The written script of the word “horse” was different among major states during the “Warring States Period” before Qin standardized them under small seal script. Public domain image. April 20 is the United Nations Chinese Language Day. The date marks the sixth Chinese solar term “Guyu” (穀雨), which is celebrated to honour Cangjie (倉頡), a legendary figure who invented the written form of the Chinese language under the Yellow Emporer (2697–2597), one of the five ancient Chinese tribes. What Cangjie invented is believed to be the oracle bone script, which is used for the purpose of divination. Canjie’s story, however, is just a romanticized version of the origin of today’s written Chinese language. The standardization of written Chinese has been a brutal process that is somehow at odds with the value of “multilingualism and cultural diversity” promoted by the UN’s Language Day. The standardization of written Chinese began under Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified middle kingdom of the Qin Dynasty. Confucian scholars and historians in other dynasties usually depicted Qin Shi Huang as a brutal tyrant who was obsessed with the elixir of life and haunted by the fear of assassination. Chinese Oracle Bone Script. Public domain photo from Flickr user Gary Todd. After Qin conquered six other states, Qin Shi Huang consolidated the unified kingdom by setting up a hierarchy of officials centring around the emperor, expanding military power through a hierarchical ranking system and mandatory military services, embracing “legalism” — a philosophy of exercising control over his subjects through stern law and punishment, burning of books and burying of scholars, building the Great Wall and etc. The standardization of written Chinese texts, along with currency and units of measurement, were significant steps for Qin Shi Huang’s centralization of power. The first emperor appointed his prime minister Li Si to standardize the written Chinese texts by promulgating the Small Seal Script as the imperial state’s official language (see the top image). The six other major scripts were suppressed or banned. One of the major dictionaries compiled under Li Si’s supervision was Cangjie Pian. Since Qin, an official and unified written Chinese script has become a most significant political means for the governance of the middle kingdom. Even during Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), when the last middle kingdom empire was under the rule of Manchus, a native group of people from northeast Asia who are ethnically distinctive from Han Chinese, the imperial court was eager to standardize the written Chinese texts. In fact, the most authoritative dictionary of Chinese characters, the Kangxi Dictionary, was compiled under the order of the Qing Emperor Kangxi. Westerners invented the English term “Mandarin,” which means “officials of the Manchus” (滿大人), to refer to the official dialect used in the Qing imperial court. China has always been ethnically diverse, and many emperors and royal families, such as Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchus-led Qing Dynasty, were not Han Chinese. Although written Chinese was standardized and the imperial courts had their own official tongue, outside the courts, the medium of instruction in education was regional mother tongues. Indigenous languages and Chinese languages and dialects were hence able to be preserved locally during the imperial era. The Kangxi Dictionary also captures the diversity of spoken Chinese languages by providing each Chinese character's pronunciations of major regional languages. This helps many Chinese languages and dialects to find their written matches. That’s why Chinese regional languages, such as Cantonese and Min Nan, have developed their own written forms with expressions very much distinctive from Mandarin. However, in June 1911, the imperial Qing government started introducing Mandarin as a national tongue to modernize the country's education system. But soon after, the Qing Dynasty was overthrown, and the project to introduce a “national language” (國語) was left to the Republic of China (ROC). In 1913, one year after the establishment of ROC, Mandarin was picked as a unified national language, albeit by a rather weak consensus. According to Ethnologue, an authentic website that records 7,168 living languages worldwide, China is still the seventh most linguistically diverse country in the world. It has 281 spoken languages, including non-Chinese indigenous languages and Chinese languages and dialects, but 153 are endangered thanks to the country’s language policy. Upon its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) inherited ROC's official tongue and called it Putonghua. The new regime also simplified the traditional written form into simplified Chinese characters.