In 1972, Richard Sears, a young American from the state of Tennessee, began learning Chinese because of his fascination with traditional Chinese culture.
“Chinese characters are the only ancient script now still in use in the world and it's a miracle of human history,” said Sears in fluent Chinese.
As a primitive form of Chinese characters and the oldest fully developed characters in China, Jiaguwen, or oracle bone inscriptions, were first discovered in 1899 and aimed for their inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones.
Drawn to the ancient language, Sears often went back and forth between China and the US. In 1994, he made a decision to make the ancient Chinese characters available online. Taking advantage of his professional skill，Sears started programming and building a database of oracle bone inscriptions on his own. It took him seven years just to scan the characters in Chinese ancient books. In 2002, the Jiaguwen enthusiast's website was launched, though with only a few page views per day in the beginning. However, it surged to 600,000 per day in 2011 after a blogger recommended the site on Chinese social media platform Weibo. “I became a web celebrity overnight and was given a nickname 'Uncle Hanzi',” Sears said with a smile. Hanzi means Chinese characters.
During the past 26 years, he has accumulated a great deal of information on his website-more than 96,000 ancient Chinese character forms from archeological sources. Up till now, the web site has been continuously updated, giving lovers of the ancient language from all over the world free access to browse at their leisure. In order to reveal the mystery behind the ancient characters, he spent a great deal of money and time buying and going through dozens of books, living on a shoestring.
Since last year, Sears has been working with a Chinese technology company on a smartphone application for children to learn about how the characters evolved. The app is expected to be launched next year.
