 This project had long been advocated by another pinyin proponent, Victor H. Mair in his The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (1986).When the Republic of China began in 1912, educators and scholars recognized the need to update the 1716 "Kangxi Zidian".It was thoroughly revised in the (1915) "Zhonghua Da Zidian" (中華大字典 "Comprehensive Chinese-Character Dictionary"), which corrected over 4,000 "Kangxi Zidian" mistakes and added more than 1,000 new characters.