Typing Chinese

In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savings into the design, which he named MingKwai, ‘clear and fast’. Despite its celebrity and Lin’s high hopes, the MingKwai never went into production, and the lone prototype had long been assumed lost—until it surfaced in the basement of a New York resident’s late grandfather-in-law earlier this year.

What happened to the MingKwai? Why was its invention groundbreaking, and why did it fail commercially? For Episode 3 of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang speaks with historian Thomas S. Mullaney about the legendary typewriter and the century-old quest to bring the ancient Chinese script into the modern information age.