The Stanford University Libraries have accepted with gratitude the donation of the archive of Dr. Hsin Chen “H.C.” Tien (1929-2015), a family psychiatrist and entrepreneurial inventor who developed a Chinese character encoding system for word processors and computers in the 1970s. The H.C. Tien Collection on Chinese Computing will be accessible in the East Asia Library alongside another recently discovered artifact anticipating the origin of Chinese computing, the only known prototype of the MingKwai typewriter.
“The H.C. Tien Collection, the MingKwai typewriter, and the Thomas S. Mullaney Collection form the nucleus of our nascent collection of East Asian information technology.” said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian. “These unique materials entrusted to the Stanford University Libraries are the early records of what many have called the digital Silk Road. They provide a much-needed global perspective for researchers at the Silicon Valley Archives as they investigate the impact of technology in the modern era.”
Aled Tien, representing the Tien Family in donating the archive, was aware of the research of Professor Thomas S. Mullaney, author of The Chinese Typewriter and The Chinese Computer (MIT Press, 2018 and 2024). “Moreover, he already knew about my father’s work in Chinese computerization and his Pinxxiee alphabetic input methods and was eager to talk with me about it,” he said. “Tom Mullaney has been a kindred spirit, practical example, and resource to me in preserving my father’s Chinese computerization archive.”
Born in Beijing and educated at a British school in Portugal in the final years of World War II, H.C. Tien’s journey to the United States in 1947 to attend Adrian College was sponsored by the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. After graduating from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1955, he resided with his family in Michigan and worked in various hospitals, clinics, and private practice. He published prolifically, launched scholarly journals, wrote software, and developed neurological tests and video technologies that were widely adopted for diagnosing and treating mental illness. Both his psychiatric practice and his personal life were focused on family and community; in East Lansing, he was a leading activist for desegregated housing, community mental health, and better U.S-China relations, which he believed possible through greater awareness of Chinese science and culture.
“My father was deeply interested in philosophy and ideas. One of his favorite words was synthesis. He believed that the synthesis of the old and the new, or the east and the west could lead to some higher truth, theory, or understanding to improve the human condition,” said Aled Tien. “Parallel to this was his interest in applying technology to modernize psychiatry and later computerize Chinese. In the 1970’s, all sorts of machines, including a Double Pigeon Chinese typewriter and a refrigerator-sized Chinese character IBM System/34, ran concurrently in his medical office, yet he regularly spent Saturday mornings at home translating into vernacular English the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.
H.C. Tien’s encyclopedic interests included his lifelong study of Chinese linguistics. In the early 1980s, he founded Chinese Computer Communications, Inc. to develop and commercialize his invention of the Pinxxiee alphabetization system and Tenstrokes input method, together creating a “radical transalphabet” that could bridge the gap between alphabetization and phoneticization. His Pinxxiee dictionaries are included in the archive. “Tien’s venture ultimately did not yield lucrative results,” said Mullaney in “QWERTY in China: Chinese Computing and the Radical Alphabet” (Technology and Culture, 2018). “In the wide-open field of early Chinese personal computing and word processing, however, experimentation with the semi-phonetic, semi-structural possibilities of the Latin alphabet would continue into the present day.”
Aled Tien reflected: “Organizing my father’s archive highlighted to me the ideas, optimism, ambition, and energy he brought to trying to take advantage of the trends and opportunities of his own time to make a positive impact on his world. His was a time of the opening of China to the West, the information age, the video age, the PC and digitalization, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurship, and globalization. His ambition to computerize Chinese and bring China into the digital age came about in large part from living at this remarkable time with his unique cultural and educational background.”