Looking Back: What a Long Lost Typewriter Says About Chinese Culture

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0:39Start 2026 on a high note and invest in a public service that matters to you. Visit plus.npr.org. Thanks. Now here's the show. Today on State of the World, what a long-lost typewriter says about Chinese culture.

1:01You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. As we say goodbye to 2025, our international reporters are looking back at some of the stories they covered in the last year. NPR's Emily Feng covers China, and she's here with me. Emily, what was your most memorable story of the last year? One of my favorite stories of this year was about a Chinese typewriter. It was discovered in someone's basement, and it recently went on public display this year, so I wanted to go see it. This was some special typewriter from the past?

1:36It turns out that there's only one of these typewriters that was ever made. People thought it was lost to history. And then it showed up in someone's basement. And it's important because it was one of the first times that someone succeeded in creating a machine that could type the Chinese language, which is, if people are not familiar with Chinese, a series of pictographic characters, not a Roman alphabet. And that created this massive problem for engineers and intellectuals in the early 20th century who wanted to be part of the computer revolution but didn't have a keyboard that represented the Chinese language.

2:07That sounds great. Let's listen to your report from June of 2025. Stanford professor Thomas Mullaney was at a conference last year when he got a message. Someone in upstate New York had found a strange machine in their basement and posted a picture of it online. It was a sleepless night. I was randomly searching who the owner might be. Mulini spent 20 years studying Chinese computers. Admittedly, that sounds niche, but China's entry into modern computing has changed the technology we use today. To do that, some of the brightest Chinese minds of the 20th century had to figure out how to type the complex pictographs that make up written Chinese.

2:48One man, this man, succeeded more than any other before him. His name was Lin Yutang. Here is a recording of him speaking in 1967. He made just one prototype of his Chinese typewriter. I had really, truly thought it was gone. But last year, Mulaney confirmed that machine found in that New York basement was the only ever prototype of Lin's typewriter, called the Ming Kui. Mulaney studied the ideas behind the machine for two decades without ever seeing it in person. It's like a family member just showing up at your doorstep, and you just had assumed you would never see them. The story of why such a typewriter even exists runs parallel to the political upheaval and conflict over Chinese identity and politics in the 20th century.

3:34Lin was born in 1895 in southern China during the tail end of a failing Qing dynasty. Student activists and radical thinkers were desperate to reform and to strengthen China. Some proposed dismantling traditional Chinese culture in favor of Western science and technology and eliminating Chinese characters altogether in favor of a Roman alphabet. But Jia Fang Cai, the director of the Lin Yutang Foundation in Taiwan, says Lin wanted to chart a middle course, a way that married both East and West and preserved the Chinese language and the digital age. This was a monumental challenge. Chinese has no alphabet.

4:15Instead, it uses tens of thousands of pictographs. Think hieroglyphics of sorts. And when Ling started his work in the early 20th century, there were also hundreds of dialects and languages spoken, meaning there was no singular phonetic spelling of the sound of each word either. He had spent a lot of money on that. A lot. That's Jill Lye Miller, Ling's granddaughter. She says Ling nearly bankrupted himself trying to build his typewriter. And then it was lost to history. Until now. Since being discovered, it's been acquired by Stanford University, and Mullaney, on its campus, carefully opens the machine's wooden casing.

4:56It's a beautifully made piece of machinery. It's so intricate. Mullaney's trying to understand how the machine works, in the far-off dream of perhaps one day building more machines like it. Can I touch it? Yeah, of course. Just don't push down on it. But the typewriter's real genius comes from the way Lin decided to break down Chinese pictographs. By their shapes, not sounds. You search for a certain combination of shapes using its keyboard, then a little pop-up menu offers the typist up to eight possible characters that might match. In this way, the typewriter boasts that it can retrieve up to 90 ,000 characters.

5:31I'm not a theological or religious person. This is like Eve. This is the beginning of it all. Because these concepts underlie how we type Chinese, Japanese, and Korean today. And it's a direct rebuttal to voices in and outside of China that once said that the price of entry to modernity is our culture, our language. I read the manual that comes with the typewriter, types the Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian alphabets, meaning encoded in the machine was an ambitious globalism. Here's Yang Yang Chang, a writer who first wrote about the typewriter's discovery. One thing that was very interesting and very important in Lin Yutang's thinking about Chineseness and Chinese culture is that it must not be insular.

6:15It must have this porous border. It must be capacious and be able to communicate and talk with other cultures. This ability to translate seamlessly between languages and identities draws from Lin's own bilingual and nomadic life. Especially at a time when the cultural and political contours of the world were being redrawn. Redrawn in the wake of a fading Chinese empire. Ling was educated in the U.S. and later, after the Communist Party took control of mainland China, he took up residence in Taiwan, plus the then British colony of Hong Kong. To him, the hope for an open multicultural China, for which he designed the typewriter, no longer existed.

6:58A, B, C. Mullaney, the Stanford professor, is now using a dental mirror to peer inside the machine. He thinks the typewriter perhaps contains one last secret. You'll notice that the ink spool is still there. Mullaney thinks the spool could contain the traces from the last time someone typed on the machine. Meaning, perhaps Ling's words are in this machine too. That was Emily Feng reporting in June of 2025.

7:36That's the State of the World from NPR. Happy holidays, and thanks for listening.