In other words, to type a Chinese character is essentially to punch in a set of instructions—a code if you will, to retrieve a specific character. Mullaney calls Chinese typists “code conscious.” Dozens of ways to input Chinese now exist, but the Western world mostly remains stuck typing letter-by-letter on a computer keyboard, without taking full advantage of software-augmented shortcuts. Because, he asks, “How do you convince a person who's been told for a century and a half that their alphabet is the greatest thing since sliced bread?”

It’s China’s awkward history with the telegraph and the typewriter, argues Mullaney, that primed Chinese speakers to take full advantage of software when it came along—to the point where it’s now faster to input Chinese than English.

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In the beginning, it really was awkward.

When the telegraph came to China in 1871, the Chinese first had to bend their language to Western technology. The solution, devised by a Dutch astronomer and a French customs officer, was to assign a four-digit code to each character, which was then translated into the dots and dashes of Morse. This worked, but it put Chinese at a disadvantage. Numbers in Morse code contain five dots or dashes and letters only one to three, which made Chinese telegrams both more expensive and less efficient. By some accounts, when former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was on the road, sending telegrams was his biggest expense.

The Chinese typewriter was a cumbersome object, too. It had a tray bed of more than 2,000 common characters. A typist selected characters by maneuvering a chassis on top of the tray bed, pushing a lever that struck the chosen character against the page. If you wanted to type an uncommon character, you had to go hunting for it among thousands in a secondary tray bed.

At the same time, dozens of inventors tried their hand on better ways to send telegrams or build typewriters. To do so, they had to come up with new ways of indexing Chinese characters, breaking them into subunits. Take, for example, the “four corner method,” which notes the shape in each corner. Ten different shapes are assigned a number 0 through 9; going around the corners in a clockwise direction gives you a four-digit code to send telegrams or to organize characters in a typewriter. If you don’t write Chinese, this might not seem particularly profound. But in fact, it is a complete rethinking of the Chinese character.

It would be like, if instead of spelling an English word letter by letter, you represent it by noting the number of letters that are ascenders (d b l h), descenders (p y g j), or neither. The idea of choosing characters by inputting an abstract code was part of Chinese technology from the start.

So when the computer comes along, the number of ways to input Chinese just exploded in the “input wars of the 70s and 80s,” says Mullaney. Different input methods require different ways of thinking about Chinese characters. You might do it based on the four corners or three corners or radicals (subunits of Chinese characters) or stroke order. Others experimented with pronunciation-based systems that used the QWERTY keyboard, taking advantage of software to translate letters into characters. And in a real breakthrough, these systems were now predictive. You, might, for example, input a string of characters by typing just the first letter corresponding with each character. In other words, it’s predictive text.