Hong Kong Type: A Love Letter Late by One Hundred and Fifty Years

Hong Kong Type is the first complete set of movable lead types in Chinese characters. It was minted by the missionaries of the London Missionary Society in the mid-nineteenth century to print the Chinese Bible and works introducing Western knowledge to China. It brought about the modernization of the printing industry in China, gradually replacing traditional wood block printing by movable type printing. This work is based on the facts about Hong Kong Type but it is not a historical novel. It is both about the past and the present. A typeface is where the word and the object meet, where culture and technology, or the spiritual and the material, converge. The novel is about writing itself, which is both a letter and a record, a séance and a testament. The novel was originally published in Chinese in 2021. The initial draft of this English translation was done by GPT-4. The text is then checked, corrected and edited by the author himself.