Letter from the Far East

In a tiny flat in Peking I heard a 105-year-old Chinese man explain how he was responsible for the capital of China being called Beijing. The centenarian, Mr Zhou Youguang, was the founder of Pinyin, the system of phonetic transliteration for all the Chinese characters. It might be argued that he is one of the most influential men of our age, for he has made it possible for foreigners to speak Mandarin without writing the characters and dramatically improved the literacy rate of the Chinese population. Chairman Mao had asked Stalin for advice on the gloomy 80 per cent illiteracy rate in China in the 1950s. Comrade Joseph thought that the only way forward was for China to use phonetics to substitute the complicated Chinese characters. Mao listened and in 1958 Mr Zhou’s Pinyin system was adopted by the nation. Today, each street name and every other Chinese sign is accompanied by what seems like pidgin English, but is in fact Pinyin, invented by Mr Zhou as an artificial language. It’s not dissimilar to Esperanto. It’s a howler to believe that the name of the capital of China has changed from a English word to a Chinese one. Beijing is a Pinyin word, one that is perennially mispronounced, even by the BBC.

Mr Zhou (whose name would have been transliterated as Mr Chou before Pinyin) spoke excellent English with Stephen Fry, who was interviewing him for a documentary on world languages. ‘Please excuse my English for it is a bit rusty!’ said Mr Zhou, charmingly. ‘I am 106 by Chinese counting; God must be very busy because he has forgotten me!’ It was, incredibly, Mr Zhou’s first television interview, and we all felt we were witnessing one of those rare moments in history. And it was rather poignant that this extraordinary sage should be living in a very modest flat, incognito and all but forgotten.