The first character frequency count based on a corpus of texts written in the modern Chinese vernacular was conducted by the educator Chén Hèqín 陳鶴琴 (1892–1982) in Nánjīng 南京. Chén and his collaborators were inspired by Thorndike (1921). They counted the character frequency in a corpus of 554,478 tokens, finding 4,261 character types altogether (Chén 1928).

In the 1950s, several character frequency counts were carried out in the People’s Republ…