A China-manufactured Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter from 1971 is on display in the Museum of Chinese in America in New York (YU SHUJUN) 

An exhibition on Chinese typewriters, Radical Machines: Chinese in the Information Age, is being held at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York. The installation is providing an unprecedented insight into the ever-evolving history of the world’s oldest living language. 

Several rare Chinese typewriters and computers are on display, plus an array of historic photographs, telegraph codebooks and typing manuals. Among them is the oldest known Chinese typewriter in the Western hemisphere.   

“Technology is a major factor in why writing systems and languages change,” said Tom Mullaney, the exhibition's curator and an associate professor of Chinese history at Stanford University. “I became interested in Chinese information technology 10 years ago when I started to explore how Chinese writing has changed through history.”  

How to build a Chinese typewriter was a major engineering puzzle of the modern age, said Mullaney. Through examining the history of the Chinese typewriter--a machine that inputs a language with no alphabet and yet has more than 70,000 characters, the exhibition explores the historical significance and technological innovation behind the Chinese typing machine. It also details the role it played in the survival of the language in the information age.  

Chinese typing manuals on display. A 1956 version (left) and the last model ever manufactured in 1989 (right) (YU SHUJUN) 

Mullaney said the machines and artifacts on display were the culmination of cross-cultural exchange between Chinese students studying at American institutions and Chinese investors partnering with American corporations. American linguists and technologists also participated in the project.  

Nancy Yao Maasbach, President of the MOCA, said, “This exhibition enables us to combine the depth of our own collection of Chinese typewriter-related artifacts with the largest modern Chinese information-technology collection in the world. Together they tell the untold story of how the greatest minds came together in the spirit of Chinese-American cross-cultural exchange to solve the linguistic and engineering puzzle that is the Chinese typewriter.”  

The exhibition started on October 18 and will last till March 24, 2019. 

(Reporting from New York)

Copyedited by Craig Crowther 

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