Written vernacular Chinese, also known as Baihua (simplified Chinese: 白话文; traditional Chinese: 白話文; pinyin: báihuàwén) or Huawen (simplified Chinese: 华文; traditional Chinese: 華文; pinyin: huáwén), is the forms of written Chinese based on the varieties of Chinese spoken throughout China, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used during imperial China up to the early twentieth century. A written vernacular based on Mandarin Chinese was used in novels in the Ming and Qing dynasties (14th–20th centuries), and later refined by intellectuals associated with the May Fourth Movement. Since the early 1920s, this modern vernacular form has been the standard style of writing for speakers of all varieties of Chinese throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore as the wr