in separate directions.6 Zhou proposed a visit to the United States, where he hoped to inspect American typewriter production and develop an improved version of his machine to better suit the needs of potential customers. Zhou offered to cover the cost of his own travel, but requested that Commercial Press commit to providing the cost of manufacturing an improved machine he planned to complete upon his return. Zhang Yuanji declined, calling the financial commitment untenable. Zhou countered, offering to cover all expenses himself, but requesting that Commercial Press agree to sell and distribute the machine on his behalf. This offer was rebuffed as well. “I sense that it would be best for us to cancel our old contract,” Zhang recommended to his associates at the press, “and that [Zhou] handle everything on his own from here on out.”7 Thus came to an end Zhou Houkun’s brief relationship with Commercial Press, as well as his long-held dream of being the first to design a commercially successful typewriter for the Chinese language. In the years to come, Zhou returned to his first love of airplane and ship construction, to serve his country by other means.8 Circa 1923, he went on to join the Hanyeping Steel Company as their director of technology.9 Meanwhile, by May 1919, Commercial Press was in possession of Zhou Houkun’s prototype, but had not pursued plans of production.10
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