The early modern travels of Manchu : a script and its study in East Asia and Europe / Mårten Söderblom Saarela.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Conventions -- Introduction. A Cultural History of the Manchu Script -- Chapter 1. To Follow Fuxi or Kubilai Khan? Written Manchu Before 1644 -- Chapter 2. The Beijing Origins of Manchu Language Pedagogy, 1668-1730 -- Chapter 3. Phonology and Manchu in Southern China and Japan, c. 1670-1716 -- Chapter 4. Manchu Words and Alphabetical Order in China and Japan, 1683-1820s -- Chapter 5. Leibniz's Dream of a Manchu Encyclopedia and Kangxi's Mirror, 1673-1708 -- Chapter 6. The Manchu Script and Foreign Sounds from the Qing Court to Korea, 1720s-1770s -- Chapter 7. The Invention of a Manchu Alphabet in Saint Petersburg, 1720s-1730s -- Chapter 8. The Making of a Manchu Typeface in Paris, 1780s-1810s -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world, Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu.In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how--through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing--intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Chosŏn Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.

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The Manchu language at court and in the bureaucracy under the Qianlong emperor / by Mårten Söderblom Saarela.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This is the first book-length study of the roles played by the Manchu language at the center of the Qing empire at the height of its power in the eighteenth century. It presents a revisionist account of Manchu not as a language in decline, but as extensively and consciously used language in a variety of areas. It treats the use, discussion, regulation, and philological study of Manchu at the court of an emperor who cared deeply for the maintenance and history of the language of his dynasty"--  Provided by publisher.

Introduction 1
1 The How and Why of Manchu 3
2 Manchu Documents, Books, and Three Reasons for Writing  this Study 12
1 Background: The Manchu Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Qianlong Period 19
1 The Early History of Written Manchu 19
2 The Manchu Language in China Proper 23
3 Scholarly Efforts to Describe the Manchu Language and Qianlong’s
Project to Change it 26
3.1 Manchu Grammatical Studies 27
3.2 Qianlong’s Manchu Neologisms 29
2 Public Inscriptions and Manchu Language Reform in the Early
Qianlong Reign 37
1 Background: Manchu Steles and Public Inscriptions 39
2 Public Inscriptions and Qianlong-era Language Reform 45
3 The Names for Temples, Altars, and Gates 46
4 The Inscription at Fragrance of the Teaching Temple 53
5 Conclusion 57
3 Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace Memorial System 59
1 Manchu and Chinese Linguistic Regimes 61
2 Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace
Memorial System 67
2.1 The Forwarding of Palace Memorials to Outer Court
Agencies 68
3 The Experiment of Bilingual Palace Memorials 69
3.1 Military Communications 72
3.2 Judicial Cases Involving Individuals Subject to Chinese Law 79
4 Language Choice and Secrecy 83
5 The Limits of Linguistic Compartmentalization:
Lateral Communications 93
6 Conclusion 99
4 Reading Manchu Palace Memorials Against the Idea of Manchu Decline 102
1 The Idea of Manchu Decline 103
2 Palace Memorials from Letters to Bureaucratic Summaries 107
3 How did Qianlong Understand Authorship? The Examples of Kuilin, Kinglin, and Guncukdar 113
4 Problems Related to the Composite Nature of Memorials 120
5 Conclusion 123
5 Imperial Corrections of Language Errors in Manchu
Palace Memorials 124
1 Corrections before Qianlong 125
2 Qianlong’s Corrections of Manchu Usage 127
2.1 Spelling Mistakes and Non-standard Spellings 128
2.2 Word Choice (1): Improper Usage 131
2.3 Word Choice (2): Qianlong’s Idiosyncratic Standard 134
2.4 Sinicisms 138
2.5 Grammatical Errors 145
3 Criticism of Language and of the Writer 152
4 Reprimands for Mistakes in Languages other than Manchu 153
5 Conclusion 155
6 Philological Scholarship in Manchu: Linguistic Studies on the
Pre-conquest Archive 157
1 What was “Evidential Learning”? 157
2 Manchu “Evidential Learning” 161
3 Manchu Philology before Qianlong: The Translation of
Confucian Literature 162
4 The Pre-conquest Archive and the Early Veritable Records 170
5 The Book of Characters Without Dots and Circles 173
6 The Book of Old Manchu Phrases Lifted from the Veritable Records 178
6.1 Structure and Character of the Book 181
6.2 Glosses that Highlight Morphology 183
6.3 Comments on Linguistic Structures 184
6.4 Defining Historical and Contemporary Usage 186
6.5 Glosses that Acknowledge the Plurilingual Historical Context of the Source Text 187
6.6 Conclusion 189
7 Footnotes to Early Qing History: The Grand Secretariat Copy of the Old
Manchu Archive 191
1 Editing the Old Archive 193
2 The Yellow Sticky Notes 198
2.1 Notes on the Archive’s Plurilingual Character 198
2.2 Consultation of Experts and Use of Field Reports 201
2.3 Consultation of Literature 204
2.4 The Research Behind the Notes and Its Limitations 211
3 The Philology of Manchu before Manchu: Multilingual
Historical Glossaries 214
4 Conclusion 222
Conclusion: Manchu after Qianlong 226
1 Manchu as a Language of Court Scholarship 227
2 Statistics on Manchu Document Production 228
3 A New Role for Manchu? 236
4 Survival as an Administrative Language in
Multilingual Contexts 237
5 Socio-political Change and Linguistic Change 240
6 Manchu’s Survival as a Vernacular Language 241
7 Limited use of Manchu as a Spoken Language in
Nineteenth-century Beijing 243
8 The Decline of Manchu 247
Bibliography 251
Archives and Databases Used 251
Works Cited 251
Index 289

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