TIANJIN, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- But for the help from tens of thousands of netizens, Richard Sears would be soon forced to leave China, where he has devoted 20 years and every penny studying the origins of Chinese characters, or Hanzi.

Struggling to operate a free website recording the history of around 6,500 contemporary Hanzi in the northern Tianjin City, the American, nicknamed "Uncle Hanzi", was in need of a permanent job to renew his visa, which is due to expire this month.

Sears felt hopeless until a user of his website revealed his plight on Weibo, a popular Chinese Twitter-like microblog. "He's given everything to Hanzi...down-and-out...He hopes to find a regular job as an English teacher or translator, so as to continue his life and research on Hanzi in China. Please forward this post!" said the post, written by "Dixin Yan".

The message was forwarded more than 40,000 times, bringing Sears fame, donations and job opportunities.

"I've got many offers. I think the visa problem will be solved soon," he said on his Weibo account Friday.

However, he has not stopped searching for better jobs, and had five interviews in Beijing on Sunday and Monday.

So far, Sears has received financial aid of more than 13,000 U.S. dollars from over 1,200 donators.

Now an Internet sensation, Sears has to deal with hundreds of emails each day. "I've taken China as my home. I hope to stay here forever," he told a group of reporters in his single-room apartment in Tianjin.

ALL-OUT PURSUIT

In 2002, the Sinophile launched the advertising-free website (www. chineseetymology. org), which is devoted to the etymology of Chinese characters. Now, it racks up a maximum of 600,000 clicks a day.

After typing a character into the database on the website, a user will see how the character was evolved from its ancient forms. The database has 96,000 forms of ancient Hanzi.

In addition, the website also adds an English meaning to each character and contains phonetic material of Mandarin and other dialects.

Grown up in a small town in Tennessee and a physics graduate, Sears used to wonder how Non-English speakers think and communicate. Therefore, he chose to learn Chinese in the early 1970s, with his first stop in Taiwan.

Learning was hard in the beginning, but Sears found a shortcut. He realized to understand a character's origin and ancient forms helped him memorize its current form and meaning, and thus devoted himself to the research on etymology of Hanzi.

As a former computer engineer, he developed the vision of digitalizing the origins of Hanzi and sharing it on the Internet.

Escaping death, after a heart attack in 1994, he asked himself what mattered most to him. "My answer was, if I had one more year to live, I hoped to computerize Hanzi," he said.

In the following seven years, he hired a Chinese worker to scan ancient textbooks he had purchased with all his savings and traveled between the United States, Chinese mainland and Taiwan to collect materials.

So far, the website has cost Sears more than 300,000 U.S. dollars, leading him to the brink of bankruptcy.

In recent years, he barely made ends meet as a temporary English teacher, taking care of his website alone, and often grabbing a bite to eat at sidewalk snack booths. Worse still, without a regular job, he had to worry about his visa every three months.

Despite all the hardship, Sears does not regret anything he has done. "This is my choice, and I'm doing the things I truly like," he says.

INSPIRATION

Sears's devotion to Hanzi inspired Chinese people, including those who might become his employers and business partners, and prompting some to reflect on themselves.

"I read about his deed on Weibo and was moved. I got in touch with him right that day," said Sun Huimin, chairman of the Tianjin-based Lianbang Education Group.

Sun was willing to offer Sears a job in the group's English language research institute. He also promised to support his studies on Hanzi by introducing him to researchers and institutes in the field.

Sears has completed a lot of fundamental and creative work in digitalizing Chinese characters, said He Miao, an executive with Hudong.com, a major Chinese-language online encyclopedia. He said the company decided to provide free Internet services to Sears's website and was considering co-operation with him.

"How many Chinese understand Hanzi, a treasure left by our ancestors, as much as Sears does?" asked netizen "neal".

"Our traditional culture is so broad and profound that many Chinese people simply ignore it," said Zhang Baoyi, director of the Sociology Institute of Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.

Unlike Sears, many Chinese scholars feel reluctant to conduct unprofitable researches, which has a disadvantage to both cultural inheritance and scientific innovation, Zhang said.

In the future, Sears plans to work to revise the existing data on his website and upload more pictures and information for each character.

He describes the evolvement of each character as a story. "Every story is so charming, and they make me always anxious to know more," he said.