TIANJIN, April 21 (Xinhua) -- 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 named for their inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones.
Drawn to the ancient language, Sears often went back and forth between China and the United States. As a computer engineer in his country, he continued to learn Chinese until the 1990s.
In 1994, after stricken by a severe heart attack, he made a decision.
"At that time, I almost died. Later on, I was thinking that if I had only one day left to live, I would call my friends and say 'goodbye' and if one year left, I would make the ancient Chinese characters available online," Sears recalled.
In the following days, Sears started programming and building a database of oracle bone inscriptions. 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.
"Every character fascinates me. I hope to take people back to the origin of Chinese characters and see how each of them evolved into what it is today," he said.
Up till now, the website has been continuously updated, giving lovers of the ancient language from all over the world free access to browse at their leisure.
"When I analyze each character, I wonder what did the ancient Chinese think," said Sears.
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.
After visiting many Chinese cities, Sears learned more about China and ancient Chinese culture. He said when he came to China in the last century, few Chinese could speak good English. However, English education has been popularized across the country in recent years.
Similarly, Chinese language and culture were mysterious and not known by people in most countries, but now, more and more people in the world are learning Chinese, even Chinese history, traditional Chinese medicine and so on, Sears added.
At present, the 70-year-old American has made his home in China with his friend's support. Apart from taking part in some social activities, Sears devotes all his efforts to the study of Chinese characters.
Since the end of 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, which shows the step-by-step evolution of the first batch of 108 characters with augmented reality technology, is expected to be launched on June 1.
"When I die, I hope my website will live on, and I'm planning to write a book about my research. This will be my gift to China," he said. Enditem
