American 'Uncle Hanzi' dedicated to research of Chinese characters

In 1972, Richard Sears, a young American from the state of Tennessee, began learning Chinese because of his fascination with traditional Chinese culture.

"Chinese characters are the only ancient script now still in use in the world and it's a miracle of human history," said Sears in fluent Chinese.

As a primitive form of Chinese characters and the oldest fully developed characters in China, Jiaguwen, or oracle bone inscriptions, were first discovered in 1899 and named for their inscriptions on tortoise shells and animal bones.

Drawn to the ancient language, Sears often went back and forth between China and the US. As a computer engineer in his country, he continued to learn Chinese until the 1990s.

In 1994, after stricken by a severe heart attack, he made a decision.

"At that time, I almost died. Later on, I was thinking that if I had only one day left to live, I would call my friends and say 'goodbye' and if one year left, I would make the ancient Chinese characters available online," Sears recalled.

In the following days, Sears started programming and building a database of oracle bone inscriptions. It took him seven years just to scan the characters in Chinese ancient books.

In 2002, the Jiaguwen enthusiast's website was launched, though with only a few page views per day in the beginning. However, it surged to 600,000 per day in 2011 after a blogger recommended the site on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

"I became a web celebrity overnight and was given a nickname 'Uncle Hanzi,'" Sears said with a smile. Hanzi means Chinese characters.