Kingdom of Characters - by Jing Tsu

ISBN: 9780735214736
Date read: 2026-01-27
How strongly I recommend it: 2/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Since I’m learning to read and write Chinese, I thought this was going to go more into the history of the characters themselves, but it was about the technological innovations that enabled their adoption and distribution.

my notes

Drawn by pamphlets and flyers that mythologized the rich bounties of the golden hills of California, Chinese immigrants poured into San Francisco to work in the gold mines during the 1849 gold rush.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coolies worked on the transcontinental railway from 1865 to 1869.
By the 1870s, Chinese laborers accounted for one-fourth of the workers in California.
They made up 90 percent of the labor force that built the transcontinental railway.