A Chinese Alphabet

A Chinese Alphabet

By

Stephen Copestake (2016) [Just re-issuing it again, I may expand it in due course]

Outline:

A high ranking Qin Dynasty official, Qin Da Ren, a young cousin of the Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is sent as an envoy by the Emperor to study and spy on the Roman Empire, Da Qin, and learn various languages with a view to contributing to the reform of Great Seal Script into an alphabetical language. The Emperor presumes he is immortal and thus thinks that his Qin Dynasty will last forever, so Qin Da Ren is instructed to return in twenty years time with a completed alphabet.

Qin Da Ren travels widely and works hard learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Persian. The old seal script had many more strokes to the characters than modern traditional Chinese and so he has no difficulty in assigning strokes to an alphabet and devises a way of forming characters with the strokes written clockwise from top left to form a word. He also borrows sounds from these other languages to make a new sophisticated language that is easy to translate and understand. He has the alphabets for these other languages and his new Qin alphabet cast into a bronze plate which he carries back to China, along with many camel loads of books and scrolls and learned treatise, together with rare objects and works of art. He anticipated and studied the great inventions from the future that would make the complexity of copying the intricate characters seem as trivial as writing out all the books in the world in a minute!

He returns, with some adventure, after his twenty years are up, to China, but finds to his dismay that the Emperor is long dead and lavishly buried and the Qin Dynasty replaced. He is advised of great hostility and threat to life, so he retreats to his ancestral home in a remote mountainous province of North West China. He hides his bronze plate and the books and treasures, carefully sealed in glazed earthenware jars, in a deep cave which he thoroughly conceals by blowing up the entrance with an early form of gunpowder, so as to make it look like a natural landslide. He says goodbye to his family and disguises himself as a wandering beggar and returns to Rome where he renews his scholarly life in exile, eventually travelling to Jerusalem, where he becomes a Jew and lives out his life in diligent study of ancient scripts, translating them with his Qin alphabet.

Many centuries pass and in 2021, a young archaeologist, Grace Qin, discovers the cave after an earthquake exposed it and she fell into it while working on a dig searching for remains of prehistoric man. The bronze plate and the rare manuscripts and treasures cause a great sensation, but the communist government is so very hostile to the idea that a Chinese alphabet had been developed twenty or so centuries beforehand, that Grace takes the bronze plate and goes into hiding and journeys across Asia to Europe where she hides in a remote area that she studied in her early days as a geologist. While she is in hiding in Taithes Gill, she develops the old Qin alphabet to suit modern English and also develops the alphabet using computer software which updates modern Chinese into an alphabetical system. She also develops a smartphone app which works in parallel to the syllable characters and facilitates translation of other languages, enabling Chinese people to say words and phrases in other languages by using the sounds of existing syllable characters, strung together in nonsense phrases, the mood and tone of which evokes the proper emotions due to the meaning of the foreign phrase required.

The Chinese communist government is furious and wants to destroy the Qin alphabet system. It is also discovered that Grace Qin is actually a descendant of the Qin Dynasty Emperor and has a right to become Empress herself. She is hunted down by the communist government, but fortunately she is 96th Dan and has military survival skills and lots of friends and so eludes capture. The Chinese communist government is overthrown by its own computer hackers who want to see the return of the Emperor and Grace is eventually brought safely back to Beijing where she is called “All China” and becomes Empress. She soon finds that being Empress is as boring and tedious as being the Queen of England was, and so delegates most of her administrative responsibilities so that she can continue to spend time as an archaeologist studying ancient sites of prehistoric man.

She establishes her rule such that the Imperial position is democratically elected every ten years, hoping that someone else would like to stand for Imperial Election, but she always wins the election!

[The story or film starts with the earthquake and discovery of the cave and parallels the story of Qin Da Ren, which is inscribed on the back of the bronze plate. The plate itself is a similar size to an iPad which facilitates carrying. By 2029 iPads are self charging with a solar panel on the cover, and the VPN location changes thirty times a second, so ideal for fugitives.]