China Scene: West

Chef writes dictionary with 60,000 characters

Zhang Xueguo, a chef in Daxian county, Sichuan province, spent 18 years editing a dictionary and hopes his achievement will soon be published.

Although the 43-year-old only has a primary school education, he educated himself during his spare time and found there were some defects in the New China Dictionary, the most authoritative in China, and decided to edit a new version. Zhang started his ambitious plan in 1990 and after 18 long years of hard work has completed a new dictionary complete with more than 600,000 characters. "I hope my dictionary can be published," Zhang said.