Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Chinese government officially adopted Standard Chinese in the year 1932 when a commission in Nanjing made the decision to elevate the Beijing dialect to the status of a global standard. The People's Republic of China, founded in 1949, retained this standard and renamed it Putonghua. The government of Taiwan continued to use this standard as well.
The earliest attested written form of the Chinese language consists of divinations etched onto the shoulder blades of oxen and the plastrons of turtles during the Shang dynasty over three thousand years ago. These oracle bones contain the first attempts to capture the phonology of Old Chinese, which lacked the retroflex and palatal obstruents found in later forms. The language evolved from these bronze inscriptions to the rhyming practices of the Classic of Poetry during the Western Zhou period.
Cantonese retains six tones and historically counted nine tones, which is significantly more than the three tones found in some northern dialects. Shanghainese is an exception that has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system. The use of tones in Chinese can range from three in some northern dialects to twelve in some southern varieties.
The government introduced simplified Chinese characters in the year 1954 to promote mass literacy by reducing the number of strokes in complex glyphs. Singapore followed suit in the year 1976, and the modern character set includes over 40,000 characters though fewer than a quarter are commonly used. The Kangxi Dictionary of the 18th century had previously standardized 214 radicals.
The spread of Chinese Buddhism between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE brought the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Sino-Korean, Sino-Japanese, and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now comprise over half of the respective word counts in these languages. This influence created a shared corpus of terminology that parallels the Greco-Latin roots of European languages.