The U.S. tends to think of itself as the center of the world, and to some degree, that's

true.

Our country's economic, military, and cultural power have dominated the globe for decades,

but that's changing.

Over the past few years, we've watched Russia invade Ukraine, North Korea test nuclear

weapons, and China threaten Taiwan.

When we need a break from the news, we might binge the dystopian world of squid game, dance

it out to some K-pop, or distract ourselves with videos on the Chinese own platform TikTok.

And we do it all on devices powered by Taiwanese semi-conductors.

We're going to devote our next few episodes to telling some of the stories of how China,

South Korea, and Taiwan came to shape so many aspects of life around the world.

We're calling this series super power.

We start with the characters that built China, a sweeping story filled with spies, book smugglers,

and visionary librarians who stake their lives on the effort to create and share a common

written language.

The oldest theory we have of how Chinese characters came into being is actually this myth

of this four-eyed sage who spent his days looking up at the clouds and noticing the formation

and pattern.

And then he looked down on the ground and looked at how the birds were leading tracks on the

sand.

He noticed that there are these recurrent patterns in the universe that tied the world together.

And then the lore has that from that, that's how he developed characters.

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