How Mandarin Became Standard Chinese

Chinese history holds two opposing views on Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), the first emperor of China. He was the man who unified the country in 221 BCE, standardizing currency, axle widths, and, above all, the written script: 书同文 (shū tóng wén). The standardization of written characters held the civilization together for thousands of years to come. He was also known as the tyrant who “burned the books and buried the scholars”—焚书坑儒 (fén shū kēng rú)—in an attempt to erase the history and classics of the states he conquered. Unification and destruction: this duality runs through the entire story that follows.A person from Canton and a person from Fujian could both understand the Analects (论语), but neither would understand a word the other read out loud. The same text possesses different sounds in different regions, sometimes just across the river.The unit of Chinese language was the written system 文 (wén), not the spoken one 语 (yǔ). For most of Chinese history, there was no such thing as “the…