This paper examines the indispensable role the Arabic script played in Chinese linguistic modernization. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals––much like their counterparts in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia––singled out the written script as the culprit in the failure to modernize. What followed was decades of struggle to alphabetize Chinese, which finally culminated in the invention of pinyin in the 1950s, the system of Latinized transcription that coexists with Chinese characters. The scholarship on language and writing reform in twentieth-century China has long maintained a dichotomy between the Alphabet (i.e., the West) and the Non-Alphabet (i.e., China), treating alphabetization as essentially a derivative of Western colonial discourse. These studies have sought the origins of Chinese alphabetization in the long history of Sino-Western contacts, extending from Jesuit and Protestant efforts to alphabetize Chinese to twentieth-century linguistic notations. The purpose of this paper is to show the conceptual limitations and historical inaccuracies embedded in this enduring West/China dichotomy. Subverting the existing narratives, I argue that the invention of the first Chinese Latin Alphabet in the 1930s, which served as the mother of pinyin, was intimately connected not only to the reform of the Arabic script across Eurasia, but also to the Chinese Muslims’ long history of using the Arabic script to record Chinese sounds. This reform movement started in the Ottoman Empire and Russian Caucasus, and through unexpected twists and turns ended up as a Latinization movement, which spread like wildfire in Turkey, the Soviet Union, and China. Following the forgotten traces of the Arabic script in the rest of Eurasia, this paper unravels a world of letters and sounds that have long been erased from, and yet were central to, the history of linguistic modernization in China.