Join us at the Wende Museum for the story of the MingKwai Chinese Typewriter, a machine of near-mythical reputation that debuted in 1947, disappeared for decades, and was rediscovered in a basement in New York.

Invented by Chinese-born author and translator Lin Yutang, the MingKwai was a revolutionary attempt to rethink the typewriter for the Chinese language. Far more than an unusual writing machine, its ingenious design anticipated ideas that would later become central to Chinese computing and the global digital age.

Dr. Thomas S. Mullaney, Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, brokered the agreement that secured the sole surviving prototype for the public, arranging for it to be entrusted to the Stanford University Libraries. The rediscovery was featured in a front-page article in The New York Times.

In this talk, Mullaney tells the extraordinary story of the MingKwai: how it worked, why it mattered, how it traveled across continents and vanished from view, and how its rediscovery culminated in an effort to preserve it for the public. Drawing on nearly 20 years of research into Chinese information technology, he shows how efforts to solve the challenges of Chinese writing shaped technologies that extend far beyond China.

The program invites audiences to reconsider a larger question: What does the history of the digital age look like when we tell it from beyond the English-speaking world?

The talk is followed by a Q&A and a wine reception in the garden.

Bio

Tom Mullaney is Professor of History at Stanford University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Author of The Chinese Typewriter (John King Fairbank Prize) and How We Disappear, he built the world’s largest collection on East Asian information technology history and negotiated Stanford’s acquisition of the legendary MingKwai typewriter.