Lost and Found: The Unexpected Journey of the MingKwai Typewriter

It began as an innocuous inquiry on Facebook. Nelson Felix, a resident of New York State, posted in the group ‘What’s My Typewriter Worth?’ about a curious find he made while clearing out the basement of his wife’s grandfather. He shared a few photos. The keys on the typewriter are all in Chinese, Felix noted, and the model does not appear to have ever been sold in the United States. ‘Is it even worth anything?’ he asked (Felix 2025).

By the next day, news of Felix’s find had spread across the Pacific (IT之家 2025). Exclamations of excitement and disbelief flooded the comment section of the original post (see comments to Felix 2025). Thomas S. Mullaney (2025), a historian at Stanford University and the author of The Chinese Typewriter (2018), called it ‘[t]he most important discovery in Chinese history since the rediscovery of Dragon Bones or the Terracotta Warriors’.

The machine is called MingKwai: ‘clear and fast’. Invented by the renowned Chinese scholar and writer Lin Yutang in 1947, it was the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard. Its ingenious design inspired generations of language-processing technology, but only one prototype was made and had long been assumed lost (Mullaney 2017). In recent years, engineering teams and design studios have tried to re-create the device based on available documentation, with limited success (Liu 2024; HTX Studio 2023). The legendary typewriter, like Lin himself, was inimitable.

A prolific author both in his native tongue and in English, Lin was regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century and a peerless interpreter of Chinese culture to the West during his time (Reuters 1976). His creativity extended beyond the page. As he told reporters, he ‘always liked gadgets’ (San Francisco Examiner 1947). For three decades after 1936, Lin lived in New York, where MingKwai was built. Like many of his written works, the pioneering invention bridged the East and the West and propelled the past into the future. The birth of MingKwai and its subsequent journey, from tragic loss to surprising rediscovery, encapsulate an ancient civilisation’s search for modernity and national identity across an uneven world connected by technology yet fractured by politics.

~

The son of a village pastor, Lin grew up in Fujian Province on China’s southern coast, across the strait from the island of Taiwan (Qian 2017). In 1895, months before Lin was born, the Qing Empire lost the First Sino-Japanese War and yielded Taiwan to Japanese rule. Sixteen years later, the Qing Dynasty was overthrown and the newly founded Republic of China struggled to control its vast territory. Lin studied English at St John’s University in Shanghai and earned a master’s degree from Harvard. After completing his doctoral dissertation on ancient Chinese phonetics at the University of Leipzig, he returned to China to teach and soon established himself as one of the country’s most prominent authors (Lin Yutang House 2015).

In 1935, the publication of My Country and My People, written in English and first released in the United States, brought Lin international acclaim. Encouraged by his friend Pearl S. Buck, Lin and his family moved to New York the following year.

While he lived an ocean away, the homeland was never far from Lin’s mind. In essays and books, he described his country’s illustrious past and trying present to a Western audience, and contemplated China’s future. Lin had come of age at a historic juncture for China and the world. Devastating defeats by foreign powers shattered the Chinese literati’s centuries-old sense of cultural superiority. Progressive scholars, including many of Lin’s peers, saw Chinese tradition as the social albatross holding their country back. They sought new tools and ideas, imported from the West, for national salvation. One of the targets of their critique was the Chinese script (Moser 2016). Dating back millennia, the ideographic characters were deemed antiquated: they are too difficult to learn and too cumbersome to write.

As the historian Uluğ Kuzuoğlu elucidates in his 2023 book Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age, industrialisation ignited fresh demands for efficiency and productivity. New modes of transportation and communication, from railways to the telegraph, shrank distance and collapsed time. The growing flow of people, goods, and ideas gave rise to an expanding bureaucracy, as more clerical work was needed to record and regulate migration, production, and exchange. A lot more needed to be written down and shared fast. By the early twentieth century, the click-clack of the typewriter had become the soundtrack of the modern state.

The original typewriters were designed for the Latin alphabet. Conceived with little regard for the non-Western world, the technology’s proliferation served Western hegemony. The devices arrived on distant shores along the same routes as capital and colonial expansion and were advertised as a necessity for civilisational advancement. Languages with non-Latin alphabets were forced to contort and comply with the alien instrument. The Chinese script, unreachable with an alphabetic keyboard, was castigated as incompatible with modernity (Mullaney 2017).

Many Chinese scholars and educators agreed with the unforgiving assessment. They proposed ways to radically reform how to write their language, from reducing the number of strokes in a character to replacing the ideographs with a phonetic alphabet. Lin was in favour of simplifying the characters, but he opposed abolishing the script—‘the visible symbol of China’s unity’ (1935: 17–18; see also Lin 1933). The Chinese writing system epitomised longevity and richness. Contemporary readers could access ancient texts and people who spoke different languages could understand each other’s writing.

Lin also criticised the relentless pursuit of efficiency. In his 1937 bestseller, The Importance of Living, Lin cautioned: ‘The tempo of modern industrial life … imposes upon us a different conception of time as measured by the clock, and eventually turns the human being into a clock himself’ (pp. 168–69). Nevertheless, the advocate for ‘glorious and magnificent idling’ also recognised the value of time and the importance of mass literacy, especially in moments of national peril. In a column written for the New York Times in 1938, Lin prophesied that a new nation would emerge from the ancient land of his birth, forged in the flames of war amid escalating Japanese invasions. Yet, ‘without modern means of communication, unity was a physical impossibility’. New technologies were essential to carry ‘the force of ideas’ for ‘increasing public enlightenment’ (Lin 1938).

By the time Lin penned this influential essay, he had been working for years to develop an index system for the Chinese script. He wanted to organise the tens of thousands of characters in a more practical manner, and to manifest the method physically via a keyboard. He wanted to build a Chinese typewriter.

~

For decades, the very idea of a Chinese typewriter was disparaged as an oxymoron in the West, a punchline in popular culture ‘almost synonymous with the paradoxical or impossible’ (Bonavia 1973). Before MingKwai, earlier models of Chinese typewriters had been invented; some were in commercial use. Instead of typing with a keyboard, the characters were set on a tray bed or rotating drum, and the user had to locate them individually for print. The process was slow and labour-intensive. The limited space on the devices meant only a few thousand characters could be included (Mullaney 2017). Learning of Lin’s progress on a new Chinese typewriter in 1945, reporters at the Chicago Daily Tribune consulted their laundryman and a busboy at the local chop-suey joint and speculated on the size of the machine: might it rival the Hoover Dam or at least match the pipe organ in the Chicago Theatre?

The press did not need to guess for long. Two years later, in the summer of 1947, Lin unveiled his creation, the culmination of a three-decade-long endeavour. His second daughter, Lin Tai-yi, a prodigious writer and novelist, demonstrated its use. At nine inches (23 centimetres) tall and less than 20 inches (50 centimetres) in length and width, MingKwai was no larger than a standard English typewriter. Most notably, it resembled its Western counterparts and featured a keyboard. With 72 keys, the device could type more than 90,000 Chinese characters.

The incredible feat was accomplished through a novel sort and search method. Lin broke down Chinese ideographs into more fundamental components of strokes and shapes, and arranged the characters in a linear order, like an English dictionary does with alphabetic words (Tsu 2011, 2014). By pressing one of the 36 top character component keys and one of the 28 bottom component keys simultaneously, the machine would find up to eight corresponding characters. The user could see the candidates through a special viewing window on the device, which Lin called his ‘magic eye’, and select the correct one by pushing the respective numerical key.

In other words, the combination of three keys—two character components and one number—produced a unique address, with which the gears in MingKwai could locate and retrieve the matching character from its memory bank: a cluster of tightly packed metal cylinders where all the character shapes had been set. MingKwai was not just the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard; it also embodied the first Chinese input method and helped lay the intellectual foundation for modern human–computer interactions (Mullaney 2017, 2024).

The stunning design debuted to much attention and fanfare. Newspapers across North America and the Sinophone world and as far away as Dublin and Jerusalem covered Lin’s invention (Times Pictorial 1947; The Palestine Post 1947). The reports highlighted MingKwai’s promise of efficiency, when a day’s secretarial work could be done in an hour. Lin boasted that his device could transform the Chinese office and commercial life, help usher in a new industrial era, and ‘move the clock of progress in China forward by ten to twenty years’ (San Francisco Examiner 1947). The Chinese Nationalist Daily, a newspaper based in New York, saw in Lin the potential to be ‘ranked with Gutenberg’ (Ritchie 1949).

As Lin aspired to revolutionise Chinese writing and bureaucracy, a different kind of revolution was taking place in his homeland. Japan had surrendered, but China was still at war, and the Nationalist Government under Chiang Kai-shek was rapidly losing ground to the communist rebels led by Mao Zedong. Speaking at the press conference in New York in 1947 at which he announced his invention, Lin stated that he hoped to return to China soon and show Mingkwai to his countrymen. The machine had to be manufactured in the United States for the moment, Lin said, but he hoped it could be made in China in the future (Central News Agency 1947). The littérateur was optimistic, but the Cold War would crush both his dreams.

To build the typewriter, Lin had exhausted his savings and went into debt. The lone model had cost more than US$120,000, or nearly US$2 million in today’s money, to build. In 1948, Lin signed a contract with Mergenthaler Linotype Company, which received the prototype to investigate the feasibility of commercial production. In return, Lin was paid US$5,000 every six months.

‘The compensation was modest,’ wrote Lin Tai-yi (2011: 240) in her biography of her father. ‘But it was a great encouragement to my parents.’

MingKwai was a work of art, which made it a bad consumer product in the eyes of capitalism. Too intricate for mass manufacture at low cost, its marketing prospects were further dimmed by political developments in China. Mergenthaler executives wondered whether a communist country would honour intellectual property rights, and Mao had repeatedly called for the Romanisation of the Chinese script to achieve mass literacy (Mullaney 2017). By the time Lin sold the patents for MingKwai to Mergenthaler for US$25,000 in 1951, the communists had declared victory over China and the Nationalists had retreated to Taiwan. As American and Chinese soldiers battled each other on the Korean Peninsula, MingKwai and the people for whom it was designed stood on opposite sides of a geopolitical chasm.

In 1966, at the personal invitation of Chiang Kai-shek, Lin and his wife moved to Taiwan (United Daily News 1966). The official press of the Nationalist Government celebrated the literary giant’s arrival as a homecoming (Taiwan Review 1967). Lin had only visited Taiwan briefly before, but the sound of Hokkien spoken on the island reminded him of his native Fujian (Lin 2011: 309). From his new abode in Taipei—a gift from Chiang’s government—Lin continued to write and compiled a Chinese–English dictionary for modern usage. A narrow body of water separated him from his ancestral land. Crossing was forbidden. He died in 1976 at the age of 80. He never set foot on the mainland or saw MingKwai again.

~

On a business trip to the United States in the 1960s, Lin Tai-yi, who helmed the Chinese edition of Reader’s Digest in Hong Kong, tried to recover her father’s precious invention (Lin 2011: 247). After countless calls, she finally reached an engineer at Mergenthaler who had worked on the device. ‘Oh no! You’re late by three months,’ he exclaimed over the phone. The company had recently moved from Brooklyn to Long Island. Much was tossed out, including MingKwai, which had been gathering dust in his office for more than a decade. Lin Tai-yi suggested she could place an ad in the firm’s bulletin in case someone had picked it up, perhaps drawn to its beautiful casing.

‘I don’t think that would be useful,’ the engineer said.

But someone did pick it up. Douglas Arthur Jung, a toolmaker at Mergenthaler, kept the typewriter in his basement. Jung died in 2004 (Ancestry.com n.d.). Two decades later, his granddaughter and her husband made a fortuitous discovery.

The reappearance of MingKwai opens tantalising new windows of research into not just how the machine works, but also how and by whom it was built. Lin did not fabricate the device, and much can be learned about ‘the hidden labour of engineering’, said Mullaney when I interviewed him. Yet, before all the scholarly inquiries could take place, a more immediate question was: where should MingKwai go?

Suggestions abound on social media. In the comment section of Felix’s post (2025), a few people offered to purchase it directly. Some proposed an auction. Others stressed that a work of such cultural and historical significance belongs in a museum. A representative from the North American alumni association of St John’s University, Lin’s undergraduate alma mater in Shanghai, which was shuttered by the communist government in 1952, expressed great interest in helping find a good home for MingKwai.

Several Facebook users urged Felix to reach out to the Lin Yutang House in Taipei. After Lin’s death, authorities in Taiwan established his former residence as a library and museum, where most of his books, manuscripts, and other memorabilia are kept (Lin Yutang House 2015; Qian 2017). In the meantime, someone identifying as a staff member from the Lin Yutang Memorial Museum in mainland China asked whether MingKwai could be donated to them. Another user, claiming to speak for the Computer Museum of the Chinese Computer Federation, commented that they would like to acquire MingKwai for a price. The Computer Museum is currently under construction in eastern China and is expected to be the world’s largest museum on computing technology (CCFCM n.d.).

When Lin conveyed his intention to bring MingKwai to his countrymen, it was during the height of the Civil War. The blade of ideology cleaved through what he saw as one nation and one people. He chose a side, that of the Nationalists, and shouldered the consequences. His capacious mind probably could not have foreseen that decades after his passing, both sides would strive to claim his legacy, in overlapping yet distinct ways.

A fiercely independent spirit, Lin was sceptical of the leftist ferment during his youth and grew into one of the boldest and most insistent critics of communism among his generation of Chinese intellectuals (Qian 2017). The wordsmith aimed his pen against the regime in Beijing and Mao himself, weaving verses mocking the Great Helmsman and wishing for his early demise (Lin 1965, 1966a). For years, Lin’s name was banned on the mainland. In the reform era since the 1980s, when much of what was forbidden has become permissible, Lin’s works have enjoyed a popular resurgence. As a young child in China at the turn of the new century, I found an old copy of My Country and My People on my father’s shelf. It had been translated into Chinese. The content escaped me, but one line in the editor’s preface left a lasting impression. It noted that parts of the book had been censored and the reader should beware Lin was not a follower of Marxism.

As China exited its socialist past to embrace global capitalism, association with Lin has been wielded as a marketing strategy by local governments. In 2012, Lin’s ancestral hometown of Zhangzhou, Fujian, announced plans to invest RMB190 million (about US$27 million) to construct a ‘Lin Yutang Cultural Park’ (林语堂文化园) (Xinhua 2012). About the same time, the neighbouring county of Pinghe, where Lin was born, put forth an even more ambitious proposal: it would spend RMB3 billion to turn the place into a ‘world-class literary village’ (China News 2012). In the homeland that once renounced him, the native son is no longer a person but a brand. Coincidentally, weeks after the recovery of MingKwai, a documentary about Lin premiered at the Lin Yutang Cultural Park in Zhangzhou (People.cn 2025). Co-sponsored by state and local authorities, the film is part of China Central Television’s ‘Centennial Master’ (百年巨匠) series.

For many in Taiwan, the prospect of MingKwai being acquired by a mainland entity was deeply upsetting. On social media (see comments on Felix 2025), some emphasised Lin’s anticommunist stance. Others pointed out the device was designed for traditional Chinese characters, not the simplified script used on the mainland, even though Lin had been an advocate for character simplification. Several cited the devastation of Chinese heritage during the Mao years and contended that the regime in Beijing could not be trusted with national treasures.

In 1966, the year Lin decided to settle in Taiwan, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution that avowed to smash the old and make the world anew. In response, Chiang initiated the Cultural Renaissance Movement in his jurisdiction. By promoting a standard tongue and dictating a shared culture, the Nationalist Government sought to bolster its reign by fashioning a collective Chinese identity in Taiwan. As the hopes of taking back the mainland faded over time, positioning itself as the vanguard of Chinese tradition was also crucial for Chiang’s government to assert legitimacy on the international stage, where the Republic of China in Taiwan was not just ‘Free China’ but also the ‘real’ China.

Lin eviscerated the Cultural Revolution in his writing and predicted that the rule of the ‘Commie bandits’ would collapse within three years (1966b). He supported reviving traditional Chinese culture but warned against orthodoxy and intellectual isolation (Qian 2017). While he directed his ire against communism, Lin had also criticised the Nationalist Government at various points, and one could interpret his refusal to take part in formal politics as a subtle rebellion. Nevertheless, for much of his life, the maverick author enjoyed a cordial relationship with Chiang and was often sympathetic to the Generalissimo’s positions. Writing in 1960 after a short visit to Taiwan, Lin praised the territory under martial law as ‘a showpiece of democracy’ and a model for industrial progress (Lin 1960).

Much has changed since Lin’s time. Having walked the long, hard road to freedom, the people of Taiwan increasingly see themselves as distinctly Taiwanese. For many, rejecting the Chinese label imposed by the dictatorial Nationalist Government constitutes liberation. As tensions rise across the Taiwan Strait, and Beijing dresses its desire to annex the territory in the language of national reunification, being proudly Taiwanese is also a defence of sovereignty and the right to self-determination. When social media users from Taiwan argued passionately against MingKwai going to China and lamented that Taiwanese institutions might not have the resources to win a bid, the heart of the issue was no longer about preserving an artefact or honouring its creator. The heated exchanges carried echoes from a past conflict and sounded anxieties about the future.

~

In a discussion on Threads about potential destinations for MingKwai, one user commented that given the ‘cultural atmosphere’ in the Sinophone region, as well as cross-strait dynamics, the device staying in the United States would be ‘the least beneficial to Sinophone heritage and education, but the best for guaranteeing the safety of the artifact’ (aaron_yodel 2025). And it is in the United States that the typewriter will remain. Stanford University just announced that the California campus will be the new home of MingKwai, owing to generous support from the Bin Lin and Daisy Liu Foundation (Stanford University 2025). Stanford is planning a series of research, education, and outreach activities around its prized acquisition.

When I first heard the news, my excitement was laced with regret. I am happy and relieved that MingKwai has found a good home and will be available to researchers and the public. I cannot wait to see it in person. Yet, Lin’s wish of taking MingKwai to his homeland is left unfulfilled. The groundbreaking Chinese typewriter remains out of reach of most Chinese speakers.

When Lin was on the verge of bankruptcy over his passion project, a loan from his Chinese friend C.T. Loo (Loo Ching-Tsai) helped him complete the design (Lin 2011: 230). A preeminent art dealer, Loo was a subject of controversy in his birth country, where he was criticised for pawning ancestral jewels to the foreign elite. Loo, however, reasoned that the antiques were safer and better appreciated in the West (Kahn 2012).

Unlike the jade and bronze artefacts traded by Loo, many of which came from ancient tombs in China, MingKwai was born in New York. It would be a mistake to insist that the Chinese typewriter belongs only on Chinese soil. Like Lin’s life and career, the creation of MingKwai was quintessentially bicultural and transnational. The keyboard design was a marriage between the composite shapes of the Chinese script and the linear logic of the Latin alphabet. The machine was conceived through Chinese ingenuity and realised by American engineering.

I wonder how Lin would feel about the latest developments around MingKwai. The prototype plundered his finances and was discarded as trash by the company that acquired it, only to reappear more than half a century later as a coveted gem, thanks to an unsuspecting American family and the magic of social media. The story of the typewriter reads like a metaphor, an allegory for the world it disappeared from and the one it has just entered, containing old wounds, new troubles, a persistent imbalance of power, and an unyielding quest for recognition and belonging.

I imagine telling Lin all this. He listens patiently as I ramble on with unformed thoughts. Then, he puts down his signature smoking pipe and lets out a hearty laugh. I am overthinking it, he says, burdening myself like the lad in the classic Hsin Ch’ichi (辛弃疾) poem: ‘But loved to mount the top floor, / To write a song pretending sadness.’

Lin included the twelfth-century verse in My Country and My People (1935) and again in his final book, Memoirs of an Octogenarian (1975). ‘I am a bundle of contradictions, and I enjoy it,’ he wrote in the latter (Lin 1975: 1). He always took pleasure in not conforming. MingKwai was invented to facilitate capitalist production and failed as a product thanks to capitalist logic. Financing and geopolitics, the twin factors that shaped Lin’s life and doomed MingKwai’s future, also limited the final destination for the lone prototype. Even a spirit that soared as high and as freely as Lin’s had to contend with earthly bounds. One wisdom of old age, Lin wrote, is to know ‘the limitations of life’ (1975: 79).

But just as we cannot reduce Lin’s writings to one language, define his home as one place, or tie his legacy to one country, the value of MingKwai cannot be measured by a price tag. The meaning of the machine is much larger and more enduring than its physical form. It broke the conventions of two writing systems and generated new dialogues between them. It challenged Western stereotypes and explored new ways to write Chinese and be Chinese. Lin found new order in an ancient script and cast it in metal, while his soft calligraphy brush probed the unruly margins.

In a 2016 essay for The New Yorker, the Taiwanese-American science fiction writer Ted Chiang (no relation to Chiang Kai-shek), whose parents had left mainland China during the Civil War, posed an interesting question: what might have happened had the Chinese people invented a phonetic writing system some three millennia ago? Chiang suggested increased literacy, less emphasis on tradition, and a culture that was more open to new ideas and modern technologies. Yet, in this hypothetical scenario, would modernity and the technologies that represent it look the same as they do today?

I would like to propose a different question: what might the first typewriter look like had it been invented by a Chinese speaker for the Chinese script? To attempt an answer demands one radically reimagine one’s relationship to machines, the value of time, and the purpose of writing. Maybe there would be no typewriter and life would be governed by a different conception of the clock. Maybe the clock would only tell the time and not dictate how one should live in it. Maybe nothing would take too much time. Maybe no dream would be out of time. The thought experiment reveals paths not taken and hints at alternative futures. It offers glimpses to another world, where Lin Yutang would feel at home.

Featured Image: Lin Tai-yi writes a letter dictated by her father Lin Yutang on the typewriter he invented. Source: Lin Yutang House.

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