May 27, 2021

Learning to Read in Republican China: Illustrated Character Cards

Shuqi Ye

I have recently had the chance to work as an intern with Chinese Cataloging and Metadata Librarian Jian Ping Lee on a project to back-catalog a collection of early- to mid-twentieth century Chinese books, among which I have found many interesting titles. One day I encountered a delicate box of color-illustrated Chinese character cards. Its attractiveness prompted me to explore further, and to share some of my discoveries.

1. Item Description

This item consists of a rigid box (16 x 11 cm) containing 1,000 square character cards (approximately 5 x 5 cm). The box lid displays the title, Huitu wucai xinfangzi 繪圖五彩新方字 [New Illustrated Character Cards in Five Colors], and publisher, Shanghai Guangyi shuju 上海廣益書局. Each card has a number in one corner, indicating to which of twenty thematically defined “packs” 包 it belongs. The choice of corner indicates the character’s tone, as discussed below. Cards are printed in one of five colors—red, green, blue, brown, or black—hence the title.

Illustrations accompany characters that refer to readily visualized objects, actions, or concepts. Most show elements of Chinese life, but some bear the influence of Western learning or material culture. The latter include body parts and a skeleton in Western anatomical style, and objects such as a baby stroller, a glass tumbler, and a pocket watch.

The character cards give word definitions in unpunctuated literary Chinese, not the vernacular Chinese championed by some in the late 1910s and 1920s. Most cards do not indicate pronunciation, aside from tone: students would rely on instructors to teach this. For heteronymic characters, alternate pronunciations (but not the main pronunciation) and concise definitions appear after the main definition. Homophonic characters are used to convey these pronunciations, a common practice in premodern Chinese philology.

Tateuchi EAL’s character card set does not include explanatory notes. However, I discovered teaching booklets for two similar sets on the rare book website kongfuzi.com (here and here). According to these, Huitu wucai xinfangzi is designed as an aid for elementary school teachers to teach Chinese characters to children aged between five and eight. A set contains 1,000 characters, divided among twenty packs, each with 50 cards (in TEAL’s set, some have 49 or 51). The packs are grouped into ten thematic pairs, ordered by difficulty. Individual packs also contain characters of varying difficulty, with teachers given discretion to select those of an appropriate level. A character can be shown to children separately or alongside its antonym, for easier memorization. Most represent simple words with a single meaning, and are accompanied by illustrations where feasible. The choice of corner for displaying the pack number indicates the character’s tone. Whether to teach the four tones to a student depends on their ability. The set also includes fifty pieces of blank white paper, on which the teacher can record each child’s name, address, and characters they should learn. The booklets note the planned publication of a second set with 1,000 characters of greater difficulty.

TEAL’s item generally matches the teaching booklets’ description of the first of the two sets, except for its lack of items such as the booklet itself and additional white paper, and a few inconsistencies perhaps caused by errors in the notes or revisions to later editions of the set. For example, the booklets note that on cards for even-tone characters, the pack number should appear in the bottom left corner. However, in our set even-tone character cards often display the number in the upper left.

Based on our set, I roughly summarize the pack themes and the relationship between character tone and pack number position as follows. There remain exceptions to these patterns.

Pack themes: 1-2: abstract words; 3-4: time/calendar and astronomical phenomenon; 5-6: architecture and construction; 7-8: social relations and occupations; 9-10: the human body; 11-12: common verbs; 13-14: plants; 15-16: animals; 17-18: objects and activities from daily life; 19-20: production tools and activities.

Tones and pack number positions: even tone 平: upper left; rising tone 上: bottom left; departing tone 去: bottom right; entering tone 入: upper right.

2. Historical Context

Teaching children to read through illustrated character cards, especially multi-colored ones, was new to China in the early twentieth century. Traditional education, whose main goal was preparing students for civil service examinations, had emphasized reading, recitation, and writing, but rarely pictures. This reflected the outlook of instructors, who were not professional teachers but entry-level exam graduates who had failed to progress further. Multi-color print editions had been accessible mainly to families of high status or wealth, due to the high cost and complexity of traditional Chinese woodblock printing.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, institutional and technological changes transformed teaching methods and materials. The official examination system declined in status, before being abolished in 1905. Western pedagogical methods such as the Herbartian five steps gained favor, and teaching became a recognized profession. Publishers kept pace with new educational materials, aided by Western technologies such as chromolithography, which greatly reduced the cost of color printing. The Commercial Press 商務印書館 published the first character-learning teaching aid Wucai jingtu fangzi 五彩精圖方字 [Illustrated Character Cards in Five Colors] in 1906, advertising its new offering in newspapers. Other publishers followed suit with their own educational aids and textbooks. Shanghai Guangyi shuju, publisher of our library’s Huitu wucai xinfangzi, became one of the largest publishers of such materials in the decades after its founding in 1900.

 

3. Points of Interest

3.1 Cover Image Design

The box lid features a painting of a girl in the calendar picture 月份牌 style. Combining the techniques of traditional Chinese gongbi 工筆 painting and Western watercolor painting, this was Shanghai’s most popular commercial art style in the first half of the 20th century, especially for company advertisements.

To the bottom right of the girl is the artist’s signature, Yuqing 育青. We do know of one calendar picture painter Zhang Yuqing章育青 who signed his works Yuqing. Zhang was reputedly born in 1909 and studied painting at the Shanghai publisher Shijie shuju 世界書局 in 1925; his work included book design and illustration. Guangyi shuju, the publisher of Huitu wucai xinfangzi, entered into partnership with Shijie shuju in 1925. It is possible that Zhang Yuqing designed this cover while an apprentice at Shijie shuju. His surviving paintings, mostly produced after 1949, are quite different in theme. We cannot be sure whether Zhang Yuqing was the painter of our box’s image.

3.2 Publication Date

There are several editions of this title. TEAL’s set does not display a date, and its accompanying teaching booklet has been lost, hence we cannot precisely determine its edition or year of publication. The underside of the box bears a gift dedication dated 1936. One of the teaching booklets mentioned above reproduces a publishing certification issued by the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of China in 1915. Our set must therefore have been published between 1915 and 1936. In addition, the box may feature the artwork of Zhang Yuqing, who in 1925 studied painting at a partner publisher to Guangyi shuju, the publisher of Huitu wucai xinfangzi (see above). We also know that in the 1930s, Guangyi shuju turned mainly to popular novels. While not definitive, these details increase the probability of a publication date between 1925 and around 1930.

3.3 Tone System

Until the 1910s, authoritative scholarly pronunciations of characters followed the Middle Chinese (MC) tone system first set out by Lu Fayan 陸法言 in his 601 CE rime dictionary Qieyun 切韻. Lu’s work is no longer extant, but as developed in later rime dictionaries, the system identifies four basic tones, each with yin 陰 and yang 陽 variants. The schema was viewed as generally applicable to different dialects. The founding of the Republic of China in 1912 invigorated debate regarding which dialect(s) should form the basis of a national language. An influential early model merged different dialectics, but from the 1920s official policy favored the Beijing dialect. This standard northern Chinese, informally referred to in English as Mandarin, also has four tones, but these differ from the MC system in that they lack an entering tone 入聲 (use of this was lost in most Northern dialects), and in that they count yin and yang variants of MC’s level tone 平聲 as two separate tones (Mandarin’s two other tones have MC equivalents, but lack yin and yang variants).

It is interesting that Huitu wucai xinfangzi, published between 1915 and 1936, adopts the traditional MC tone system, with an entering tone and only one level tone, rather than that of the Beijing-centric national language. As noted above, for most characters tones are the only phonetic information the cards provide. These choices enable instruction in multiple dialects. While the card set reflects modernizing changes to the education system, it also retains traditional elements; another is the use of unpunctuated literary Chinese for definitions. It is possible that later editions simply reproduced a design conceived in 1915, predating the large-scale promotion of Beijing-based pronunciation and punctuated vernacular writing.