A study of how the science of diachronic linguistics merged with the will to reform language in the Catholic missionary milieu of Republican China. In focus is a romanization of the Chinese language that was proposed in 1931 by two missionaries in Manchuria. The inventors of the new system claimed that their so-called Romanisation Interdialectique (R.I.) could spell all dialects of Chinese using a single orthography. This feat was, allegedly, made possible by the reliance on the latest achievements of historical linguistics. R.I. quickly gained traction in missionary circles, but its history came to an end when the Communist authorities expelled foreign missionaries after 1949.
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