China: The Asian Civilization - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 230

in Wade-Giles are now rendered as q; thus the Ch'in Dynasty is now the Qin Dynasty. And
in another Pinyin change, Peking is now Beijing.
For the foreigner, merely saying a word (using either Wade-Giles or Pinyin) rarely con-
veys meaning to a Chinese listener. Chinese is a tonal language. The meaning of a word is
determined by its tone and pitch. Chinese words are one syllable. Mandarin has four tones;
each tone assigns a different meaning for that one word. For starters, try saying an English
word using different tones. Better yet, say the words “Mary,” “merry,” and “marry,” and
ask a listener which meaning is conveyed by your pronunciation!
To be literate in Chinese is also daunting. To read a newspaper requires mastery
of about 4,000 ideographs. To read, for example, the Confucian texts requires mastery
of 50,000, and full mastery of Confucian texts requires an understanding of more than
488,000 ideographs. In Imperial China, literacy and government appointment went hand
in glove. The Chinese invented the civil service. Appointment to its lowest ranks required
successful completion of a written examination. Further advancement required further ex-
aminations. Aspiring bureaucrats would spend ten, twenty, and even thirty years preparing
to pass their examinations. The scholar-bureaucrat was a symbol and archetype of gov-
ernment authority: stoop-shouldered, nearsighted, and taking pleasure in discourse, paint-
ing, and poetry. But it was the combination of literacy and the education for administrative
appointment that were the foundations of China's long-lasting system of imperial govern-
ment, from sometime around the Shang Dynasty (circa 1500 to circa 1000 BCE) to the re-
volution of 1912.