6 hours
Green Library (Silicon Valley Archives)
Free Tickets Available
Tue, 02 Dec, 2025 at 09:00 am to 03:00 pm (GMT-08:00)
Green Library (Silicon Valley Archives)
557 Escondido Mall, Stanford, United States
Join us on December 2, 2025, as we explore the origins of of the incredible MingKwai typewriter, trace its history across continents, and examine its lasting cultural and technological impact.
The MingKwai Chinese Typewriter, a milestone in the history of Chinese information technology, was invented by the Chinese-born author, translator, and cultural commentator Lin Yutang in the 1940s. Discovered in a New York basement, this extraordinary prototype has been entrusted to the Stanford University Libraries, where it will be used in research, exhibits, and academic programs.
To celebrate the typewriter’s rediscovery and new home at Stanford, we will be bringing together scholars and experts from across multiple disciplines to reintroduce the legendary MingKwai Chinese Typewriter to the world. Dr. Thomas S. Mullaney, Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, will lead a team of researchers and students in exploring the MingKwai's historical, technological, and cultural significance.
Info: In this presentation, I will briefly unpack why it is that electric typewriters, along with technologies built from them, were ubiquitous parts of the electronic digital computers of the 1940s and 1950s, including the first electronic digital computer manufactured in China. While this ubiquity is most often unremarked upon and overlooked, the relation between computing and writing, and in this period specifically typewriting, is profound. I will conclude with commentary on how this relation can provide an additional interpretive frame for the MingKwai.
Info: This illustrated talks will pair stories about innovations in technologies of communication and transportation, and focus on how speed has often been seen as both symbolically and practically important in these two realms. In 1875, the fastest way to move people long distances was via trains, and those that were fastest and went furthest were in the West. China was just gearing up to have its first rail line open, and the trains on it would not go fast or far. Flash forward 150 years, and we find China with the most extensive high speed rail network on earth. Like Japan's bullet trains before them, China's speedy trains are seen as markers of a country that's become thoroughly--even hyper--modern. It is illuminating to pair this transportation tale with stories about typewriters and computers and changes over time in how swiftly texts involving characters vs. letters can be created.
Info: Lin Yutang (1895–1976) was widely reviled by early Asian American activists, who accused him of self-exoticization. To reconsider Lin’s place within Asian American cultural history, this paper focuses on his contributions, along with his wife and daughter, to Chinese American culinary writing, probing the dynamics of ethnonationalism. Lin asserted gastronomy as one area in which the Chinese “had much to teach the West.” Lin’s attempt to define “Chinese gastronomy” for Anglophone audiences aimed to place Chinese cuisine on par with French, and he billed Tsuifeng Lin and Hsiang Ju Lin as the “Chinese Savarin in English.” Taking “gastronomy [as] a matter of wors and taste as well as food,” this paper explores how the three Lins contributed aspects of theory and practice to their collective gastronomic project, with attention to the gendered division of labor.
Info: "In the past few years, a group of individuals from diverse backgrounds have strived to rebuild the MingKwai typewriter faithfully. I participated in this endeavor as a type designer, and my task was to make a font for the mechanical team, based on the character tables obtained from the Lin Yutang House.
As I examined these tables, I began to ponder over the inner logic of their layout. How did Lin conceive a way to fit 90,000 characters from five writing systems into a single machine?
The revived MingKwai font enabled us to recompose the tables digitally and from there, we reconstruct a digital MingKwai typewriter. On a computer or a smartphone, anyone can now experience the ingenious interactive design of this machine.
In this talk, I will share the story of the font in the MingKwai typewriter — its origins, its design, its revival, and the mysteries that remain unsolved."
Info: When making the prototype for the MingKwai, Lin Yutang was briefly embroiled in an intellectual property dispute with an engineer who helped fabricate the device. Later, Mergenthaler Linotype Company acquired the prototype and patents for the MingKwai from Lin, who had exhausted his savings and gone into debt in pursuit of his invention. The story of who owned the MingKwai is part of a much older and larger question of who can claim the rights to an idea and its physical embodiment. From hand-copied volumes to woodblock printing, from typewriters to digital input, evolutions in writing methods and manuscript technologies have been facilitated by social, political, and economic developments, and changes in how words are written and transmitted have led to profound shifts in the concept of who owns these words. As LLMs and other AI-labeled technologies appear to be swallowing up everything that has been written, this talk will examine how we got here and explore what may lie ahead.
Info: This presentation looks at Lin Yutang’s final decade in Taipei and Hong Kong—his return to Chinese writing, the making of his last major work, Lin Yutang’s Contemporary Chinese–English Dictionary, and the people and places around him. It then asks how to narrate his story “after the MingKwai.” The typewriter’s ideas are briefly situated within input methods and Taiwan’s early Chinese computing, with attention to how these links resonate with today’s visitors. It also engages two practical challenges: the marginalization of Republican-era figures in Taiwan’s public memory, and how to communicate their legacies across generations and contemporary media.
Also check out other Arts events in Stanford, Food & Drink events in Stanford, Literary Art events in Stanford.
Tickets for MingKwai, Rediscovered can be booked here.
| Ticket type | Ticket price |
|---|---|
| General Admission | Free |
