Kingdom of Characters review: a ‘delightful mix of history and linguistics’

Jing Tsu’s ‘enchanting’ book tells the story of the Chinese language over the past 150 years

Chinese characters
(Image credit: Kilito Chan/Getty Images)

“It sounds like a movie script,” said Laura Hackett in The Sunday Times: the story of a group of Stasi spies “who spent their days interrogating suspects and their evenings penning sonnets”. But it’s true. In East Germany, art was seen as a means of socialist self-improvement and a weapon in the fight against capitalism. Every factory in the German Democratic Republic had its own library, and every industry its own “circle of writing workers”. So perhaps it was inevitable that the secret police got in on the act, forming the Writing Chekists in 1982.

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