The History of Cangjie Input: Chu Bong-Foo and the Legend of Cangjie
From the legendary inventor of writing to Chu Bong-Foo’s 1976 input method, and how Cangjie became part of every computer and phone used in Hong Kong.
Key takeaways
- The method is named after Cangjie (倉頡), the legendary historian of the Yellow Emperor said to have invented Chinese writing.
- Chu Bong-Foo (朱邦復) developed the Cangjie input method in 1976, when putting Chinese on computers was a major unsolved problem.
- Chu gave up his patent rights so the method could be freely used, which is why it is built into every major operating system.
- The system was revised in later generations; Cangjie 3 and Cangjie 5 are the versions in wide use today.
The legend of Cangjie
Chinese tradition credits the invention of writing to Cangjie, a historian at the court of the legendary Yellow Emperor. According to the story, he observed the tracks of birds and animals and created characters from them; one ancient text says that when writing was invented, grain rained from the sky and ghosts wept at night. Historians see Chinese writing as developing gradually over centuries rather than being invented by one person, but the legend made Cangjie a symbol of the written language itself.
Putting Chinese on computers
Early computers were built around alphabets. A Chinese system needed a way to store thousands of characters and a way to type them on a keyboard of a few dozen keys. In the 1970s several approaches competed, including large keyboards with hundreds of keys and codes based on pronunciation or character numbers.
Chu Bong-Foo, working on Chinese computing in Taiwan, developed a method that analysed characters into a small set of graphic components. He completed it in 1976, and it was later named after the legendary inventor of writing.
Giving it away
Chu chose to give up his patent rights so that anyone could use the method without paying royalties. Free use let manufacturers and software makers adopt Cangjie widely, and it became a standard input method on personal computers in Hong Kong and Taiwan, later included in Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.
Generations
Cangjie was revised as character sets grew and inconsistencies were found. The third generation was widely implemented in system input methods, and the fifth generation made some decompositions more regular. The two versions agree on almost all characters; see Cangjie 3 vs Cangjie 5 for the differences. Simplified two-code Quick (速成) input, derived from Cangjie, became popular with casual typists.
Cangjie today
Although phrase-based sound input and voice typing have grown, Cangjie remains widely taught in Hong Kong schools and valued by fast typists. It also shaped how a generation of users think about character structure: to type in Cangjie, you have to see each character as a composition of parts.
Frequently asked questions
When was the Cangjie input method invented?
Chu Bong-Foo developed it in 1976.
Did Chu Bong-Foo make money from Cangjie?
He gave up his patent rights so the method could be used freely, which helped it spread.
Who was Cangjie?
In legend, Cangjie was the Yellow Emperor’s historian who invented Chinese characters by observing animal tracks.
Related guides
What is Cangjie?
How the shape-based Cangjie system turns any Chinese character into a code of up to five letters, and why Hong Kong typists still swear by it.
Cangjie 3 vs Cangjie 5
Why the same character can have two Cangjie codes, the systematic changes between the third and fifth generations, and a table of common characters that differ.
Cangjie vs other input methods
An honest comparison of the main ways to type Chinese: shape-based Cangjie and Quick, sound-based Pinyin, Zhuyin and Jyutping, and handwriting and voice.
Six Writings (六書)
The traditional six categories of Chinese character formation, from pictographs to phono-semantic compounds, with examples and real statistics on how common each is.