Cyrillic and Chinese: history and current trends

Since Russian missionaries and scholars turned their attention to China at the beginning of the 18th century, diverse attempts at tailoring the Cyrillic script to the Chinese language have taken place to a fair degree of success, and Cyrillic has even been adopted by a Chinese-speaking people, the Dungans of Central Asia, as their main writing system. However, the Cyrillisation of Chinese has drawn less scholarly attention than the concurrent efforts to write Chinese with Latin letters, one reason being that a plethora of language specific schemes are still in use at a time when Hanyu Pinyin has taken the place of most Romanisations of old. Most specialised publications on this subject, like Dacyšen 2018, Šprincin 1964, Veber et al. 1908, are in fact limited to the Russian system, which, despite being the most significant one, is but one of several; an extensive work like the one Raini (2011) has dedicated to the early Romanisations of Chinese is still wanting. Collecting information from historical sources and regulatory texts in various Slavic languages, this paper aims to draft a comprehensive history of Cyrillic and Chinese, providing an overview of the different systems historically and currently used in several countries and how they relate to one another.