IN 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself deep in the suburbs of London.
A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was planning a house renovation, she explained, and it needed a new home.
Mullaney, a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years scouring the globe for Chinese typewriters – wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of characters, yet small enough to fit on a desk.
The one before him, 23kg of metal frame, levers and ingenuity, was a relic of a dying breed. If he didn’t save it, would it end up on the scrap heap?
He packed it into a suitcase and carried it back to California, where it joined his growing collection of Asian-language typing devices.
But there was one typewriter he never expected to find: the MingKwai.
Made by Lin Yutang – an eccentric Chinese linguist, writer and inventor living in Manhattan – the MingKwai was a revolutionary prototype whose mechanics foreshadowed the input systems almost everyone now uses to type Chinese today. Only one machine was ever made.
“It was the one machine,” Mullaney said recently, “which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100%, definitely gone.”
Down the rabbit hole
Mullaney’s fascination with Chinese typewriters began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of certain Chinese characters.
Chinese has around 100,000 known characters, but hundreds are now “dead” – preserved in books but with their pronunciations and sometimes meanings lost to history.
Sitting in his office, Mullaney wondered how something immortalised in print could still vanish from human memory.
That led him to another question: could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?
Within hours, he was on the floor of his office poring over patent documents.
There had been dozens of designs over the past 150 years, each one a unique attempt to fit thousands of characters into a usable machine.
These inventions were already rare, victims of obsolescence.
Mullaney became obsessed. What began as an evening’s curiosity turned into years of research – and a global hunt.
He cold-called strangers, left voicemails for collectors, trawled ancestry records to track down relatives of known owners and phoned museums with a simple question: “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”
Sometimes, they did. A private museum in Delaware had one of only a handful of surviving IBM Chinese typewriters.
A Chinese Christian church in San Francisco handed him a machine they no longer wanted.
A collector in Northern California offered him two rare Japanese typewriters, asking only, “Is your trunk big enough?”
With each acquisition, Mullaney realised he might soon be one of the last people who truly understood these machines – the last barrier between them and oblivion.
An impossible invention
Among collectors, the MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast”, is legend.
In the 1930s, Lin feared that without a way to convert brush-written characters into easily reproduced text, China would fall behind technologically and even risk destruction by foreign powers.
Most attempts at Chinese typewriters had stumbled over the same problem: how to include tens of thousands of characters in one machine.
Lin’s solution was ingenious. Housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter, the MingKwai used 72 keys to represent parts of characters.
Any two keystrokes moved internal gears so that, in a small display window – the “Magic Eye” – up to eight characters containing those elements appeared. The typist could then select the correct one.
It was as if, Mullaney said, someone had invented a Roman-alphabet keyboard with a single key that could type every letter.
Lin, living with his family on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, spent heavily to hire a machinist to build the prototype.
In a demonstration to executives at Remington, the machine malfunctioned.
Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to the Mergenthaler Linotype company in Brooklyn.
When the firm moved offices in the 1950s, the MingKwai vanished.
Mullaney concluded in his 2017 book The Chinese Typewriter that it had likely been scrapped.
The basement discovery
In January this year, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were sorting through boxes in their Massapequa, New York home.
The boxes had been in storage since her father died in Arizona. Among them was a heavy wooden crate.
“What’s this?” Jennifer said. Nelson had peeked inside years before. “Oh, it’s that typewriter,” he said casually.
Opening it, Jennifer saw keys with unfamiliar symbols. Chinese, perhaps?
Nelson, a frequent buyer and seller on Facebook, posted photos in a group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?”. Then they moved on to other boxes.
An hour later, hundreds of comments had piled up – many in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom.
“Who’s Tom?” they wondered.
Mullaney was in Chicago giving a talk when his phone began buzzing relentlessly. Friends and fellow collectors were sending urgent messages.
As soon as he saw the post, he knew. It was the MingKwai.
But his first reaction wasn’t joy – it was fear. If the Felixes didn’t realise what they had, it could be sold in an instant, turned into a coffee table, dismantled for steampunk jewellery or simply lost again.
He posted a plea for the owners to contact him. Hours later, they connected.
On the phone the next day, he told them the machine’s story and suggested they consider selling it to a museum, warning that if it went to auction, it could vanish into a private collection.
Jennifer was stunned.
“It was just a typewriter in a basement,” she said.
But Mullaney had made an impression.
“It was lost for half a century. We didn’t want it to get lost again.”
A machinist’s legacy
Mullaney soon discovered that Jennifer’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype.
It’s likely that when the company relocated, Jung took the MingKwai home. It was later passed to Felix’s father, who kept it with him for decades – even hauling the 20kg machine across the country.
“Why he held on to it, I don’t know,” Jennifer said. “But it must have been deliberate. You don’t accidentally pack something that heavy.”
Back to the West Coast
In April, the Felixes sold the MingKwai for an undisclosed sum to Stanford University Libraries, with help from a private donor.
That spring, the machine made its way back across the United States.
When it was lifted from its crate in a Stanford warehouse, Mullaney lay on the floor to examine it.
It was more intricate than any typewriter he’d ever seen, packed with delicate mechanisms. He began imagining how engineers might help decode its design – revealing what Lin was thinking in 1947, perhaps even making it possible to build a working version.
After more than 50 years in the shadows, the MingKwai was safe.
And for Mullaney, the long hunt was over – but the story of the world’s rarest Chinese typewriter had only just begun. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
Already a subscriber? Log in
Get 20% OFF The Star Digital Access
Cancel anytime. Ad-free. Unlimited access with perks.
