Mandarin over Manchu : court-sponsored Qing lexicography and its subversion in Korea and Japan / Mårten Söderblom Saarela 

This extract is from the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies Volume 77 Number 2.

Abstract:

The Manchu language studies of the Qing empire emerged in Beijing during the late seventeenth century and spread to Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan during the eighteenth century. The Qing court sponsored the compilation of multilingual thesauri and thereby created an imperial linguistic order with Manchu at the center and vernacular Chinese, or Mandarin, in a subordinate position. Chosŏn and Tokugawa scholars, by contrast, usually placed Mandarin—not Manchu, Korean, or Japanese—as the leading language in the new multilingual thesauri they compiled on the basis of Qing works. I show how the balance between Manchu and Mandarin changed as Korean and Japanese scholars reworked lexicographic books from Beijing. The lexicographic evidence demonstrates that the international languages of pre-twentieth-century East Asia included Manchu and vernacular Mandarin as well as literary Chinese.

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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