A legacy of literacy: commemorating old Peh-oe-ji system

Lin Shiyan, a 90-year-old resident who wrote a book about efforts to translate the local dialect, has played a part in Gulangyu Island's selection as China's newest entrant on UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

A Concise Book of Xiamen Pehoe-ji is a guide to the spelling system invented about 170 years ago using English letters to represent the Xiamen, Fujian province, dialect.

It took an entire year, beginning in 2011, for Lin to finish the first draft of the book. At that time, Lin was already 84 years old and relied on a magnifying glass to read.

Born in 1928, Lin experienced a childhood of hardship. When he was 3 years old, he was brought to Gulangyu Island - known locally as Kulangsu - by his widowed mother and lived an impoverished life.

At 13, he was a child laborer, cooking for workers.

In order to lift himself out of poverty, he finished the six-year secondary education in four years.

Later, he spent his whole life teaching on the island and cultivated many students throughout his life.

In 2011, officials from the Gulangyu World Heritage Nomination Office selected Lin as a representative of native residents on the island and requested he write the book.

"At first, I denied their request for lacking of self-confidence. As a school master for several primary schools on the island, I didn't own (a) high scholar degree," Lin said.

"Later on, I changed my mind. Gulangyu is my motherland; I must make my contribution to pay back her nurturing," Lin added.

Lin's book uses 23 English letters and eight tones to spell all Chinese characters in the Xiamen dialect, which was established and built up by foreign missionaries during the 1840s.

At that time, when missionaries first came to China, "a major obstacle was the Chinese writing system, which is radically different from the phonetically based alphabet used in the Western world," according to the book The Reform Church in China (1842-1951).

"Chinese writing is made up of thousands of intricate, difficult-to-learn characters. To be able to read even a few hundreds of the numerous Chinese characters and understand their meanings requires a good memory and many months of study," according to the book.

For the convenience of spreading Christianity, the missionaries invented the system to use English letters with marks for tones and phonemes to represent the Xiamen dialect. In 1850, John Van Nest Talmage of the American Reformed Church finished Xiamen Peh-oe-ji by summarizing past experience and researching and analyzing the pronunciation, tones and phonemes of the Xiamen dialect.

The newly invented written language can be mastered in a matter of only a few weeks of hard work, with the result that even someone illiterate in Chinese can read the Bible and Psalms as well as write letters in the language.

"As a child, I learned the Xiamen dialect from my mother and witnessed many illiterates and women like my mother becoming independent through learning Xiamen Peh-oe-ji; they recorded what they were going to buy on the market with that language," Lin said.

Later on, the spelling system spread to south Fujian province and Taiwan as well as Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and other countries, becoming a pioneer language system to transform Chinese characters into a phonetic system.

Xiamen Peh-oe-ji has gradually faded away. However, it is still a practical tool for foreigners to study Xiamen dialects nowadays and it is an indispensable historic heritage for Gulangyu Island, according to Lin.

"Xiamen Peh-oe-ji removed the obstacle of communication, made the illiterate people and housewives become literate, encouraged people to learn and promoted the cultural communication and the development of Gulangyu," Lin said. "If it is permitted, I would like to write another book to record my whole lifetime on Gulangyu, but now I am already 90 years old," Lin added.