With my daughter on winter break, most of my time lately has gone into helping her study. She is in her third year of middle school, and since her final exam results were not very good, this holiday has become a period of catching up rather than relaxing. Because of that, I have read less than usual. The only book I finished was The Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline, and aside from reading, I also changed the input method on my phone after seeing someone discuss it online: I moved to Fcitx5 for Android, installed the Rime plugin, and used the Misty Pinyin dictionary. That way, my phone and computer now share the same vocabulary base.

Moving my phone to Fcitx5 for Android

On my computer, I have been using Weasel together with the Misty Pinyin dictionary since last year. It is open source, does a good job protecting privacy, and has a large enough dictionary to make input feel accurate and efficient. In contrast, I was never really satisfied with the input methods I had on my phone.

I used WeChat Keyboard for a while, but the constant WeChat-related promotion built into it was so intrusive that I gave up on it. After that I switched to Gboard for some time. My problems with it were straightforward: the dictionary felt too limited, input was often inaccurate, and choosing the right candidate could be annoying. On top of that, some emoji and kaomoji features depended on network access, so using it comfortably often meant keeping a workaround ready at all times. After a while, that also became hard to tolerate.

I had actually tried Fcitx5 for Android once before, not long after it first appeared. At the time, there was no Rime plugin yet, and it also lacked a 9-key layout, so it was hard to stick with. In the end, I settled on Huawei's Xiaoyi input method. It was fairly average in every respect, but usable and familiar enough that I kept it as my daily keyboard.

After seeing that Fcitx5 for Android had gone through many updates and now supported the Rime plugin with the Misty Pinyin dictionary, I decided to try it again. The setup process was quite easy, and getting it running did not take much effort.

After using it for a few days, my overall impression is that it works reasonably well. The biggest advantage is clearly the Misty Pinyin dictionary, which makes the typing experience on my phone much closer to what I already have on my computer. The drawback remains the same as before: there is still no 9-key layout. For now, I am trying to get used to typing on a full keyboard layout instead.

Reading The Year of No Significance

I first heard of this book years ago while watching the TV drama In the Name of the People. Recently it was recommended to me in WeChat Reading, where it was available to read for free, so I finally picked it up.

Despite the title, the book is not simply a record of what happened in the fifteenth year of the Wanli reign. Instead, it uses that moment as an entry point to discuss several representative figures, including Zhang Juzheng, Shen Shixing, Hai Rui, and Qi Jiguang.

What stands out in the book is how much historical direction could be shaped by the personalities of grand secretaries, by the peculiar structure of the Ming civil bureaucracy, by the frustrations of the emperor, and by the tragic position of generals and soldiers under that system.

One of the most striking ideas in the book is that an incident that appears trivial on the surface can end up exposing the deeper roots of a dynasty's collapse. It is hard to imagine that a seemingly minor case of official muddling-through could be connected, in the long run, to the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing. Yet the book shows how such patterns mattered. It also describes absurd situations such as a band of only fifty or sixty pirates landing in Zhejiang, traveling more than a thousand kilometers, and killing over four thousand people. When an emperor wanted to do something that did not suit the civil official establishment, he often simply could not get it done. Over time, that kind of political paralysis could easily lead to discouragement, apathy, and a habit of merely getting by.

Of course, these are the book's interpretations, and they are not necessarily complete or beyond dispute. Even so, it is still quite helpful for understanding that unusual feudal dynasty and the inner logic of its decline.

The "muddling-through" incident mentioned in the book goes roughly like this: a regional inspector in the northeast noticed that one tribe was steadily annexing nearby tribes, so he ordered a commander-in-chief to suppress it. The commander not only disobeyed but also lost the battle—which, under the Ming system, was hardly surprising. The inspector then accused the commander of misconduct. The commander, who had backing of his own, retaliated with accusations against the inspector. At that time, the chief grand secretary was Shen Shixing, a man known for smoothing things over. Faced with the mutual accusations, he basically treated the matter as canceled out on both sides and let it pass. And so the whole thing came to nothing. The tribal leader involved was Nurhaci.