Those vernacular versions of written Chinese always existed, but they had very little prestige compared to the Classical Chinese (文言文) mainly used by the imperial bureaucracy, which was based on literature from the Han dynasty and earlier. Elegant and concise, but it required dedicated education, which was tested in the imperial examinations, and starkly differed from the vernacular versions in both grammar and vocabulary. Modern Written Chinese was standardised only after the fall of the Qing dynasty by the successive governments. Quite younger again than Bühnendeutsch, and so recent that spoken Mandarin has not yet managed to supplant the other languages of China. German has only managed to do so in the big cities, where people at times often don't speak nor understand the dialects of the surrounding rural areas anymore.