China would not be a technological power if this imprisoned scientist had not deciphered how to write Mandarin with a QWERTY keyboard
Unlike the Latin alphabet, Chinese has no letters or phonetic spelling. Each word is an ideogram loaded with history and visual form. This made it almost impossible to incorporate them into the logic of software programming (or into the limited space of keyboards).
Zhi set out to solve this problem (after all, it’s not like he had anything else to do at that moment), and found an unexpected tool for it: the lid of his teacup. Using it as an improvised whiteboard, he began to break down Chinese characters into their basic components —called radicals— and to assign them letters from the Latin alphabet based on their pronunciation in pinyin.
