China: Empire of Living Symbols

This is a fabulous book on Chinese, though it's not a textbook on learning Chinese. It tells the history of the development of many characters, and is fascinating. The main part of the book goes back to the oracle bones and ancient bronzes and shows quite a few of the characters and how they developed. A chapter in the back of the book (where I started) tells how the characters were invented. It tells of the various strategies for creating characters. Every strategy devised for creating characters ended up being exhausted, and new strategies had to be created. One of the last strategies was the `radical' concept, where they would take an existing character that sounded like a word that didn't have a character, and they would add a `radical' to it to create a new character. This concept allowed for almost a limitless number of characters and was one of the final strategies. It's interesting to note that in ancient China, most of the words for daily life had no written equivalent. Writing for the most part was reserved for administrative tasks, record-keeping, etc. Words that were used for daily life for thousands of years had no written equivalent and posed great challenges to create characters.
The author is Swedish and the book was translated from Swedish to English recently.
It would be a great book for anyone studying Chinese, but it would also be a great book for Chinese children to learn more about the history of China. It really is a fascinating book that I can hardly put down...
This book also helps with learning (& remembering!) Chinese characters, but a reader does not have to be learning to read and write Chinese characters in order to gain a lot of insight not only into the language, but the Chinese culture itself.
By the way, did you know that the character for `self' Zì, originally meant `small nose'? In western society, when people refer to themselves, they may point at their own chest, whereas in China, traditionally, people pointed to their nose. That's how the character Zì, [which originally meant `nose'] came also to mean `myself', or `self']. It's also interesting to note that the radical for Bí [nose] is the same character for Zì [nose]. In fact, Zì means `small nose' and Bí means `big nose'.

The book is filled with all sorts of fascinating things...

I cannot believe how beautifully this book was written. Even as a Chinese educated in China, I was fascinated by this little book. It is not only about Chinese language but also about a people, a nation, and a civilization. This book made me re-think about my cultural heritage that I am extremely pround of already. I recommend this book to anybody who is interested in China and humanity in general.
Thank you Cecilia Lindqvist. Your professional expertise inspired me and your lovely sense of humor made my days.

When I was a kid I though that the Chinese written language was impossible to learn (unless you were born there) and that the signs were just a bunch of arbitrary strokes impossible to remember.

All this changed when I picked up this book in the 1990s. I then discovered the connection between the Chinese culture and history, and the written Chinese language. It is thick with carefully chosen and categorized stories, often experienced by the author herself, about how a Chinese character reveals something about Chinese history, thinking, or everyday life in ancient times. The Chinese themselves are often strangely unaware about the etymology of their Hànzi characters, since the school system encourages rote learning. Its richly illustrated by drawings and photographs that shows similarities between something and the character representing it. E.g. how the character for "well" resembles the ancient Chinese way of constructing wells, quite different from western ones.


What this book is not:
- Its very, far from anything like a textbook in Chinese writing. But it may be the best soft introduction to such a topic. Its well suited for people that want to know something about the Chinese language, but don't want to spend time studying it.
- Its not a dictionary. It covers 500 characters in 350 pages. The characters are not selected because of word frequency, or usefulness in everyday life etc. Many characters covered are really rare.
- It doesn't say anything about how the signs are pronounced. It is strictly about how the Chinese culture embedded in the written language.
- If you stop reading before the last chapter you will believe that the Chinese language are mostly made up of ideographs or pictograms (a picture of something in the real world). In fact more than 90% of Characters are made up of Radical-Phonetic signs (explained in the final chapter) and character do not resemble anything "in real life". To "unlearn" this misunderstanding I will recommend J. DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy"

Because of this book, I moved to China and studied there in 2005. Without getting inspiration from this book a few years ago, I would never have thought it was worth even trying to understand the Chinese language.

CHINA : Empire of Living Symbols. By Cecilia Lindqvist. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. 424 pp. New York : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1991 (1989). ISBN 0-201-57009-2 (hbk.)

Although Cecilia Lindqvist is a professional scholar of Chinese and was in fact a pupil of Bernhard Karlgren, one of the greatest sinologists of the 20th century, she is one of those rare scholars who, instead of devoting herself exclusively to academic publications, has not been afraid to produce a book designed for the general reader.

Her book, though founded in a specialist knowledge of both Chinese and China, where she lived for many years, is written with a light and engaging touch, is magnificently illustrated with numerous photographs, both black-and-white and color, line drawings, maps, Chinese characters, etc., and is so beautifully produced that it could be read or browsed with interest by anyone.

Her book attempts so many things, and succeeds so well in them all, that it would be difficult to overpraise it. It introduces us to the pictorial element of the Chinese script in a more engaging way than has ever been done before, and becomes in fact a painless way of acquiring a vocabulary of the basic building blocks which go to make up Chinese characters.

It relates these basic pictograms to a wide range of topics in Chinese cultural history in a sumptuously illustrated series of chapters dealing with - Oracle Bones and Bronzes; Man, Mankind; Water and Mountains ; Wild Animals; Domestic Animals; Carts, Roads, and Boats; Farming; Wine and Jars; Hemp and Silk; Bamboo and Tree; Tools and Weapons; Roofs and Houses; Books and Musical Instruments; Numbers and Other Abstract Characters. It also includes a chapter on Meaning and Sound which traces the development of Chinese writing from the early pictographs through to phonetic compounds.

The book is rounded out with a gallery of superb color photographs; a section on Character Stroke Order; a really excellent Bibliography of both Western and Chinese books (which unfortunately gives only the pinyin and lacks the sinographs for the latter); a table of Dynasties and Periods; and a full Index.

The book is a curious size, having been made 8.5 by 8.5 inches to accomodate its many photographs, is bound in full linen, stitched, and beautifully printed on a very strong smooth ivory-tinted paper.

Anyone who, after reading the book, would like to learn more about China's culture or writing system, will find that the fully annotated Bibliography with its extensive list of interesting works for further reading will provide many leads. These range from general books on the science and civilization of China up to such things as specialist Chinese dictionaries of the ancient bone and bronze forms of the characters.

Lindqvist's love of China, its people, language, and culture shines through on every page, and her book is clearly a labor of love. It can be recommended without reservation as a marvelous introduction to one of the richest and most fascinating cultures on earth.

Glad to see it was translated from Swedish. It is quite good, I have seen other interpretations of some characters than the ones she gives. Also I was hoping she would cover more characters. Still a very interesting book.

Tom Anderson
Anderson Analytics, LLC
http://www.andersonanalytics.com