Siddhartha

Interesting historical fact I learned about today: Sun Yat-sen and his wife Soong Ching-ling, both legendary founding figures of modern China (Soong Ching-ling was Honorary Chairman of the PRC and Sun Yat-sen's portrait still goes up in Tiananmen Square on National Day), only spoke English to each other! This is because she spoke Shanghainese and he spoke Cantonese, which are mutually unintelligible. However they both spoke perfect English because they were both educated in English-speaking schools: Soong Ching-ling at Wesleyan College in Georgia, and Sun Yat-sen in Hawaii and in then-British Hong Kong. In fact, funnily enough, when Soong Ching-ling - on her deathbed in 1981 - was told of the Politburo’s decision to admit her to the Communist Party, it was announced to her first in Mandarin (which she never mastered) and then again in English so she would understand (thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forwa…). This all highlights how recent China’s linguistic unity is: it’s actually one of the country’s major achievements. China has had "one script" since the Qin dynasty, but "one pronunciation" is a very recent achievement - people from different regions often couldn’t understand each other when they spoke until the past few decades. To the point where even China’s "Father of the Nation" and "Mother of the Nation" couldn’t speak the national language to each other!