Thomas S. Mullaney, historian at Stanford University, traces how Chinese writing was reshaped by mechanization and digitization over the last two centuries. Delivered as the Roger E. Covey Distinguished Lecture in Premodern China Studies, the talk opens with the puzzle of fitting over 100,000 Chinese characters into Morse code, typewriter keys, and computer keyboards. Mullaney argues that engineers, linguists, and ordinary users solved this problem by inventing what he calls hypography, a mode of writing in which users search for and retrieve characters rather than inscribe them directly. He contrasts this with older technologies like woodblock printing and calligraphy, which worked by adding or removing physical matter, against telegraphy and computing, which do not. The lecture situates Chinese writing's digital transformation within a broader worldwide shift in how inscription technologies physically function, moving from material addition and subtraction to retrieval from memory.