Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919 900427927X, 9789004279278

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Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004279278_001

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Sinica Leidensia Edited by Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel In co-operation with P.K. Bol – D.R. Knechtges – E.S. Rawski –  W.L. Idema – H.T. Zurndorfer

VOLUME 115

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinl





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Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919 Edited by

Benjamin A. Elman

LEIDEN | BOSTON

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Based on a “Research Cluster” supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the East Asian Studies Program, 2009–2012. Thanks are also due the Davis Center for History and the Council for the Humanities Gardner Fund for their support. A Mellon Foundation Career Achievement Award provided a timely publication subvention for the project. Cover illustration: Theater Performance in “Prosperous Suzhou” from Xu Yang’s “Prosperous Suzhou” scroll for the Qianlong emperor. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rethinking East Asian languages, vernaculars, and literacies, 1000-1919 / Edited by Benjamin A. Elman. p. cm. -- (Sinica Leidensia; 115) Includes index. ISBN 978-90-04-27759-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-27927-8 (e-book) 1. East Asia--Languages--Grammar. 2. Linguistics--East Asia. 3. Grammar, Comparative and general--Syntax. 4. East Asia-Civilization. I. Elman, Benjamin A., 1946- editor. PL493.R38 2014 495--dc23 2014024421

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0169-9563 isbn 978-90-04-27759-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27927-8 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Contents

Contents Contributors viiX 1

Introduction: Languages in East and South Asia, 1000–1919 1 Benjamin A. Elman

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The Vernacularization of Buddhist Texts: From the Tangut Empire to Japan 29 Peter Kornicki

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The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea 58 Wang Sixiang

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Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam 96 John D. Phan

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Mediating the Literary Classics: Commentary and Translation in Premodern Japan 129 Haruo Shirane

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The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan 147 Daniel Trambaiolo

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The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China’s Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy 169 Mårten Söderblom Saarela

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Unintended Consequences of Classical Literacies for the Early Modern Chinese Civil Examinations 198 Benjamin A. Elman

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Competing “Languages”: “Sound” in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan 220 Atsuko Ueda

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Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China 254 Shang Wei Index 303 324

Contents Contents v Contributors vii 1. Introduction: Languages in East and South Asia, 1000–1919 1 Benjamin A. Elman 1 2. The Vernacularization of Buddhist Texts: From the Tangut Empire to Japan 29 Peter Kornicki 29 3. The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea Wang Sixiang 58 4. Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam 96 John D. Phan 96 5. Mediating the Literary Classics: Commentary and Translation in Premodern Japan 129 Haruo Shirane 129 6. The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan 147 Daniel Trambaiolo 147 7. The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China’s Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy Mårten Söderblom Saarela 169 8. Unintended Consequences of Classical Literacies for the Early Modern Chinese Civil Examinations Benjamin A. Elman 198 9. Competing “Languages”: “Sound” in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan 220 Atsuko Ueda 220 10. Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China 254 Shang Wei 254 Index 303

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Contributors Contributors

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Contributors Benjamin A. Elman is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University. He works at the intersection of several fields, including history, philosophy, literature, religion, economics, politics, and science. His ongoing interest is in rethinking how the history of East Asia has been told in the West as well as in China, Japan, and Korea. He is currently studying cultural interactions in East Asia during the eighteenth century, in particular the impact of Chinese classical learning, medicine, and natural studies on Tokugawa Japan and Chosŏn Korea. Peter Kornicki is professor of Japanese at Cambridge University, deputy warden of Robinson College, Cambridge, and a fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (1998) and other works and is now studying the dissemination of texts and the role of vernacularization in East Asia. John D. Phan completed a postgraduate Fulbright research fellowship in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he studied Chữ, Nôm, and Sino-Vietnamese literature. He then obtained an M.A. in premodern Chinese literature from Columbia University and recently completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University in the Department of Asian Studies. His dissertation is entitled “Lacquered Words: The Evolution of Vietnamese under Sinitic Influences” (2013). Phan is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tokyo, under the auspices of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Shang Wei is Du Family Professor of Chinese Culture at Columbia University. His research interests include cultural history and literature of early modern China. He is the author of “Rulin waishi” and Cultural Transformation in Late Imperial China (2003), and his other publications, in both English and Chinese, are concerned with late Ming culture and Jin ping mei cihua (The Plum in the Golden Vase), fiction commentary, and print culture. He is the coeditor of several books.

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Haruo Shirane is the Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He has written widely on Heian, medieval, and Edo prose fiction, poetry, and visual culture, as well as on the modern reception of literary classics and the production of the “past.” He is the author of Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (2012) and the editor of a book on Japanese poetry, Waka Opening Up to the World: Language, Community, and Gender (2012), a bilingual (Japanese-English) edition. Mårten Söderblom Saarela is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His research interests include the history of scholarship, education, and the study of language in the Qing Empire (1644–1911). He is working on a dissertation on lexicography and phonology covering the late seventeenth century to the last decades of the dynasty, looking primarily at Manchu dictionaries and Manchu-inspired theoretical treatises on language. Daniel Trambaiolo received his Ph.D. degree in the History of Science Program at Princeton University in December 2013. His dissertation examines concepts of medical efficacy and their relationship to the sociological phenomenon of medical expertise in Tokugawa Japan. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. Atsuko Ueda is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University and specializes in modern Japanese literature and culture. Her research interests include literary historiography of modern Japan, linguistic reforms of Meiji Japan, and postwar literary criticism and its relationship to war responsibility. She has published widely and currently is working on a monograph entitled Voices of Language: Linguistic Reform Movements in Meiji Japan, which explores the many proposals for linguistic reforms prevalent in the Meiji period. She is also coediting a volume of translations entitled Politics and Literature Debate: Postwar Literary Criticism, 1945–1952 and a volume of essays entitled Literature among the Ruins: Postwar ‘Japanese’ Literary Criticism.

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Wang Sixiang is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the History–East Asia program at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. His primary research interests include the cultural and political history of Chosŏn Korea and the history of empire in East Asia. His dissertation, tentatively titled “Korea and the Knowledge of Empire (1250–1550),” looks at literary anthologies, language manuals, envoy diaries, and court historiography to examine the role of knowledge production in how the courts of Koryŏ (918–1392) and Chosŏn (1392–1910) Korea engaged with the Mongol-Yuan and Ming Empires.

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Introduction Introduction

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Introduction: Languages in East and South Asia, 1000–1919 Benjamin A. Elman1 Today, we still premise study of premodern East Asian languages on the stark dichotomy between “the classical” and “the vernacular.” Influenced by European models explaining the transition from Latin as a classical language to local vernaculars as indigenous, scholars of East Asian cultural history have tended to view classical/literary/Sinitic Chinese, on the one hand, and spoken/ written vernaculars, on the other, as different languages that did not interact and developed along separate tracks. Peter Kornicki, while recognizing the problematic nature of doing so, has defined the term “vernacular” “to refer to locally spoken, and later written, languages like Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese, in contrast to literary Chinese, the written language that enjoyed high prestige and that spread throughout East Asia in the form of texts.”2 Our “research cluster” (see below) considered new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy that are especially central to the new historiography of India. Based on recent Indian/South Asian findings, we examined alternative frameworks for understanding East Asian languages between 1000 and 1919. Using new sources, making new connections, and reexamining old assumptions, we have asked whether and why East Asian languages should be analyzed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy. This discussion encouraged us to explore whether European modernity is an appropriate standard at all for East Asia. Individually and collectively, we have sought to establish linkages between societies without making a priori assumptions about the countries’ internal structures or the genealogy of their connections. Recent scholarship, some of it presented at our workshops and at our November 2011 final conference, entitled “Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies,” has presented a strong challenge to earlier models for understanding early modern languages in East Asia. Following the lead of Sheldon Pollock, 1 Sincere thanks and acknowledgments are due Daniel Barish (History), Yulia Frumer (History of Science), Magnus Ribbing Gren (East Asian Studies), and Bingyu Zheng (History), who as Princeton graduate student rapporteurs or commentators for our workshops and final conference prepared succinct summaries and penetrating critiques of our discussions. Each of them is a coauthor with me of this introductory chapter. 2 Kornicki 2008, 50. Cf. Lurie 2011, 342–353.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004279278_002

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who described the spread of Sanskrit in ways often diametrically opposed to the history of Latin, Peter Kornicki, Wang Sixiang, John Phan, Haruo Shirane, Daniel Trambaiolo, Atsuko Ueda, Shang Wei, and myself present essays in this volume that in aggregate challenge accepted distinctions between classical and vernacular languages in East Asia. In so doing, this volume presents a new conceptual framework that recognizes that in East Asia the literary and vernacular registers historically interacted and influenced each other as part of a unified, if hybrid, language system that was mastered by Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese according to their own unique linguistic resources. Pollock has shown how, despite their similarities as early modern cosmopolitan languages, Latin and Sanskrit had very different histories. Whereas Latin was disseminated by the military force of the Roman centralized state, Sanskrit spread instead through trade and religious activity in a more decentralized environment. In this way, Latin represented a “coercive cosmopolitanism” while Sanskrit typified a “voluntaristic cosmopolitanism.” A central concern emerging from our conference volume is the need to understand— but not reduce East Asian languages to—Pollock’s model of “voluntaristic cosmopolitanism and a vernacularism of accommodation, where very different principles are at work inviting affiliation to these cultural-political orders.” Rather than the “Latin of East Asia,” perhaps a closer analogy for classical Chinese might be Sanskrit.3 We first met in fall 2008 as a “research cluster” under the auspices of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and the East Asian Studies Program. At two “brainstorming sessions” in fall 2008 and 2009, we compared and contrasted how people in East and South Asia used languages. We also discussed the historical conditions under which Asian languages changed. We hoped to fathom in a non-Eurocentric way how and why aristocrats, warriors, officials, scholars, physicians, Buddhists, and teachers, who shared a “cosmopolitan-like” classical language originally from China, were able to forge an East Asian education revolution, circa 1500–1800, for elites, commoners, and women. A precocious, “early modern–like” woodblock print revolution that began in Song China (960–1280)—three centuries before Europe—and slowly expanded to Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) and Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) was certainly an important enabling factor.4 Our focus initially was on East and Central Asia after 1000 CE, with precolonial India as a parallel example. Our “nested” research groups included two core groups from Princeton and Columbia, who could meet frequently enough 3 Pollock 2000, 596. 4 Cf. Brokaw and Chow 2005 with Kornicki 1998.

Introduction

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to study historical connections between regions, thus yielding more interesting results than a purely comparative methodology. We asked ourselves in what ways consideration of parallel issues in Central Asia and Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the “early modern” period, 1500–1800, might enhance our understanding of language processes in China and India. We also queried whether “early modern” was an appropriate chronology to apply to our findings. When Sheldon Pollock addressed the group in fall 2008, he focused on the case of Sanskrit, which at first glance appeared to be a “classical language” that paralleled Latin in Europe. Nevertheless, Sanskrit differed from Latin because its expansion was facilitated by local conscious decisions to have a homogeneous language for cultural purposes, rather than by warfare and conquest. Furthermore, unlike in early modern Europe, the infiltration of local languages into the so-called higher culture of Indian classical languages was motivated neither by power struggles nor by appeals to nationalism. Could East Asian languages before 1800 be understood in this sense? If so, then literary practices in East and South Asia could not be described as “early modern” in the European sense. Nor would an “early modern” methodological framework based on the “rise of the West” adequately explain the processes by which local languages came into the public domain and successfully competed with the literary traditions of Sanskrit in South Asia and classical Chinese in East Asia. Simplifying it greatly vis-à-vis Latin and Sanskrit, the East Asian case of a “cosmopolitan language” uniquely had a single center and centrifugal flows of classical Chinese texts, in contrast to the European and Indian cases of multipolar flows of texts and languages. This difference is not a major part of all the essays presented in this volume, but it means that this introduction has to be clear about the issues at stake in the comparisons between East and South Asia in light of what Pollock called “cosmopolitanism.” Some authors at our final conference in fall 2011 used “classical versus vernacular(s)” rather than “cosmopolitan versus vernacular(s)” to make their points, but the former also has its problems because Heian Japanese circa 800–1200 may have been a “vernacular” vis-à-vis classical Chinese in Japan (kanbun 漢文), for instance, but it attained its own “classical” voice in Japanese later, in the Tokugawa period. We have tried to explain the similarities and differences in East Asia relative to the European and Indian cases. In this volume, we expand on our current knowledge of premodern East and South Asian intellectual and cultural history to globalize the centrality of classical languages and vernaculars in Asian daily life. Can we prepare ourselves and our graduate students to envision a cultural history in comparative terms, which will match and improve on the globalized work accomplished by

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economic historians?5 Rather than just “follow the money,” can’t we impartially measure the “velocities” of local languages as “linguistic currencies,” when they were exchanged/translated daily for classical educations, religion, art, literature, science, philology, antiquities, and so on?6 The value of our dialogue among scholars and students working on different regions was immediately demonstrated by a brief conversation that occurred on the first day of our 2011 conference and that concerned the role of printing in shaping “early modern” European and Chinese cultures and languages but not those of India. Many scholars of European and East Asian history have tended to grant printing technologies a profound role in shaping cultural developments. We see many of the same developments in South Asia and Japan before 1650, however, in the absence of any extensive use of printing, suggesting that the importance of printing in the European and Chinese cases may be either overstated or misinterpreted. Printing empowered languages, but it did not decide their raison d’être. Meetings of specialists working on these different regions have allowed us to refine our insights into the history of our own regions without necessarily—and preemptively—subsuming them into broadly comparative or theoretical models.7 The ambitious goal that we set for our workshops was to come up with a new research methodology, detached from the teleological tendencies of Asianists to draw on the European model, on the one hand, and remaining sensitive to issues specific to broader East Asian perspectives, on the other. The core issue that was echoed in most of our discussions was the need to come up with an alternative that would go beyond the classical/vernacular dichotomy and thus be more reflective of the actual uses of languages rather than subsuming them under the general story line of the rise of vernaculars in emerging nation-states. Our comparative approach allowed us to focus on Central, East, and South Asia in order to learn about how the local uses of spoken and written languages were related to the cosmopolitan classics written in Chinese script but also pronounced using local dialects. The difference between the European case and that of East Asia continued to be the main theme when we discussed how languages traveled. Classical Chinese, for example, became dissociated from its geographical origins and was increasingly identified as a literary language in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Ryukyus. Moreover, classical Chinese traveled mainly in a written form, so 5 Pomeranz and Topik 1999. 6 Lurie 2011, 346–348. 7 The essays in Brokaw and Chow 2005 present printing in “late imperial” China as intellectually determinative. See the caveats in Elman 2001, 178–207.

Introduction

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that the term “lingua franca,” which implies verbal communication, can be applied only to its written place in East Asia. Another important point that should be taken into account when talking about the scope of East Asian literacies is the scale of expansion, in both geographic and demographic terms. As in India, even when a language appeared to travel among a small percentage of people in East Asia, that percentage translated into an aggregate number of millions of people who shared a spoken or written language. One of our conference discussants, Constanze Güthenke, who comes from a Western Classics background, posed several universal questions and themes. She first pointed to the question of how people deal with the classical text, a conundrum faced by the historical actors in European, as well as Asian, situations. She pointed out that among scholars of European history it was also very difficult to talk about linguistic issues without falling into the national paradigm of state building. Güthenke highlighted for us the issue of the anxiety over language in the recent past when, influenced by modern Western linguistics, people began to see language as a single marker of individuality. Modern classicists have also struggled with the concept of the coexistence of two separate linguistic registers in one language, even though the original writers never shared the same worries. She compared the commentary traditions of East Asia and Europe and pointed out that in Europe, from Petrarch down to Ranke, there was an awareness of the foreignness of the classical texts and a desire to “hear the voices of the past” in their natural registers. She asked whether such questions of language were tokens of a new modernity. Martin Kern also pointed to the other functions of commentaries for constituting, securing, and asserting the superiority of the master texts while at the same time setting the limits for reading them. Janet Chen suggested that since language registers still suggested a sense of hierarchy, “spectrum” may be a better word to describe the classical/vernacular relationship in “classical” Chinese. Pollock has shown that “vernaculars” rarely emerged on their own. They were the self-conscious projects of elites within a society. Hence, the categories of classical and vernacular languages we deploy must be problematized. How are we to understand the production and spread of normative styles and forms of writing and speech in premodern East Asia? Do we have the vocabulary to adequately describe the nature of premodern East Asian languages while not teleologically presuming the national boundaries for spoken vernaculars or making simple-minded categorizations of classical Chinese as a “dead,” written language?

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Peter Kornicki (Cambridge University) The high degree of cultural commensurability achieved through the use of the Chinese script by Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese has long been acknowledged. According to Peter Kornicki, however, the adoption of the Chinese script was not the only linguistic option for peoples and states within East and Central Asia. The Tangut Empire (called the Xixia dynasty, 1032–1227) embarked on a much different project to achieve political commensurability. Kornicki thinks that the Tangut script was devised and promulgated by the Xixia ruler in 1036 partly to facilitate vernacular translation of Buddhist texts for a Tangut audience. This is remarkable because the encounter with Chinese texts in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam did not at first stimulate an equivalent search for a vernacular script or the urge to translate per se. The question of why the Tanguts, who developed a thriving print culture producing large quantities of Buddhist works in several languages, decided to embark on projects of vernacular translation is puzzling. Kornicki posits a few possible explanations, ranging from the Tanguts’ exposure to numerous scripts and the multilingual nature of the monastic community. Although a definitive answer for why the script was created remains elusive, Kornicki presents a compelling case that “the Tanguts provide a counterexample to other East Asian societies in their response to Chinese writing.”8 To get at the role of Tangut vernacularization in the twelfth century, Kornicki uses Tangut texts hidden in Buddhist temple pagodas to find clues. These texts consisted of Buddhist canons translated from Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur, which were printed using movable type by the Xixia state three centuries before Gutenberg. The northwestern Tanguts were engaged in a massive translation project at the behest of their rulers and were committed to using the latest technology for its dissemination. At their height the Tanguts founded an empire that rivaled the Han Chinese Song dynasty (960–1280) in its power and independently developed their own script and vernacular literature. Why did the Tanguts invent their own script? The peoples from the steppes northwest of China such as the Tanguts, Uighurs, Tibetans, Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols all developed their own scripts when founding their middle imperial states, as did the late imperial Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911; see the essay by Mårten Söderblom Saarela). Khitan Liao (907–1125) rulers first perceived such scripts in terms of political legitimation vis-à-vis the Tang dynasty (618–907). Countries located east and south of Song China, such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, did not develop their own writing forms until much later in 8 See also Kornicki 2008; Lurie 2011, 343–347.

Introduction

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their histories. Kornicki contends that the steppe people were constantly at war with Tang and Song China and were thus more inclined to establish their own language as distinct from Chinese than were Korea and Japan, which were placed in subordinate positions to China and accepted the dominance of Chinese culture. In the case of the Tanguts, they were early on exposed to scripts such as Tibetan and Uighur that were distinct from Chinese and could decide which scripture tradition to follow. Such a luxury was available to the early Koreans, Vietnamese, and Japanese but to a lesser degree.9 While the Tangut invention of their own script represents a more explicit example of vernacular translation into a non-Chinese script, the use of Chinese characters by early Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese, as the following chapters by John Phan, Wang Sixiang, and Haruo Shirane show, also involved a process of vernacularization and translation. We should also note, however, that no translations of classical texts into the Chinese vernacular language appeared, although reading primers may perhaps be seen as an in-between stage. Both Korea and Japan invented neologisms using Chinese graphs to create new words that were unintelligible for contemporaries in China. In this way, each country localized the more cosmopolitan classical Chinese to challenge China’s claim to the ownership of the writing system. Kornicki’s conclusion that the Tangut invention of their own script presented a challenge to the traditional Chinese cultural order can also be applied later to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. After 1400 each claimed the classical Chinese writing system as their own to assert their potential status as “second Romes” for cultural supremacy in East Asia. The Tangut vernacular translation of Sinitic texts and their meager output of their own vernacular texts suggest, however, that classical Chinese was the cosmopolitan language for political reasons. Was this because as the northwestern Xixia, the Tanguts (and the Uighurs and Tibetans) were closer to the medieval Tang metropolitan cultural centers, while the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin (1115–1234) were from more peripheral areas in the northeast where the power of Chinese as a cosmopolitan language was still quite limited or resisted until the Jurchens captured North China? Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as “second Romes,” must have struggled with containing the cosmopolitan power of Chinese in their midst, something they were ambivalent about, unlike the Tanguts, who had lived under and saw the Xixia as a legitimate successor to the Great Tang. Saarela’s chapter shows that the supporters of the Qing state languages of Manchu and Mongolian also had to devise ways to prevent their lan9 Cf. Lurie 2011, 344–345.

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guages from playing second fiddle to the Chinese “Rome,” even when all three were officially authorized by the dynasty. Political commensurability took precedence in Central Asia, while cultural commensurability was the main target in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The rulers of Central Asian dynasties and the peoples of East Asia strove to keep up with each other in a political and cultural race, so they were constantly moving across borders, using literary Chinese as the cosmopolitan language. The formation of vernacular scripts among the Central and East Asian peoples surrounding China came in waves. The initial pioneers included the Tibetans, Uighurs, Khitans, Tanguts, and Mongols. Contrary to modern nationalistic discourses, these peoples were actually closer to the Chinese cultural center during the eighth to twelfth centuries and had greater claims to be the inheritors of the Tang Empire. Korea and Vietnam, who developed their scripts centuries later, can be seen as reacting to the developments in the steppes. Kornicki’s chapter initiates a theme that many of the subsequent chapters return to: the use of a written and spoken language to carve out a distinct identity within the East Asian world. Such voluntary linguistic subordination appears also to have paralleled different forms of political subordination, including parallel forms of insubordination after 1850. Wang Sixiang (Columbia University) Wang Sixiang’s chapter highlights the performative power of language in East Asia. Language was more than simply a tool for communication, because it also transmitted significant symbolic power in its words and forms. Possession of the right language was crucial to winning the linguistic warfare that foreign envoys faced when making tributary visits to imperial China. Wang contends that the Chinese interpreters from Korea mediated between the royal and imperial courts of Chosŏn Korea and the Ming and Qing (1368–1911) dynasties through language and translation. Many interpreters rose from humble backgrounds, and they were often despised by the elites for their lowly origins and their palace intrigues. Their expert knowledge, however, made them valuable assets to both states, particularly in the arena of foreign relations. Korean interpreters had to be not only proficient in classical and spoken Chinese but also expert in Chinese ritual behavior and literature. When envoys demonstrated an expert understanding of China to Chinese rulers and dignitaries, their expertise implied that Korea was civilized. During the Yuan–Ming transition (1350–1400), after which Mongol speakers in Korea were no longer useful in diplomatic exchanges with China, the new, Ming dynasty expected

Introduction

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Korean diplomats to speak and write in Ming Chinese (at first, the version spoken in the capital in Nanjing and then that spoken in Beijing). The first Ming emperor, for example, belittled a Korean envoy for his inability to understand “contemporary” Chinese. This drove the Korean court to promote proficiency in literary and spoken Chinese by establishing the Office of Interpreters to recruit and train new interpreters. Wang’s account shows how mastery of the Chinese language was important not only in facilitating political discourse between Korea and China but also in establishing Korea as a civilized state and society. The use of classical Chinese poetry as a lingua franca in interactions between China, Japan, and Korea meant that regulated verse in particular, with its set patterns of rhymes and limited numbers of graphs per line, served as a universal medium for intellectual exchange and diplomacy in northeastern Asia. Envoys of emperors, kings, and local Japanese elites enjoyed good company, negotiated with their hosts, and complained about their treatment through verse.10 Wang, however, complicates our traditional understanding of the linguistic exchange between China and Korea by showing that a shared written language was not the only requirement. The important role that translators played on official missions to the Ming court meant that spoken Chinese was also important in the interactions between the Korean and Ming states. The use of classical Chinese may have authenticated Korean claims to classical antiquity, but the brush could not totally replace the tongue in efforts to overcome differences in spoken language. When Ming emperors ridiculed Korean envoys for their poor spoken Chinese, the Korean court tried to ameliorate the loss of face. We learn that the Korean han’gŭl 한글 script was invented in large part to teach people how to pronounce Chinese script according to the contemporary standards of the Ming court. Neither side considered proficiency in literary Chinese sufficient to consummate the required cultural, political, and economic exchanges. The classical written form was not enough for full fluency in the language, which further demonstrates that the modern distinction between the classical and the vernacular, as well as between writing and speaking, has distorted the historical realities of the nature of East Asian languages. The voluntary adoption of literary Chinese to affiliate verbally within a simultaneously cultural, political, and economic order is reminiscent of Pollock’s narrative of the cultural spread of Sanskrit. Language empowered “cultural commensurability,” whereby each side communicated through classical Chinese to adjudicate both cultural and political associations between 10

Goble 2011, 11.

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China and its neighboring states and empires. Korea’s expert use of classical Chinese gave it a special place in the imagination of the Ming Empire. When Korean envoys communicated with their Chinese hosts using the brush to compose poetry, this brought honor to the envoys and empowered Korea as a civilized state in the eyes of the Ming court. John D. Phan (Cornell University) John Phan explores how Vietnamese Confucian and Buddhist scholars tried to bridge the distance between literary Chinese and the native Nôm 喃 script (also known as Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃, lit., “characters for talking”) beginning in the fifteenth century. Literary elites seeking civil service appointments in Vietnam legitimated the new forms of Song classical learning, which had become early Ming orthodoxy, by mastering the Classics and composing the appropriate Confucian commentaries in classical Chinese. Marginalized Buddhist scholars, on the other hand, because they were increasingly disinherited from state power from the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries embraced the heterodoxy of the vernacular and enunciated their views in temples using Nôm writing as the preferred alternative.11 One product of these parallel developments, which Phan focuses on in his chapter, is the dictionary entitled Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds (Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa). This work glossed terms commonly used in Confucian intellectual discourses. Its two prefaces, one in Nôm and one in Chinese, reveal a surprising overlap between the classical language and Vietnamese. The compiler, likely a Buddhist monk, contended in the Nôm preface that semantosyllabicity was the form through which the ancient sages invented characters, the foundation of the Chinese writing system. According to the monk, Nôm was also constructed in accordance with semantosyllabism. In the Chinese preface, the author specified that the semantosyllabic Chinese script was devised to enable the Chinese to pacify the world culturally by assigning proper names to the myriad things. By comparing the two prefaces, Phan shows that they provide a defense of both Chinese and Nôm. On the basis of semantosyllabism, Nôm could be seen as an authentic extension of literary Chinese and proof that Vietnam was analogous to China and hence civilized in universal terms. Just as Wang Sixiang forces us to reconsider the interaction of the spoken and the written language in the Korean missions to Ming China, Phan shows 11

Elman 2013, chap. 1.

Introduction

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that classical Chinese had a significant impact on both the spoken and the written Vietnamese language. Phan contends that the push toward semantosyllabicity in Vietnamese led to many dropped initial sounds and the adoption of Chinese grammatical particles in the spoken language. Problematizing the previous language paradigm that separated the written classical from spoken vernaculars into different spheres, Phan also shows that the two interacted significantly. Through a close reading of the two prefaces we see that Vietnamese intellectuals viewed their script, Chữ Nôm, as a fully formed sagely script, capable of the same intellectual and imaginative expressivity as literary Chinese—and not as a vernacular alternative to the classical. Just as Koreans valued literacy in classical Chinese as well as knowledge of the Ming spoken language, the Vietnamese idealization of the Chinese script led to significant changes in both the written and spoken forms of Vietnamese. Whereas in royal Korea, Chinese was explicitly tied to communicating culturally with the Ming Chinese court, Phan argues that although the Vietnamese may have venerated the Chinese script, they never explicitly referenced the Chinese political world when they did so. This claim leaves open, however, how Vietnamese tributary missions to the Ming and Qing courts affected language policy in Vietnam.12 Haruo Shirane (Columbia University) Haruo Shirane’s chapter focuses on the interactions between commentary, vernacular, and translation to understand vernaculars in ancient Japan. Shirane points out that medieval Japanese commentaries to the Chinese Classics, such as the Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing (Wakan rōeishū 和漢朗 詠集; compiled 1012), served multiple functions in the medieval period, including explicating words and phrases, serving as models for writing and learning, giving the source of the original text, providing fundamental cultural and historical knowledge, serving as modern translations, and interpreting the ancient texts. Martin Kern added at the conference that commentaries also clarify the pronunciation in the Classic, something very important for Chinese commentaries because different pronunciations implied different meanings. Often a phonetic gloss sufficed, because the commentator assumed that the reader would know the particular meaning that went with the pronunciation. Other functions that the commentary exerts, according to Kern, include constituting the text in its wording, boundaries, and format; securing the text 12

Ge 2012.

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against competing versions of the text; limiting the ways in which the text can be interpreted; tying the text to a distinct body of other texts and hence situating it within the larger textual universe; constituting the “textual community” that shares the text as a common point of reference; elevating the text above other texts and simultaneously censoring and silencing its competitors; and constituting the discursive voice of the commentator as the mediator between text and audience. In these diverse ways, the commentaries initially mediated between the original texts written in the cosmopolitan literary Chinese and the popular works vocalized and written in more vernacular forms. Such ancient and medieval forms contributed to the evolution of Japanese classical registers of language paralleling classical Chinese (kanbun). Shirane also rethinks the written/oral dichotomy by showing that many commentaries originated from oral lectures or sermons, which were later written down. Instead of just assuming that the written automatically had cultural authority and influenced the lower-brow oral registers, Shirane proposes an initial two-way recycling process between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages caused by the dual interaction between written and oral presentation and elite and popular works. Shirane outlines the various literary genres that were based on the vernaculars of ancient Japan and were developed by various social groups for different purposes. He contends that contemporaries recognized the differences between the various genres. The tension between what was considered to be “highbrow” and what was considered to be “lowbrow” was consciously deployed as a literary device. The discussion of hierarchies of genres of writing is often seen in Japanese literature, yet the hierarchies themselves changed over time and reflect specific periods. For India too, neither vernaculars nor cosmopolitan languages were homogeneous. In her presentation of linguistic practices in early modern India at our first workshop, Allison Busch stressed the influence not only of Sanskrit but also of Persian in forming modern vernacular Hindi. In the sixteenth century, the interest in poetry led to the proliferation of manuals written in the Braj language using both Hindi and Arabic scripts and thereby incorporating ideas from Sanskrit and Persian poetry into Hindi. Under British colonialism, however, a different ideal about literacy and education emerged, obviating Braj and rendering it outdated. The linguistic engineering of modern-day Hindi separated it from Braj as part of a “de-Islamization” of the language. This process parallels the fate of Chinese language and script in the formation of modern Japanese, which Atsuko Ueda describes in her chapter below in light of “de-Sinification.”13 13

Busch 2010.

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13

For Shirane, commentaries in premodern Japan were catalysts for intellectual and cultural activity. They formed a body of discourse that related the canonical text not only to other classical texts but also to contemporary Japanese state and society. Shirane also suggests that the practices of commentators likely paralleled or preceded the paratextual adaptations of ancient texts by vernacular writers, playwrights, and artists. The full-fledged translation of a Chinese text into another language such as Japanese, on the other hand, suggests a Japanese readership unable and probably unwilling to engage the original text. Translations—if not the product of a modern type of scholarship— were presumably geared toward readers whose attitude toward the source language and its culture was more of curiosity than engagement. Such distinctions are worth reconsidering when addressing why, initially, the Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese did not fully translate Chinese texts, whereas the Tanguts, Mongolians, and Uighurs did. Based on the Dunhuang manuscripts, Kornicki has shown that the first stage in making Sinitic texts accessible to a reading audience was the addition of punctuation, which required a prior grammatical understanding of the text. Koreans by the seventh century read Sinitic texts in a new way known as idu 吏讀 (lit., “clerical reading of documents”), which was based on hundok 訓讀 (lit., “markings for reading”). It entailed adding glosses to encode the missing grammatical particles needed for Korean inflections. Korean monks transmitted this technique to Japan, where, after additional development, it formed the foundation for the reading strategy known in Japan as kundoku 訓讀, which added glosses to “translate” the text via punctuation.14 David Lurie has suggested that Japanese kundoku practices for reading and writing in effect produced “invisible vernacular texts.” Although these were not translations in a strict sense, Japanese readers produced from the Chinese text a reading that differed from the original not only phonetically but also syntactically. Lurie has shown how the text could be read in more than one language simultaneously. Moreover, characters could be read both phonographically and logographically.15 Daniel Trambaiolo (University of Hong Kong) To investigate classical languages and literacies and how they interact, Daniel Trambaiolo examines the language registers of traditional medical knowledge 14 15

Kornicki 2008, 5. Lurie 2011.

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in Tokugawa Japan. He points out that while in East Asia as a whole, literary Chinese was the language of the center and radiated outward to Japan and Korea, there was another, complementary process in the medical realm, namely the textualization of vernacular medicine. He shows that these two language registers were not exclusive and often overlapped, but they had different origins and developments. Tokugawa was a period of great change in social relations for doctors. In the medieval era, medical learning was usually confined to Kyoto and the Buddhist institutions. During the seventeenth century, however, the doctors were grouped together with the classical scholar (ru 儒). For medical texts, classical Chinese (kanbun) was considered the standard written language, but in the Tokugawa era, an increasing number of texts were written in Japanese (wabun 和文), enabling more people to read them. Utilizing Japanese commentaries on the medical classics and herbal (honzō 本草) encyclopedias, Trambaiolo shows that most medical names for diseases and medicinal plants were transmitted via vernacular Japanese rather than classical language. The vernacularization of classical medical knowledge and the textualization of oral traditions of medicine were parallel processes. Some of us have referred to “literary Chinese” (classical Chinese, Sinitic, etc.) as a “cosmopolitan language” in Sheldon Pollock’s sense. Daniel Trambaiolo thinks that although literary Chinese was transregional, the actual historical way that literary Chinese created a unified regional culture in East Asia was very different in practice from Latin in Europe or Sanskrit in South Asia. Japanese vernacular literature developed through conscious decisions not to renounce an earlier cosmopolitan culture for more local and geographically limited ones. Trambaiolo stresses the differences rather than the similarities between kanbun in Japan and Sanskrit in India as cosmopolitan languages. For Pollock, vernacularization might mean something very different in a culture where adoption of the cosmopolitan language was voluntary. The Chinese language, of course, was never forcibly imposed on neighboring cultures. Nor did Chinese as a cosmopolitan language serve the sole purpose of promoting two-way communication between China and its neighbors. Japanese read Chinese texts and discussed them using modified forms of the Chinese language. The purpose, however, was seldom for Japanese works to circulate outside the Japanese archipelago, at least up until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Scholars in East Asia usually did not travel to meet each other, and even when they did meet, they often communicated solely through writing. In her comments, Cynthia Brokaw noted that Trambaiolo’s chapter points to two flows of knowledge, one downward from the elites to the lower classes and one upward from the rural to the elite. Where exactly did these two flows converge? Brokaw also notes that the vernacular names used for diseases and

Introduction

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plants were probably given in Japanese because these diseases and plants existed only in Japan. Because much of Japanese medical knowledge was local, vernacular medicine could be prioritized over medical texts from China. Mårten Söderblom Saarela (Princeton University) By addressing both the Manchu language and its script under the Qing rulers as one of the three administrative languages of the empire (the others were Chinese and Mongolian), Mårten Söderblom Saarela shows how an alphabetical order based on the Manchu script was developed by relying on syllabaries used to teach literacy to both Manchu children and second-language learners, especially Chinese literati-officials. By comparing it to the Western history of alphabetization, Saarela contends that the Manchu alphabetical order in late imperial China was one of the most noteworthy by-products of the Qing dynasty’s encounter with Inner Asian alphabetical literacy as described by Peter Kornicki’s paper in this volume. Indeed, despite the uncomplimentary comparisons of Chinese print culture with its Western counterparts that appeared in the writings of language reformers during the Republic of China and of Western Sinologists, Qing scholars had grappled with alphabetization for centuries. Although the Manchu schema offered certain advantages over extant Chinese models, its application was seemingly held back by implicit structural problems and a general lack of interest from a political and intellectual establishment oblivious, if not contemptuous, of its potential. At times the untapped potential of the Manchu script was theorized in light of Qing dynasty treatises of Chinese phonology. More often, however, the dictionaries failed to stir up any debate or controversy among literati. Qing scholars of Manchu rarely wrote critically about the dictionaries they were using. Usually, any information about the progress of Manchu lexicography came from within the dictionaries themselves, not outside commentators. In the end, Manchu lexicography stagnated in the nineteenth century after a promising start during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the other hand, the Manchu script as an organizing device unexpectedly prospered and contributed to the linguistic experiments with alphabetic scripts that characterized the plethora of language reform efforts initiated during the Republic and early People’s Republic of China.

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Benjamin A. Elman (Princeton University) In my chapter I ask to what use was knowledge of the classical language being put in China? Because the civil service examination system doomed over 90 percent of its participants to the unofficial status of examination failures, how are we to understand the spread and use of classical knowledge through education? How does an institution that passes only 1 percent of its participants survive? The creation of a large literate population and the use of classical learning to pursue alternative careers and economic opportunities such as medical practice, book publishing, and pettifoggery were likely unintended consequences of the civil examination system. If the unintended consequences of classical literacy in early modern China were dictated by the imperial examination system, then we cannot continue to focus on just the very few who passed the examinations. We must also address the overwhelming majority of examination candidates who were called “failures.” A large number of people were classically literate in late imperial China, but they were unable to reach their original goal of entering officialdom. Rather than being a dead end for the many “failures,” the examination system and its classical curriculum surprisingly helped these men land in other respectable positions. In a society where about 10 percent of the Chinese population participated in the civil service examinations, and more than 90 percent of this group failed them, some means of justification was found for the decades spent memorizing classical texts. What candidates shared was knowledge of the classical language, memorization of key parts of the canon, and an ability to compose eight-legged essays. Even if social mobility in imperial China was limited by the competitive nature of the examination process, enough alternative careers were available for those who were classically literate that another unintended consequence of the examination system was the development of an alternative literati culture that reacted against and wrote against the grain of the demeaning examination process. Atsuko Ueda (Princeton University) Atsuko Ueda’s chapter unravels the rhetorical disguise surrounding Meiji calls for language reform. She compares, historically, what Meiji linguists actually claimed against the backdrop of the evolving historical context. Ueda perceptively rejects teleological hindsight in favor of working out “real-time” historical beginnings. Her account of the reforms presents the pace and cadence of

Introduction

17

vernacularization in Japan, which linguists there saw as a means to unify the spoken and written languages. She also addresses the virulence of Meiji nationalism and Japanese calls for de-Asianization and de-Sinification that coursed through the language debates. We should also note that Ueda elsewhere criticizes Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” approach. This approach, when applied to Meiji Japan, posits the nation as the goal that inspired the language reforms, thereby becoming a self-fulfilling, teleological prophecy. Ueda discovers that the reformers did not posit the nation as a goal at the start. The 1880s were not the first stage of Meiji linguistic nationalism. Rather, when Ueda reexamines the historical conditions that made a new Japanese national language (kokugo 国 語) thinkable, she finds instead that the keys to the story were the different linguistic approaches articulated in the early Meiji period. Ueda presents four linguists in this chapter: (1) Mori Arinori, who argued against Chinese script in favor of using Roman letters for their phonetic principles to make oral reading and writing commensurable; (2) Maejima Hisoka, who sought to replace Chinese script by phoneticizing all kanji with the kana syllabary; (3) Nanbu Yoshikazu, who favored the Roman alphabet to reform Japanese grammar based on the fifty-sound syllabary grid; and (4) Nishi Amane, who as a publicist also favored the Roman alphabet for the fifty-sound syllabary grid in order to reconcile spelling and pronunciation. Language reformers wished to standardize Japanese as a spoken language based on the Tokyo pronunciation. They hoped thereby to unify spoken and written Japanese through vernacularization. By defining an ideal Japanese language through sound rather than writing, Japanese linguists tied kanbun-style language in “Japanese” syntactical order (kanbun kundokutai 漢文訓読対) to anti-Chinese and anti-elite sentiments based on the distinction between dead languages (Chinese and Latin) and living languages (Japanese and European vernaculars). More radical elements attacked the alleged ideographic nature of Chinese script and overlooked its phonetic elements. In the end, however, the advocates of kanbun kundokutai recognized the efficacy of the Chinese script for newspapers, textbooks, fiction, and composition. They successfully set aside the fears of the anti-kanji movement and stressed instead the useful phonetic aspects of kanbun kundokutai because the Chinese script could easily be phonetically marked by kana. Remarkably, the superior economy and conciseness of Chinese script, when coupled with the Japanese syllabary, meant that kanji could be exploited in the name of a Japanese-inspired language reform that reduced the number of required characters to three thousand. The “new” orthography severed kanbun kundokutai from its pre-Meiji ties to kanbun and mobilized both anti-Chinese sentiments and pro-Western views of

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language in its favor. Kanbun kundokutai became a version of the Japanese language that broke away from strictly kanbun readings. It became a new form for writing modern Japanese. New textbooks no longer needed to include the original kanbun texts; they could simply present the kanbun kundokutai with kana markings for the kanji. Kanji as a foreign medium had interfered with the “Japaneseness” of the language. Now kanbun kundokutai as a Japanese form of expression ironically was privileged over the Chinese script. Like han’gŭl in premodern Korea, kana writing techniques also had a long history in Japan, most of which was unrelated to nationalist sentiments. Loosely organized sets of phonographs derived but distinct from Chinese characters were developed before the ninth century, but it was only in the late nineteenth century, with the wide adoption of movable-type printing, that strict one-to-one correspondence between kana graphs and syllables was established. Ueda shows how multiple translingual practices shaped the early and middle Meiji periods and precipitated the rise of a new national language. The space opened up by kanbun kundokutai was the key for the invention of a new national language. Nationalism was later constructed teleologically to be the end-all for everything, but in fact, a series of linguistic struggles were involved. The Japanese “nation” was the final result of the linguistic debates and not the single cause that motivated the language reforms. Similarly, Joy Kim pointed out at our first workshop that scholarship on Korean languages had been influenced by the modern, anticolonial discourses, which favored anti-Sinitic sentiments and allegedly “pure” han’gŭl texts. In Korea, han’gŭl was invented in 1443, not as an act of nationalism, but to a large extent as a syllabary to facilitate the correct pronunciation of Chinese texts. We have seen that the Vietnamese language also was conceptualized more as an extension of, and an aid to, classical Chinese than as an alternative to it. Shang Wei (Columbia University) Shang Wei’s concluding chapter moves us from post-1911 and May Fourth linguistic prescriptions for saving “China” to a historically grounded account of the spoken and literary aspects of Chinese language(s) since 1400. In terms of the descriptive issues, Shang has rehistoricized the May Fourth agenda by stripping away the cognitive illusions and modernist teleologies based on hindsight that informed earlier accounts of language reform in Republican

Introduction

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China. Like Atsuko Ueda’s theoretical work on Meiji language reforms, Shang aims to de-teleologize modernist views of premodern languages in China.16 Earlier ideological agendas and political debates have dictated that in both Meiji Japan and late Qing–early Republican China language reform was a race to catch up to Western Europe and the United States. This is a sobering lesson of how universal theory can be embedded in the individual autobiography of radical Chinese linguists, whose linguistic theories were really political weapons disguised as an objective methodology. A consensus emerged during the May Fourth era that held a derogatory view of the classical language. This May Fourth rhetoric then was enshrined as PRC state dogma after 1949. The modernist linguistic discourses that emerged were not really proofs for the superiority of vernaculars per se but a sign of insider, political, and social agendas used to advance the Cultural Revolution. May Fourth theories and analysis have until recently prevented acknowledging the cultural damage incurred during the turn away from the allegedly “dying” classical language to the allegedly “living” vernacular in Beijing. Shang Wei’s chapter, accordingly, is a balanced critique that refutes the overly theorized linguistic claims of his predecessors and asks us to rethink the development of the Chinese “vernacular” (baihua 白話; lit., “plain speech”). May Fourth intellectuals posited a false dichotomy between classical 文言 and vernacular Chinese, according to Shang. Before the twentieth century, baihua was primarily the spoken language of well-educated elites (Beijing “Mandarin”). Far from achieving a standardized form, there were actually eight different branches of Mandarin. After the fall of the Qing dynasty, the newly established Ministry of Education tried to unify sound and speech under a national dialect, but a consensus was never reached. Northerners proposed Beijing Mandarin as the national tongue, while southerners put forth their own regional dialects as more “authentic” phonological traditions. Shang also points out that both baihua and literary Chinese were usually found together in the so-called “vernacular” novels before 1900. No binary system of the Chinese language with a strict dichotomy between classical and vernacular ever existed. Shang suggests that we should perceive them as different registers of the same language line. An educated man in the early modern period used his own regional dialect to aurally render the texts that he read, regardless of whether they were classical or baihua. Like “modern” Japanese, the vernacularization movement in China, with its strict divide between classical and baihua and its intolerance for variants of an official baihua, emerged only through the modern processes of nationalism. 16

See Wu 2013 for a recent account of classical poetry and learning from 1900 to 1937.

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By highlighting an ahistorical polarizing of the classical and vernacular into separate languages in Republican China, Shang relates in passing how the efforts of linguistic reformers to create a new spoken vernacular were misguided. Mandarin was already a transregional language that defied the definition of a vernacular. The Ministry of Education’s project to invent a Chinese vernacular was more sociopolitical than linguistic. The linguists claimed that a standardized pronunciation was needed to create a unified state composed of Chinesespeaking citizens. This effort was new in the early twentieth century and not an outgrowth from an imaginary bifurcation of Chinese into classical and vernacular elements before 1900. Shang adds that until 1912 no systematic efforts were made to promote Mandarin as the officially sanctioned spoken language while at the same time suppressing regional dialects. The unity of the empire, based in part on a common writing system focused on classical Chinese, was not achieved at the cost of reducing regional diversity in speech and vocalization. The empire encompassed linguistic diversity, including Manchu and other outside inputs to the pronunciation of so-called Chinese. The officials of the new Republic and May Fourth intellectuals self-righteously imagined their task as undoing what they deemed to be the unnatural relationship between the written and the spoken language and between the classical and the vernacular. The project of constructing the nation-state required a healthy synthesis of the spoken and the written vernacular, both of which were valorized as essential to overcoming the decrepit classical language. The dichotomy between baihua and wenyan as two opposed writing systems was further rationalized in the twentieth century, when modernist Chinese linguists, for political reasons, imagined the Chinese case as analogous to the turn to “modern” European vernaculars from “medieval” written Latin. Shang’s view of vernaculars in China does not fit Pollock’s South Asian model of cosmopolitan versus vernacular languages, since the written language of vernacular Chinese fiction was also a cosmopolitan (transdialectal) form of written communication. By addressing the question of the relationship between classical Chinese, vernacularization, and modernity, Shang has presented a revisionist argument that relies on a partial bifurcation of orality (“plain speaking”) and literacy (classical texts). Adoption of a written vernacular close to the spoken language could not have happened, however, unless a language for transcription had already been constructed. Much of Ming fiction, for example, was clearly the work of educated literati, but the vernacular registers were likely based on the spoken language. Well into the twentieth century, Chinese writers remained bilingual orally and textually.

Introduction

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Judging from prefaces and colophons by Ming and Qing writers of vernacular fiction, it is clear that their writing in the vernacular intentionally accessed a wider readership than did writing in the classical language, a social phenomenon that angered classicists to no end! This further substantiates the argument that such texts were sufficiently close to the spoken vernacular to make them comparatively easy reading. The language of vernacular fiction, of course, contained classical elements. The merit of the novel was its use of both colloquial and classical language. By getting rid of classical Chinese grammatical particles, so essential to classical punctuation, Qing storytellers, and their recorders, further developed the novel as a seamless language uniting speech and writing before 1900.17 Final Comments Peter Kornicki has noted that it is not clear whether the vernacularizing process in imperial China paralleled the processes in the non-Chinese cultures discussed above. To put it another way, are the inventions of new indigenous scripts in non-Chinese cultures and the presumed vernacularization that took place within China comparable? The invention of an indigenous script, described above in the cases of Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, initially did not serve the purpose of transcribing the indigenous spoken language. That came later. Moreover, earlier script reforms had no direct and necessary relation to vernacularization until the rise of the nation-state declared them as such. In order to address vernacularization in these non-Chinese cultures, it is necessary to move beyond the level of the script and make distinctions regarding how the script was used, for what aims, and with what relation to the spoken language.18 The chapters by Atsuko Ueda and Shang Wei describe modern attempts by groups in Japan and China to create new vernaculars that would serve as a marker of a person’s cultural and national identity. Creation of a unified national language entailed different problems for China and Japan, however. While a written classical language theoretically unified China, the multitude of regional dialects resulted in mutual unintelligibility when the texts were locally vocalized even as the alleged “official speech” (guanhua 官話) of Mandarin. The infusion of regional dialects into written baihua complicated the registers of the writing system. In Japan, the continued use of Chinese 17 18

Blader 1977. See also Pastreich 2011 on early modern Japanese “vernacular” stories. Kornicki 2008.

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characters was inimical to the project of severing the present from the past in the construction of the Meiji state. Yet there was no easy solution to linguistic reform without using the Chinese script, and as Ueda shows, the early Meiji period was a time of great experimentation, which reauthorized the use of kanji in a translated form called kundoku punctuation.19 Japanese kana in the ninth century, Vietnamese Nôm in the eleventh, Korean han’gŭl in the fifteenth, along with the evidence from the Dunhuang manuscripts written in Central Asian scripts, show that a first stage in making Sinitic texts more accessible was the provision of punctuation, which depended on a prior interpretation of the text. Kornicki and others regard this linguistic operation as a form of a “bound translation” in which “the original is preserved visually in the form of the Chinese characters, even when they are used in obscure senses, although they are pronounced in accordance with vernacular phonology.” Considered a form of translation (“circumlocutionary translationese”) by David Lurie, these reading traditions likely developed primarily to complement and not to replace the direct reading of classical texts, which the Meiji reforms, for example, accomplished. Translations and punctuation using kana, Nôm, or han’gŭl increased the audience to those whose reading skills of Chinese script were limited.20 In East Asia, as long as the prestige of classical Chinese was accepted among elites and among those who aspired to become elites (i.e., until roughly 1900), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese elites embraced it. Except for Manchus and Mongols, most Central Asian Tibetans and others had stopped aspiring to master classical Chinese as a cosmopolitan language. Ueda and Shang, reveal, however, that once the language fell further from grace as a lingua franca in the late nineteenth century, East Asians, including Chinese revolutionaries, ran away from it as fast as possible. The dual forces of colonialism (in Korea and Vietnam) and nationalism (particularly in Japan and China but also in Korea, Vietnam, and Central Asia) affected the valorization of baihua, han’gŭl, kana, and Nôm readings. Such notational forms no longer were ways to master or reduplicate classical Chinese. Rather, the native forms were revaluated using modern linguistic tactics to invent new vernaculars that parted with the official language of the sick empire called Qing China.21 Before “flight” from Chinese became the norm in Central and East Asia, the authority of the teacher of classical Chinese outside China was tied to his mastery of the corresponding Tangut-Uighur-Mongol-Vietnamese scripts or 19 20 21

Ozaki and Hirata 1988. Cf. Lurie 2011, 169–212, esp. 210–211, with Kornicki 2008. Yang 2010.

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Chinese-Japanese-Korean marking techniques for reading, writing, and translating the classical Chinese language. Such teachers were able to introduce students to the texts through a series of practical steps of instruction. This process centered on parsing the Chinese into its constituent parts: (1) types of written characters 文字; (2) correct phrases and sentences 章句; and (3) forms of reasoning 文理. Like their Chinese counterparts, the Central and East Asian grammarians served as preservers and transmitters of the classical language. They represented the repository of fluent and coherent utterances in high culture by marking correct punctuation and readings, incorporating voicing marks, and adding interlinear glosses for particles 助字 (lit., “connectives,” i.e., prepositions, particles, endings), concrete graphs 實字 (lit., names of things), and “insubstantials” 虛字 (i.e., adjectives and verbs).22 The top teachers transmitted the articulations of the Five Classics; lesser, more technical teachers taught the medical classics and the mathematical classics. Korean and Vietnamese mastery of the canon was tested for the civil service as in China, while in Japan the leading classical teachers quickly found their niches among the merit-sensitive commoners and merchants who lacked but also disdained the marks of high birth. Many Japanese commoners rose in social standing because of their classical literacy, while landless, aristocratic warriors fell into poverty and disrepute because the style of life to which they were bred submerged them in debts to merchants. Many samurai, recognizing that success required classical literacy rather than martial arts, now studied to become scholars or doctors.23 Words became the entry to a world of formalism and pedantry, rules and categories, and rare lexical discussions. The classicist’s command of a few classical texts saved him from the base occupations of the unlearned. Weighing individual words, phrases, and verses allowed him and his students to write their way to fame and fortune—or at least to teach and write for others. Because classical knowledge enabled a prestigious form of writing and speech in the eighteenth century, it also appealed to East Asian rulers, who came to depend on a literate bureaucracy to administer their domains. The classicist’s instruction was embedded in a social system where wealth, distinction, and eloquence differentiated elites from those who were mainly poor, anonymous, and illiterate. Those without classical educations were now more noticeable; before, only the Buddhists in Korea and Japan, as among the 22

23

See the Tokugawa kanbun textbooks collected in Yoshikawa, Kojima, and Togawa 1979– 1981. These grammatical divisions derived from Song through Ming period classical scholarship. Elman 2008.

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Tanguts, Mongols, and Tibetans, had been the masters of Chinese language. Classical scholars provided the language and values through which a changing social and political elite recognized its own aspiring members. The governing classes of courtiers and warriors, once totally aristocratic in Japan and Korea, now shared elite status with commoners with classical educations. Classical “letters” 文 signaled increased social status. Classical studies provided upward social circulation, particularly access to urban networks of patronage.24 As in China since the Song dynasty, literacy and print culture now mattered for East Asians. They were no longer simply window dressing for aristocrats or a calling for monks. The value of “letters” amid the pervasive illiteracy of East Asian societies made grammar the first step upward for mobile students who were drawn to literary culture 文化. In turn, the social and cultural elite valued the classical teacher and hired him to train their young. By opening their own schools and preparing their own textbooks, classical teachers also became the agents of language transmission and the civilizing process. Because study of grammar incorporated memorization for a classical education, students had to master many technical rules. Since the grammarian controlled access to the classical language, his profession was thereby embedded in the shared life of the elite. Chinese was a useful measure of classical success because it worked so well and smoothly—unlike the “vulgar” vernacular language 俗語 of the marketplace. Grammarians taught the forms of classical, medical, and literary analysis and conceptual categories inherited from the past in China and now reproduced in East and Central Asia; some even taught colloquial Chinese.25 Classical scholars led profitable careers as grammarians who also taught literary style. Their textbooks established a basic grammar and sentence structure, which enabled East Asian students in the eighteenth century to master Chinese classical syntax, even if they mentally transposed sentences into native word order. What attracted the elites to such classical teachers, in addition to careerism, was that Chinese classical learning affirmed the conventional virtues and the socioeconomic status quo. Novelty or change, if any occurred, usually was an unintended by-product of learning to read and write. Classical learning became the guide to the right choices. Virtue and letters upheld each other.26 In Japan, unlike in China, Korea, and Vietnam, urban or village grammarians depended on their public reputations because there was no civil examination degree to mark their expertise. Classical teachers displayed a considerable 24 25 26

Ikegami 2005. Pastreich 1999. Cf. Kaster 1988 on Roman grammarians in antiquity.

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range in social origins and fortunes. They were subordinate to patrons, who provided them with their sons as students. They enjoyed middling respectability among urbanized elites, particularly aristocrats and samurai officials in the various Tokugawa domains. As teachers they had some chance for professional, social, and geographic mobility within their domains and within the shogunal government, but lacked access to the highest positions, which were held by the military and imperial court aristocrats. Often they became primary consultants in their domains. From samurai, commoner, and medical backgrounds, they represented the respectable classes in the growing cities. Despite their skills and accrued respect, they remained closer to the middle than the top of the social pyramid, unlike the unmitigated cultural prestige that a small number of Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese achieved through the esteemed civil examinations. Although their role as grammarians created an aura for classicists as masters of texts, they could overcome the limits of their social status only up to a point. Their role as social and cultural mediators allowed them to mix with the aristocrats and warrior-officials, particularly their sons, but the rural teacher was never far removed from his modest beginnings. Successful classical grammarians were drawn to the major cities and regional centers, which provided more pupils from the middle and upper elites for their schools. Classical teachers were motivated by the hope for fame in the increasingly fluid urban world, but their equivocal social standing often prompted them to despise the aspiring doctors or merchants just below them. Classicists criticized doctors as nouveau riche who equated their “lesser” classical learning with knowledge of the Confucian classics. In early modern Japan, samurai who became scholars enviously remarked how classical physicians exploited the Chinese Classics to rise in urban society. Many sons of doctors became classicists throughout East Asia; classicists in turn became masters of the medical classics. One of the major themes that emerges from this volume is the remarkable changeover in East and Central Asia from the desire to reach cultural commensurability with China via classical learning to the desire to escape into cultural incommensurability by sustaining native vernaculars. In the early modern eras, states outside the Chinese cultural center tried to measure themselves against Chinese classical civilization, using language as a gauge for that ecumenical, hence “cosmopolitan,” culture. These states modeled themselves as empires vis-à-vis “Greater” China and tried to position themselves politically as viable successors to the Chinese cultural tradition in case a “second Rome” (lit., a “little China” 小中華) was needed—for example, after the 1280 Mongol or the 1644 Manchu conquest. In the twentieth century, however, the nation-state narrative took over, and the Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and even the

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Chinese themselves, not to mention the Mongols, Manchus, and Tibetans, sought to distance themselves from imperial China and its classical language. The inability to completely excise the Chinese past from their language or from their cultural and intellectual discourses became a source of anxiety that had not been shared by their classicist predecessors, who had taken pride in their orthodox accomplishments. The chapters in this volume also demonstrate that beyond its linguistic functions, a classical, cosmopolitan language should also be thought of as a philosophy of action enunciated through poetry and prose, that is, as the “performative utterances” of a classical community of students, teachers, aristocrats, and officials. The ability to speak, read, and write in the correct language in each specific time or geographical space, such as being fluent in literary Chinese in Korea during the fourteenth century or understanding (and helping to invent) modern Japanese during the Meiji period, granted the speaker or writer tremendous cultural and intellectual prestige. Several chapters rethink the relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages in East and Central Asia. Classical Chinese and East Asian vernaculars in particular should not be overdetermined as an oppositional binary. Rather, we should see them as East Asians saw them, namely as two registers of the same language system or as parts of a broader spectrum of linguistic possibilities. The twentieth century championed an alternative linguistic agenda that modern intellectuals temporarily accepted as universal and normative. We are now deconstructing that position. The May Fourth narrative in particular should be historicized in light of its ROC and PRC teleologies and re-understood in light of the longer-term possibilities that encouraged East Asians to seek cultural commensurability with imperial China and its classical language since medieval times. References Blader, Susan 1977. “A Critical Study of San-hsia wu-yi and Relationship to the Lung-t’u kung-an Song-Book.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. Brokaw, Cynthia, and Kai-wing Chow 2005. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Busch, Allison 2010. “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44, 2: 267–309. Elman, Benjamin 2001. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd, rev. ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series.

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–––––– 2008. “Sinophiles and Sinophobes in Tokugawa Japan: Politics, Classicism, and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (Taiwan) 2, 1 (March): 93–121. –––––– 2013. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ge Zhaoguang 2012. “Costume, Ceremonial, and the East Asian Order: What the Annamese King Wore When Congratulating the Emperor Qianlong in Jehol in 1790,” Frontiers of History in China 7, 1 (March): 136–151. Goble, Andrew 2011. Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Ikegami Eiko 2005. Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaster, Robert 1988. Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kornicki, Peter 1998. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: E.J. Brill. –––––– 2008. Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, March, University of Cambridge, https:// sp.princeton.edu/eas/piirs-eap/Shared%20Documents/3%20-%20Research%20 Module%20on%20Rethinking%20Asian%20Languages,%20Vernaculars,%20 and%20Literacies,%20September%2024-25,%202010/Kornicki%20---%20 Sandars%20Lectures%20-%20Latin%20of%20East%20Asia%202008.doc. Lurie, David 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center; distributed by Harvard University Press. Ozaki Yūjirō 尾崎雄二郎 and Hirata Shōji 平田昌司, eds. 1988. Kangoshi no shomondai 漢語史の諸問題 [Several questions about the history of the Han Chinese spoken language]. Kyoto: Kyōto daigaku jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo. Pastreich, Emanuel 1999. “An Alien Vernacular: Okajima Kanzan’s Popularization of the Chinese Vernacular Novel in Eighteenth-Century Japan,” Sino-Japanese Studies 11, 2: 39–49. –––––– 2011. The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan. Seoul: Seoul University Press. Pollock, Sheldon 2000. “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, 3: 591–625. Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik 1999. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Wu, Shengqing 2013. Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric Tradition, 1900–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Yang Ruisong 楊瑞松 2010. Bingfu, huanghuo yu shuishi 病夫、黃禍與睡獅 [Sick man, yellow peril, and sleeping lion]. Taibei: Zhengda chubanshe.

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Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎, Kojima Noriyuki 小島憲之, and Togawa Yoshirō 戶川 芳郎, comps. 1979–1981. Kango bunten sōsho 漢語文典叢書 [Collectanea of the Han Chinese spoken and written language], vols. 1–7. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin.

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The Vernacularization of Buddhist Texts: From the Tangut Empire to Japan Peter Kornicki Introduction The transmission of Buddhism to East Asia provides us with a ready-made laboratory for the study of translation and vernacularization in East Asia, so the focus of this essay will be on Buddhist texts, and particularly the Buddhist canon. At first sight this might seem an unpromising field for the study of vernacularization, for the history of Buddhism in East Asia is dominated by the Chinese Buddhist canon. Nevertheless, translation and vernacularization have been essential to the spread of Buddhism, and intriguing questions are raised by the variety of responses to the Chinese Buddhist canon in East Asian societies. Why, in particular, was translation undertaken so extensively and so early in the Tangut Empire and so little and so late in Korea and Japan? And since translation was barely undertaken in Korea and Japan, what alternative means of vernacular access to Buddhist teaching was there for those who could not read the Chinese Buddhist canon? The sermons of the historical Buddha were delivered in a Middle Indo-Aryan language and transmitted orally, as is evident from the opening words of many Buddhist texts, “This is what I have heard,” which betray their oral origins. The oral transmission of Buddhist teachings necessarily involved translation once they reached other language communities, and this is attested by the language of the Aśokan inscriptions of the third century BCE and by the language of the Pāli canon, which was committed to writing in what is now Sri Lanka. Thus, Buddhist teachings underwent several linguistic transformations, first by being rendered in a variety of Middle Indo-Aryan languages and second by being committed to writing, all before they had been transformed into Sanskrit texts.1 The transformation of Buddhist teachings into texts in other languages and other scripts had definitely begun before Buddhism began to attract attention in China. This is no longer a hypothesis, for recent finds in Afghanistan have given us what appear to be the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, in the form of some birch-bark scrolls which date from the first century CE. The texts are written in a Gāndhārī language using the Kharoṣṭhī script, but 1 Norman 1997, chaps. 3, 5, and 6.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004279278_003

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other recent finds have given us texts written in the Brāhmī and other scripts on birch bark, vellum, palm leaves, or copper.2 By this time, then, Buddhism had clearly become a scriptural religion—that is to say, a religion based on written texts and requiring its adepts to be literate—and had spread thanks to a process of translation.3 Buddhism was first mentioned in Chinese sources in the first century CE: it was probably introduced by traders and missionaries traveling along the two branches of the Silk Road from Khotan, Turfan, and other Central Asian kingdoms. By the second century there seems to have been a monastic community in the capital, Luoyang, probably dominated by immigrants, and from the late third century onward Buddhism began to have an impact upon gentry society. Chinese pilgrims began to make their way to Nālandā and other monastic centers in India, bringing back with them Sanskritized Buddhist texts. For the most part, in all likelihood, these were texts belonging to the Mahāyāna, or “Great Vehicle,” branch of Buddhism, which was to dominate in East Asia, not those from the Theravāda branch, which continues to dominate in Śri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. In China monastic communities were nurturing a new elite of cultured Chinese monks, and apologetic literature was being composed in Chinese. In these various ways, then, Buddhism was being adapted linguistically and culturally to the Chinese milieu in which it now found itself, and thereby was gradually turning into a distinct tradition, one that differed textually and doctrinally from other traditions in lands more to the west. Whether they were written in Sanskrit or other languages and scripts, the manuscripts brought to China in these early centuries had no chance of making any impact on Chinese society without translation. This point was not lost on contemporaries: Seng You 僧祐 (445–518), a monk who compiled the oldest surviving bibliography of Buddhist texts, declared, “With translation, transmission is possible; without translation, obscurity is the result.”4 Translation was no easy matter, however, and to deal with the linguistic difficulties, a tradition of team translation developed whereby each translation went through a rigorous series of checks before being subjected to editing and rewriting.5 This 2 Allon 2008; Salomon 1999; Braarvig 2000–2006. 3 Goody 1986, 22–26; Norman 1997, 41–57, 77–94. 4 Chu sanzang jiji (Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō [hereafter T.] #2145, 55.5b27); translation adapted from Cheung 2006, 49. On the linguistic problems that early translators addressed and their views on how to deal with them, see Cheung 2006, 49–135. 5 Ma 2006, 1:65–123; Hung 2005, 84–91; Cheung 2006, 49–202. On the vexed question of the “originals” from which the translations were made, see Schopen 2009, 214–215.

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process lasted around a thousand years from the second century onward, as a multitude of Buddhist sūtras, commentaries, and other texts were translated into Chinese and frequently retranslated to produce better versions. In 730 a Chinese monk named Zhisheng 智昇 compiled a catalog of the Buddhist texts which were by then available in Chinese. Although it listed as many as 1,076 titles, some of these were in fact of Chinese authorship and are now considered apocryphal in the sense that they were composed in China.6 Nevertheless, it is clear that by this time Buddhism in China had an enormous quantity of texts to draw upon and was now textually independent of traditions elsewhere. In 845 Emperor Wuzong 武宗 turned against Buddhism, closing Buddhist institutions, confiscating their property, and laicizing their monks and nuns.7 Buddhism recovered after the fall of the Tang, and a final phase of translation activity took place during the Northern Song dynasty. Many new texts were brought from India in a variety of scripts and were translated into Chinese at the Institute for the Translation of Sūtras (Yijing yuan 譯經院), which was established in 980 at the capital Kaifeng and also contained a Bureau for Printing Sūtras.8 By the end of the Song, then, a huge corpus of texts had been translated from Sanskrit and other languages into Chinese, and it was almost exclusively in the form of these Chinese translations that Buddhist texts were taken to other parts of East Asia. The Chinese Buddhist canon thus became the standard for most of the East Asian world and largely remains so in spite of the preparation of various vernacular translations in the twentieth century. In this respect it has much in common with the Vulgate Latin version of the Bible based on the translation produced by Saint Jerome (ca. 347–420): Saint Jerome’s Latin translation was commissioned by Pope Damasus in 382, became the standard Bible of Christianity in the West, and was officially endorsed as the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545–1563).9 While the Vulgate has long been superseded by vernacular translations based on the Greek and Hebrew original texts, however, the Chinese Buddhist canon has always been the standard in East Asia, and it was largely in that form that the canon reached the Tangut Empire, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and other neighboring societies. At first, of course, the canon was transmitted in the form of manuscripts, but in 971, the fourth year of the Kaibao era, the Song emperor Taizu ordered printing blocks for the canon to be carved in Sichuan. The 6 7 8 9

Kaiyuan shijiao lu (T. #2154, 55.477–723); Tokuno 1990, 52–58; Buswell 1990. For the edict of 845, see de Bary and Bloom 1999, 585–586. Sen 2002, 27, citing Fozu tongji (T. #2035, 49.409c–410a); Jan 1966; Bowring 1992. Sparks 1970, 513–521.

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carving of the blocks was a gigantic project: 130,000 wooden blocks were carved to print 1,081 separate works in a total of 5,057 chapters; once the carving was complete in 983, the blocks were transported to Kaifeng, the Northern Song capital, and printing operations began there.10 The printed collection of Chinese translations that is now known as the Kaibao canon circulated widely: within ten years Japan and Korea had sent missions to acquire copies, followed by Vietnam in 1018, and the Tangut Empire in 1035.11 These Chinese translations, we must remember, were already at several removes from the Middle Indo-Aryan languages in which the first sermons were preached, but for the inhabitants of the Tangut Empire, the Korean peninsula, and the Japanese islands, Chinese was also a foreign language. At first they had no choice but to see Buddhism through a Chinese prism, but once translations were made and vernacular means of approaching the texts developed, Buddhism moved one further step away from its Middle Indo-Aryan linguistic origins. The history of the transmission of Buddhism in East Asia, therefore, is one of secondary, tertiary, and even quaternary translation. Translation and Vernacularization in the Tangut Empire The Tangut Empire was founded in 1032 and lasted until it was overthrown by the Mongols in 1227. During that time the Tanguts called themselves “Mi-nia,” a term that means “white and lofty,” hence the title of Ruth Dunnell’s book.12 The word “Tangut” is the term used to refer to them by the Mongols, while in Chinese sources they have customarily been referred to as Xixia 西夏. Contemporary work on the Tanguts in China describes the Tanguts as a matter of course as one of China’s minority peoples even though the Tangut Empire was a rival of the Song and by no means a part of China in any sense. Although “Xixia” is the customary term used in China, and in its Japanese pronunciation “Seika” in Japan, it is Sinocentric in its implications, for the term is of Chinese origin. Since “Mi-nia” is familiar only to a handful of specialists, I shall here side with the Russians and opt for “Tangut” instead. Tangut texts first came to light in 1900 as a result of the Boxer Rebellion, and the Frenchman G. Morisse was the first to identify them and decipher the script. A few years later, in 1908, Colonel Piotr Kozlov traded a dinner and a gramophone for the right to excavate the ruins of Khara-Khoto (Ch. 10 11 12

Chikusa 2000, 313–318; Li 2003; Fozu tongji (T. #2035, 49.398c). For details, see below. Dunnell 1996.

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Heishuicheng 黑水城) and found more than two thousand texts, including a Tangut-Chinese dictionary compiled in the twelfth century, all of which are now in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.13 Subsequent excavations by Aurel Stein, Sven Hedin, and others brought many more texts to light, and more recently some acts of vandalism and extensive investigations by Chinese archaeologists have resulted in the discovery of many more.14 As a result, Tangut texts today are to be found in St. Petersburg and various locations in China, London, Paris, and elsewhere.15 The existence of all these texts implies, of course, that the Tanguts either produced their own paper or had access to prodigious supplies of paper from elsewhere. The Tangut script appears to have been devised and promulgated in 1036 at least partly in order to facilitate vernacular translation of Buddhist texts.16 This itself is remarkable in light of the fact that the encounter with Chinese texts in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam did not stimulate any equivalent search for a vernacular script or the urge to translate. What explanations can be put forward? One explanation is that the Tanguts had greater opportunities for exposure to other scripts, in particular the Uighur and Tibetan scripts: their encounter with writing was consequently not determined by the Chinese script (even though the Tangut script has unmistakable similarities with it). Thus, many of the Buddhist texts translated into Tangut were in fact translated not from Chinese originals but from Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Uighur versions. Fortunately, the colophons of Tangut Buddhist translations usually identify the source language, and Nishida’s catalog of Tangut Buddhist translations in St. Petersburg and London does so too.17 A second explanation must be the political context: the Song did not dominate East Asia as the Tang had done and did not overawe their neighbors culturally either. As a result, the Tangut attitude toward the Song was often grudging and sometimes openly combative. It is for this reason that Dunnell describes the creation of the Tangut script as follows: “Invention of a script was an act of state creation as well as a creation of the state. It was a politically charged event that asserted cultural claims, met strategic needs, and advanced dynastic legitimacy. Even the decision to adopt a graphic script, following the 13 14 15

16 17

Kychanov 1995. Ningxia wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo 2005. On recent facsimiles of some of these finds, see Kornicki 2012b. There is a useful multilingual bibliography of Tangut studies at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_ Tangut_Studies. Luc 1977, 1989. Nishida Tatsuo 1975–1977, 3:3–59; Kychanov 1984.

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Chinese model, rather than the more linguistically suitable Tibetan alphabetic script was political.”18 The Tangut script that was invented in these circumstances was used for the inscription of native Tangut texts such as law codes as well as for the translation of Buddhist and other texts, and this is evidence enough of a vernacular drive in Tangut culture. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Tangut culture was far from exclusively vernacular, for a large number of texts were reproduced or written by the Tanguts in Chinese as well. Buddhism was from the outset the state religion in the Tangut Empire. In the eleventh century at least six missions were sent to the Northern Song capital in order to acquire copies of the Kaibao canon, sometimes paying with horses for the printing costs and sometimes receiving the canon as a gift.19 Tangut translations of a number of sūtras have come to light, some in manuscript, some (such as the Lotus Sūtra) in block-printed editions, and some (such as the Flower Garland Sūtra) in typographic editions, but so too have some Chinese Buddhist texts printed by the Tanguts. Possibly these were for scholar-monks or resident Chinese, but Chinese was not the only source of Tangut Buddhism, as mentioned above.20 By the time of the Mongol invasion, many texts had been translated, possibly enough to refer to a Tangut canon; at any rate, in 1302 the Yuan dynasty in China published what they termed the Tangut canon in a block-printed edition, possibly for the benefit of Tangut refugees.21 What is indisputable is that, although some segments of the empire’s population were clearly competent to read Chinese Buddhist texts, the Tanguts made great efforts to produce vernacular versions of a large range of Buddhist texts. The colophon of one translation made in 1085 states that ten thousand copies were printed for distribution to the populace: this is doubtless an exaggeration, but it bespeaks a desire to produce texts not only as a pious act but also to make them linguistically and physically accessible.22 Although the literary remains of the Tanguts are dominated by texts associated with Buddhism either in Tangut script or in Chinese, it should be mentioned here that Tangut translations of some non-Buddhist texts have also come to light. These include translations of the Analects (two different editions), several military works (including Sunzi 孫子), Zhenguan zhengyao 貞

18 19 20 21 22

Dunnell 1996, 37. Shi 1988, 59–63. Kychanov 1984, 377–378. For Tangut texts, see Shi et al. 2005, vols. 7, 8, and 16; and for Chinese texts, see Shi, Wei, and Kychanov 1996–2007, vols. 1–7. Grinstead 1972; Kychanov 1984, 386; Nishida Tatsuo 1975–1977, 1:8–22. Kychanov 1984, 381.

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觀政要, Mencius, and the Classic of Filial Piety.23 There must have been more: the account of Xixia in the Song dynastic history mentions Tangut translations of the early dictionary Erya 爾雅 and the Siyan zazi 四言雑字 as well as the Classic of Filial Piety.24 It is clear, therefore, that there was a drive to vernacularize and translate texts into Tangut whether they were Chinese canonical texts or Buddhist texts in various languages. The cultural linguistic self-confidence suggested by the fact that the Tanguts turned to translation was perhaps also responsible for their readiness to turn to print. The close associations between Buddhism and print in East Asia do not need to be elaborated here, and the extant printed texts are overwhelmingly, albeit not entirely, Buddhist in nature.25 What is striking is that the Tanguts resorted to print not only for texts in Chinese, as the Koreans and Japanese had been doing from the eighth century, but also for Tangut texts (vernacular printing in Korea began in the fifteenth century following the invention of the han’gŭl alphabet, and in Japan only in the seventeenth century, many centuries after the development of the kana syllabary). Furthermore, the Tanguts used not only woodblock printing but also movable type, mostly in wood but some possibly in baked clay, and the texts they printed typographically are now the oldest texts printed typographically in the world.26 What the Tangut texts that have survived show us is that the Tanguts were extraordinarily committed to print and took more enthusiastically to movable type than did any other East Asian society before the Koreans; that they readily resorted to vernacular translation of Chinese texts while at the same time printing texts in Chinese; and that they produced and printed only a very small number of vernacular works of Tangut origin. The Tanguts provide a counterexample to other East Asian societies in their response to Chinese writing and in particular to the Kaibao printed canon. Why did the Khitans, Jurchens, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese show no interest in translation, and what, conversely, induced the Tanguts, Mongolians, and Uighurs to resort to translation?

23 24 25 26

Kolokolov and Kychanov 1966; Nishida Tatsuo 1968. Song shi 485, 13995. Kornicki 2012a. Kornicki 2012b.

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Translation and Vernacularization in East Asia Vietnam We have no information on the movement of Chinese Buddhist texts to Vietnam in the age of manuscripts, but there must have been a steady flow at least until the tenth century, when the defeat of Chinese armies by Vietnamese troops led to the formation of an independent Vietnamese dynasty. This did not put an end to contacts with China but simply placed Vietnam on the same footing as other tributary states on the periphery of China. In 1018 an envoy was sent to China to request a copy of the Buddhist canon, which was presumably the Kaibao printed version. The envoy returned with it two years later: an octagonal repository was built to house it, and in 1023 and 1027 two manuscript copies were made.27 In this way imported printed canons were used as a resource and copied out by hand to facilitate wider circulation not only in Vietnam but also in Japan and Korea. There are records suggesting that a version of the Chinese canon was printed in Vietnam between 1295 and 1299. By this time the canon had already been printed in the Tangut and Khitan Empires and in Korea, and printing was almost certainly being practiced in Vietnam by this time, so it is not inherently improbable. So far not a trace has come to light, however.28 After the fifteenth century, when the Vietnamese state became more committed to Confucianism, Buddhism was less favored by the government, but it was not persecuted as it was in Korea. It seems that no books printed in Vietnam before the seventeenth century survive, so the oldest extant Buddhist imprint is a commentary on the Heart Sūtra, which was printed in 1654 by a Vietnamese nun.29 The biography of the monk Tín Hoc (d. 1090), contained in a fourteenth-century collection, mentions in passing that he came from a family that made a living from carving printing blocks for Buddhist texts.30 Even if the story is apocryphal, it is clear that, by the fourteenth century at least, printing Buddhist texts was a recognized activity, and the likelihood is that Buddhist printing began in Vietnam, as it did in Korea and Japan, well before the fourteenth century.

27 28 29 30

Đại Việt sử kí toàn thư, “Bản kỉ,” 2:213–215, 224–226; Polyakov 1980, 168, 171; Kawakami 1943. Đại Việt sử kí toàn thư, “Bản kỉ,” 6:374; Khâm định Việt sử Thông giám cương mục, Hưng long 7 [1299]; Demiéville 1924, 212–218. Liu 2005, 276. Nguyen 1997, 139.

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In spite of the development of the Nôm script by the eleventh century and the later introduction of Roman script for writing Vietnamese, Buddhist texts of all descriptions circulated mainly in their Chinese versions until recent times, and there were few translations. The colophons of surviving books reveal that more than 150 temples were involved in printing between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and it is clear that some books were based on older imprints which no longer survive, but all were in Chinese.31 So there are few signs of vernacularization before the twentieth century: while bilingual editions of Confucian texts were widely available, this was not true of Buddhist texts. One rare exception is an early eighteenth-century edition of the Sūtra on Requiting Parental Kindness, an apocryphal sūtra which was evidently compiled to make Buddhism conform to Chinese notions of filial piety and which appeared in vernacular editions in Japan and Korea. This Vietnamese edition contains the original in large Chinese graphs and interpolated lines of smaller Nôm script giving a Vietnamese translation.32 Vernacularization of Buddhist texts came very late to Vietnam, as it did to Korea and Japan. This had the inevitable result that access to scriptures was restricted to those with a good grasp of Chinese: those without it could only rely upon oral renderings in sermons and chanting. This is also an issue in Japan and Korea, but in those societies we have much better information about reading practices as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, which makes it evident that Buddhist texts in Chinese were amenable to a form of vernacular reading. The likelihood is that something similar was practiced in Vietnam, but the evidence for vernacular reading in Vietnam is slim. Korea When Buddhism reached Korea in the fourth century, the peninsula was divided into the three kingdoms of Koguryŏ in the north, Paekche in the southwest, and Silla in the southeast. The subsequent development of Buddhism in Korea owed much not only to the continuous arrival of texts from China but also to the passage of Korean monks to China for study, for Chinese monks 31

32

Liu 2005, 276–278; Nguyen 1997, 209–210. See also the colophons of the 1770 edition of the Diamond Sūtra (Kim cương bát nhỡ ba la mật kinh, AC.510) and the 1690 edition of a devotional work on the Lotus Sūtra (Đại thừa diệu pháp liên hoa kinh bát đàn nghi, AC.363/1) in the Han Nôm Institute in Hanoi. T. #2887, 85.1403–1404. This edition of Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh, which contains no colophon, is in the collection of the Société asiatique (PD2350), which is kept at the Institut des hautes études japonaises, Collège de France, Paris. A different edition, entirely in Chinese and entitled Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh and dated 1747, is in the Han Nôm Institute in Hanoi (AC.308).

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rarely engaged in anything akin to missionary work abroad. In the eighth century a number of monks ventured beyond China and reached India. Hyech’o 慧超 (704–787?), for example, left Silla for China at an early age, and by 719 was receiving instruction in esoteric Buddhism from Vajrabodhi (671–741), a south Indian monk long resident in China. In around 723 Hyech’o went to India by sea, returning overland by the Silk Road to Tang China in 727, and later wrote a detailed account of his travels.33 Hyech’o never returned to Korea and instead spent the rest of his life in China; in this he was not unusual, for not one of the eight Silla monks known to have set out for India ever set foot in Korea again.34 For the development of Korean Buddhism, therefore, the monks who returned to Korea from China were of much greater importance. By the Unified Silla period Buddhism had clearly come of age. Silla monks had produced large quantities of commentarial and doctrinal literature and made their mark well beyond the confines of Korea—this meant, of course, writing such texts in Chinese.35 In this they were more successful than their Vietnamese and Japanese counterparts. Wŏnch’ŭk 圓測 (613–696), for example, was one of the two leading disciples of Xuanzang 玄奘 (ca. 602–664), the eminent traveler and translator. Although most of Wŏnch’ŭk’s writings are now lost, they appear in ancient Chinese and Japanese catalogs and clearly circulated well beyond Korea.36 Korean scholar-monks were participating in “pan-Asian Buddhist macroculture,” as is evident from the large number of them included in a collection of biographies of monks compiled in China in the Song dynasty.37 In 918 T’aejo 太祖 established the Koryŏ dynasty and became its first king. Shortly before his death in 943 he dictated a set of injunctions for his successors; these explicitly stipulated the importance they were to place upon Buddhism, which thus became the state religion.38 With the express support of the state, Koreans were eager to acquire copies of the Kaibao and other printed versions of the Chinese canon. In 928 a Silla monk is recorded as having brought back a complete copy of the Chinese Buddhist canon from China; this must have been a manuscript copy, since the Kaibao canon had yet to be printed.39 This is the first reliable record of the importation of the canon to Korea, 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Yang et al. 1984. Lee 1969, 89–97. Ahn 1991. Cho 2005; Kapstein 2000, 78. Buswell 2009, 1063. The collection of biographies is the Song kaoseng zhuan by Zannin (919–1001): T. #2061, 50.709–900. Vermeersch 2008, 89–101. Koryŏsa 1.25b; Chŏng 2004, 15.

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but it can hardly be doubted that copies had been imported hundreds of years earlier. In 989, however, a Korean monk who had traveled to China made a request to the authorities for a copy of the Kaibao canon, which was granted, and in 991 Han Ŏn’gong 韓彥恭, a Korean ambassador visiting Song China, requested a printed copy and was given one to take home, along with several other texts; in 1083 a third copy was obtained, which presumably came with the newly translated additions to the Kaibao canon.40 The Khitan printed version of the Chinese Buddhist canon also reached Korea: the first copy arrived in 1063, and further copies were bestowed upon Korea by the Khitan state in 1072, 1099, 1107, and 1122.41 Before the arrival of the first copy of the Khitan canon, however, King Hyŏnjong 顯宗 had already undertaken to produce a Korean edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon. This was a direct result of the Khitan invasion of Korea and the sack of the Koryŏ capital, Kaesŏng, in 1011, for the king is said to have made a vow to have a set of printing blocks for the canon carved if the Khitans withdrew: they did so and the blocks for the Korean canon were prepared on the basis of the Kaibao edition.42 Irrespective of the ostensible apotropaic motives for the production of the Korean canon, it probably also reflects Koryŏ attempts to establish its own independent empire and to demonstrate that independence by rivaling both Song China and the Khitans in the production of a printed canon.43 While the Mongol invasion was still under way, a second set of printing blocks for the Korean canon was carved in the years 1236–1251, on Kanghwa Island, which had become the temporary capital. Impressive though this achievement is, it is important to remember that this was not a vernacular version of the canon such as the Tanguts produced but the Chinese canon, including commentaries and subcommentaries by learned Buddhists from throughout East Asia.

40

41

42

43

Song shi 487, 14039–14040. The monk’s visit is not mentioned in Korean sources, but for Han Ŏn’gong’s success, see Koryŏsa 3.23a. On the 1083 acquisition, see Koryŏsa 9.36a. On the importation of copies of the Chinese Buddhist canon from the Song and the Khitan, see Chŏng 2004, 15–20. For the Khitan versions arriving in 1063 and 1072 respectively, see Liao shi 115, p. 1522, and 23, p. 274; Koryŏsa 8.19b. For those arriving in 1099 and 1107, see Koryŏsa 11.18b, 12.27b; Nogami 1953, 27–28. In 1122 the canon was not a gift; rather, a Korean monk named Hyejo purchased three copies of it: Samguk yusa, T. #2039, 49.994b18–20. This is the story related in the thirteenth century when the second Korean canon was prepared; see Lee 1993–1996, 1:426–427. On the two Korean canons, see also Lancaster 1996; Chŏng 2004. Vermeersch 2008, 358. For a detailed study of the two Korean editions, see Chang 2006.

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Vernacularization came to Korean Buddhism in several stages. The first was that of vernacular reading techniques (hundok 訓讀), which are known to have been practiced in Silla in the eighth century at the latest. During the period when the Hwaŏm 華嚴 school in Korea dominated, lectures on its principal text, the Flower Garland Sūtra, took place regularly from the seventh century onward, and given the lack of knowledge of spoken Chinese, these lectures can only have been given in Korean.44 Confirmation of this is provided by the Japanese monk Ennin 圓仁: in 839 he visited a monastery in China populated entirely by Koreans and found that they conducted most of their lectures and worship in Korean.45 The second stage was the introduction of examinations for monks during the Koryŏ dynasty. These were not written but oral and required vernacular exposition of doctrine in Korean.46 The same must have been true of sermons, but of these we have no record apart from Ennin’s comments. The third stage followed the introduction of the han’gŭl script in 1443. In 1447 a vernacular biography of the Buddha was published, consisting of translated extracts from the Lotus Sūtra and other texts, and this was followed by the publication of bilingual vernacular editions of various Buddhist texts, which combined the Chinese text with a vernacular Korean translation.47 Far more of these bilingual editions (ŏnhaebon 諺解本) were produced for Confucian texts than for Buddhist, but in spite of the reduced status of Buddhism during the Chosŏn dynasty, a Sūtra Printing Office in the capital was established in 1461. For ten years this office printed Buddhist texts, and a large number of bilingual editions of Buddhist texts were published. The first was a typographic edition of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra in 1461.48 A vernacular edition of the Lotus Sūtra was produced by the Sūtra Printing Office in 1463, followed by various other scriptures over the next decade, many of them reprinted in later centuries. The most popular was the apocryphal text Sūtra on Requiting Parental Kindness: more than thirty bilingual editions were printed from 1553 onward, right up to the end of the eighteenth century.49 So quickly was the new script put to use for the vernacularization of Buddhist scriptures, well before any Confucian classics, that there is some justification for arguing that the

44 45 46 47 48 49

McBride 2008, 95. Sørensen 1986; Reischauer 1955, 151–152. Vermeersch 2008, 196–197. Sŏkpo sangjŏl 1961; Kim 2007. Yun 2003, 39–44. Yun 2003, 53–82, 179–186.

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propagation of Buddhism was one of the motives for the invention of the han’gŭl script.50 In the fifteenth century, then, some Buddhist scriptures and other texts became accessible for the first time to those who could not read Chinese. Vernacular editions of a limited range of Buddhist scriptures continued to be published up to the end of the nineteenth century, but it was only in the twentieth century that the entire Chinese canon was translated into Korean. Japan The transmission of Buddhism to Japan was rendered more difficult by Japan’s distance from the mainland and the need for hazardous voyages, but, notwithstanding those difficulties, Buddhist objects had definitely been introduced to Japan by the sixth century.51 Contact with the Korean peninsula remained important, for in the following decades a number of Paekche monks traveled or migrated to Japan, and a smaller number did so from distant Koguryŏ. There is little sign that texts from the Chinese Buddhist canon, whether imported or locally copied, had a role in the practice and dissemination of Buddhism until the end of the seventh century.52 However, official missions dispatched to neighboring states, especially to Tang China, frequently included Buddhist monks, who went in search of teachers and texts to add to those brought by immigrant or visiting monks. Many of these monks not only reached China but returned with substantial quantities of Buddhist texts. The earliest recorded mention of the Buddhist canon in the Chronicles of Japan (Nihon shoki 日本書紀) comes in an entry for 673, where it is stated that scribes were assembled in the Kawaradera temple to the south of Nara to copy out the Buddhist texts subsumed under the title All the Scriptures.53 If this is accurate, then it indicates that a considerable number of Buddhist texts had already reached Japan and that domestic production of manuscript canons was already feasible and in some sense useful. Since it was not until 730 that Zhisheng produced his definitive catalog, Record of Buddhist Teachings of the Kaiyuan Era (Kaiyuan shijiao lu 開元釋敎錄), it is unclear what texts might have been contained in the copy of All the Scriptures that was supposed to have been copied in 673. Nevertheless, since manuscript versions of the Chinese Buddhist canon were already in existence in China, it is conceivable that one had been exported to Japan and was copied there. What is certain is that by the 50 51 52 53

Shim 1999, 236–239. For evidence suggesting a fourth-century arrival, see Lurie 2011, 142. Holcombe 1999; Lurie 2011, 136–150; McCallum 2009; Ooms 2009. Nihon shoki, Tenmu 2[673].3 (Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei 68, p. 411).

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middle of the eighth century, numerous volumes survive with colophons showing that they formed part of a copy of All the Scriptures made in Nara at the behest of the female sovereign Kōken 孝謙 (r. 749–758).54 The first to bring a printed version of the canon to Japan was Chōnen 奝然 (938–1016). He successfully petitioned the Song court for a copy of the Kaibao canon, and he took all 5,048 chapters back to Japan in 987, together forty-one rolls of newly translated texts that had been printed as a supplement.55 In 1072 Jōjin 成尋 (1011–1081) traveled to China with five disciples and, in a departure from previous practice, went not only in search of texts but also as a carrier of texts from Japan. He took more than six hundred rolls consisting both of exegetical and other writings by Japanese monks, including Jōjin himself, and of copies of various Chinese works that had been lost in China but had been preserved in Japan. Jōjin never returned to Japan, but in 1073 he sent his disciples home with the large collection of books he had managed to acquire in China, which included some printed copies of newly translated scriptures.56 The book-collecting activities of Chōnen and Jōjin are well known, but they were not the only ones bringing valuable texts to Japan: at least forty-eight copies of printed Chinese canons, including twenty-one copies of the Dongchansi 東禅 寺 edition of 1102, reached Japan between the late twelfth century and 1333, and seventeen of them are extant today.57 It was not until the seventeenth century that the first Japanese edition of the Buddhist canon was printed, and it was rapidly followed by a second. As in the case of the two Korean editions, these were of course editions of the Chinese canon, not Japanese vernacular editions. The vernacularization of Buddhism in Japan began, as in Korea, with vernacular reading techniques (known in Japanese as kundoku), which were probably introduced from Silla in the eighth century, and in a few cases these reading techniques generated vernacular written versions.58 As in the case of Korea, given the lack of widespread knowledge of spoken Chinese in Japan, we must suppose that liturgies and oral readings of scriptures were conducted either using the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters or in oral translation, rather as Ennin found the Koreans doing in China. By the tenth century there were manuscripts containing vernacular versions of the Lotus Sūtra, and a fragmentary copy of Genshin’s Essentials of Rebirth in 54 55 56 57 58

Tanaka 1973, 74–76. Song shi 491, 14135; Fujiyoshi 1981; Wang 1994; Verschuer 1991. Fujiyoshi 1981; Verschuer 1991; Borgen 2007. Ōtsuka 2010, 48–53, 58–59. Fujimoto 1992; Lurie 2011, 195.

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the Pure Land (Ōjō yōshū 往生要集) survives in a twelfth-century vernacular version.59 In the Heian and Kamakura periods more use was made of the vernacular for the purpose of proselytization. The leaders of the Pure Land and True Pure Land schools of Buddhism, such as Hōnen (1133–1212), Ippen (1234–1289), and Shinran (1173–1263), all wrote some of their teachings in Japanese; some Buddhist hymns (wasan 和讃) and vernacular Buddhist poetry (hōmonka 法文歌) were composed in Japanese; and even Dōgen 道元 (1200– 1253), the founder of the Sōtō school of Chan Buddhism in Japan, wrote extensively in Japanese.60 By that time Buddhist texts were already being printed in Japan, but almost all Buddhist texts printed before 1600 were in Chinese, whether they had been written by Chinese, Koreans, or Japanese. There were a few exceptions, such as a collection of the sayings of Hōnen 法然, printed in 1321, but it was only after 1600 that Buddhist texts in Japanese became widely available.61 The only alternative form of access to Buddhist texts was initially through the medium of sermons, which took the form of expositions of doctrine. There are records of these sermons going back to the seventh and eighth centuries, and although there is no explicit mention of the language in which they were given, it is difficult to suppose that they were presented in anything but Japanese. By the Heian period, vernacular sermons were a normal practice and are mentioned in the Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi 枕草子) of Sei Shōnagon (ca. 966–1017) and the Collection of Tales from the Past (Konjaku monogatarishū 今 昔物語集; probably twelfth century). By this time, if not before, sermons were clearly functioning as a means of disseminating Buddhist concepts to vernacular lay audiences, and oral expositions of the meaning of Buddhist paintings fulfilled a similar role.62 A more indirect form of access was provided by literary works that drew upon Buddhist texts for anecdotes, themes, or doctrinal references. These had the Chinese precedent of the Treatise of the Golden Treasury (Jin zang lun 金蔵論), a collection of tales taken from Buddhist scriptures which was compiled in the sixth century by the monk Daoji 道紀 and circulated widely in East Asia.63 In the sixteenth century, accounts of the life of the

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Nozawa 2006; Nishida Naoki 2001, 17, 33–35, 49. Shirane 2007, 639–665; Heine 1994; Shōbō genzō (T. #2582, 82.7–309). Kurodani shōnin gotōroku (T. #2611, 83.171–238); Tōdō 1976, 63–65 and pl. 33; Chibbett 1977, 55–56. Sekiyama 1973, 11–41 (he does not consider the question of language); Kaminishi 2006. For the practice of explicating Buddhist paintings in China, see Berezkin 2011. Miyai and Motoi 2011, esp. 780–822.

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Buddha were produced entirely in Japanese in illustrated manuscripts, and similar works were printed in the Edo period.64 In spite of the publication of numerous translations of the Buddhist canon, it remains the case that for the purpose of chanting and for rituals such as funerals it is the Chinese versions that are used by monks and congregations alike, not the Japanese translations. It is thus still not the case that mainstream Buddhism has been fully vernacularized in Japan, notwithstanding the very real challenges posed by the Chinese texts, including mistaken punctuation in Japanese editions.65 Other Societies In Korea, Japan, and Vietnam the Chinese text of the Tripiṭaka thus held sway, and efforts to vernacularize Buddhist scriptures were limited, except in the oral realm of sermons and Buddhist narratives. Two other East Asian societies remained loyal to the Chinese Buddhist canon: the Khitan and Jurchen Empires. Little was known about Khitan Buddhism until the discovery in 1974, inside a statue in a wooden pagoda built in 1056, of numerous printed Buddhist texts, including a handful of chapters from the Khitan edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, which seems to have been printed around the middle of the twelfth century.66 The discovery of some chapters of the Khitan canon is important because it shows that the Khitans opted not to translate but to print their version of the Buddhist canon in Chinese.67 Translation was in fact an option, for by this time the Khitans had their own writing system, which consisted of a mixture of logograms representing entire words and phonograms representing sounds. The Khitan scripts, the so-called “large script” and “small script,” were developed in the tenth century, and they remain largely undeciphered, but they were clearly not alphabetic scripts and were evidently based at least partially on the Chinese script.68 The same decision was taken by the Jurchens, who overwhelmed the Khitans and took over a large swath of northern China in the twelfth century and who also had their own script, which was created in 1119. The Jurchen script, too, consisted of a mixture of logograms and phonograms, and the conception 64 65 66 67 68

Glassman 2007; Brisset and Grioler 2010. For a thorough treatment of these mistakes and difficulties, see Kanaoka 2000. For details and illustrations of all the finds, see Shanxisheng wenwuju and Zhongguo lishi bowuguan 1991. Li and He 2003, 127–160; Chikusa 2000, 292–335; Tanii 1996; Naka 1996. Kane 2009.

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of the script, which uses a system of radicals like the Chinese script, was again clearly based on Chinese.69 For lack of documentary evidence, nobody had suspected that the Jurchens had printed their own version of the Chinese Buddhist canon until 1933, when a single copy, consisting of some five thousand chapters out of a total of perhaps seven thousand, was discovered in a pagoda in Shanxi Province. It seems to be a reproduction of the Kaibao canon and so provides another witness to that lost ancestor of all printed canons. The Jurchen canon was produced in the years 1149–1173 at the Tianningsu Temple in Shanxi as a result of donations collected and so appears to have been more of a private than a state enterprise.70 Be that as it may, the significant point is that, although they already had their own script, the Jurchens chose to print the Chinese Buddhist canon, not to translate it. The Chinese Buddhist canons copied or printed in various parts of East Asia are an impressive testament to the weight of the Chinese Buddhist tradition, but they are not the whole story, as the existence of the Tangut canon shows us. During the first millennium, Buddhist texts penetrated most parts of Central and East Asia, and in many societies prompted efforts to translate. Texts were translated to and from Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Uighur, Tangut, and Mongolian in many different directions.71 Thus, Chinese was the source language for translations into all those languages, as well as being the target language for translations from Tibetan. This marks a strong contrast with the Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Khitan, and Jurchen experience and calls for explanation. I shall first consider in turn Tibetan, Uighur, Mongolian, and Manchu translation traditions and attempt to identify the circumstances that favored translation. In the case of Tibet, the introduction of Buddhism in the early seventh century was followed by the invention of the Tibetan script later in that century, a move that was in part a response to the need for a means with which to translate Buddhist texts.72 In 762 the Tibetan court adopted Buddhism and began to encourage the study of Sanskrit to facilitate the translation of scriptures, which became a state enterprise. There were Indian and Nepalese monks in Tibet, but Chinese monks also visited Tibet and in some cases translated Chinese scriptures into Tibetan. Thus, translation into Tibetan involved originals in various languages, including Chinese, Khotanese, and Bengali.73 In Tibet there was no 69 70 71 72 73

Kane 2009, 3; Tao 1976, 76–80. Li and He 2003, 91–118; Tsukamoto 1936; Kamio 1937. See the table in Kudara 2002, 189. Kollmar-Paulenz 2007; Halkias 2004; Skilling 1997, 87–89. Halkias 2004, 49; Kapstein 2003; Kollmar-Paulenz 2007.

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resistance to Chinese Buddhism, but on the other hand there is no indication that the Chinese Buddhist canon was considered normative as it was in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. On the contrary, the Tibetan canon, known as the Kanjur, was differently structured and contained texts which are not found in the Chinese canons. The Uighurs, an ethnically Turkish people occupying in the eighth century the area between the Caspian Sea and the Mongolian plains, originally wrote in the Orkhon alphabet in the eighth century but in the ninth developed their own alphabetic script based on that of Sogdian. When an envoy from Song China reached Khocho (now Gaochang 高昌) in 982, when it was under the control of the Uighurs, he found there some fifty Buddhist temples and a library of Chinese Buddhist literature, perhaps a legacy of the period when the area was under Tang control. At any rate, it is clear that the Uighurs had access to a substantial number of Chinese Buddhist texts, as well as Buddhist texts in Central Asian languages such as Tocharian. From the ninth up to the fourteenth century the Uighurs translated a number of Buddhist texts from Chinese, Sanskrit, and other languages, including sūtras, commentaries, and apocryphal works, and to date eighty-one titles have been identified, most in manuscript but some in woodblock prints.74 Buddhism also became a significant presence under the Mongols. When Činggis (Genghis) Khan constructed the Mongol state in 1206, he was already familiar with Tibetan and Tangut Buddhism, and his successors were no different. Qubilai had his Buddhist adviser ’Phags-pa compile a short introduction to Buddhism in 1278, and the Tibetan original was translated into Mongolian and then Chinese.75 By the end of the thirteenth century the first Buddhist texts had been translated into Mongolian, and other texts followed, such as the Diamond Sūtra; there were three different translations of the Diamond Sūtra from the Tibetan version, the first produced in the fourteenth century.76 In 1602–1607 a complete translation of the Tibetan Kanjur into Mongolian was completed; this is not extant, but a subsequent translation done in 1628–1629 was eventually printed in Beijing in 1717–1720.77 Thus, not only was Buddhism disseminated in Mongolian but it was the Qing government that printed it.78 Finally, after the foundation of the Qing dynasty by the Manchus, many Buddhist texts were translated into Manchu using the newly developed 74 75 76 77 78

Elverskog 1997, 5–11, 17–18, and passim; Kudara 2002, 187–188; Zieme 1992, 23–42. Sagaster 2007, 379–386, 393; the Chinese version is T. #1645, 49.226–233. Poppe 1971. See also Serruys 1967, 270–271. Kollmar-Paulenz 2002; Eimer 2007, 53. Rawski 2005, 318.

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alphabetic Manchu script, which was based on the Mongolian script. In many cases these Buddhist texts were printed in polyglot editions containing not only the Manchu and Chinese texts but also sometimes the Mongolian and Tibetan as well.79 Later in the eighteenth century a Manchu translation of the canon was produced, and although it was made to appear as if it had been based on a Tibetan Kanjur, it was in fact based on one of the Ming editions of the canon. It was finished in 1790 and printed with a preface by the Manchu emperor of China, the Qianlong emperor, who had commissioned it in 1772.80 Translation was a common option, then, and adopted by the Tanguts, Tibetans, Uighurs, Mongols, and Manchus, in most cases shortly after the invention of a script that made writing in the vernacular easy. However, the Khitans, Jurchens, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese made no such move, remaining loyal to the Chinese Buddhist canon until the twentieth century. The same was true of the inhabitants of the tiny Ryūkyū kingdom to the south of Japan, which made seven requests to the Ming court for copies of the canon, of which five were granted, and from 1455 onward a number of successful requests to the Chosŏn court in Korea.81 In all these societies the translation of Buddhist texts came relatively late, many centuries after their introduction. To date, however, no fully satisfying explanation has been put forward. The first problem was undoubtedly that of scripts. Buddhist scriptures reached Japan, Korea, and Vietnam at a time when they had no knowledge of any script other than that of Chinese. This is because there is no reason to doubt that the first texts to reach those societies were written in Chinese, either translations of Buddhist texts or works from the Chinese Confucian canon. Since the inhabitants of those lands (unlike, for example, the Tibetans or the Uighurs) are unlikely to have come into contact with any other script, they were left with nothing but Chinese graphs to work with. In this light it is significant that it was those societies in the east, farthest removed from other writing traditions using alphabetic or syllabic scripts, that accepted the Chinese Buddhist canon as it was; the same was true of the Khitans and Jurchens, whose scripts were indubitably inspired by the Chinese script and who opted not to translate but to reproduce the Chinese Buddhist canon. On the other hand, the Tanguts, Uighurs, and Mongols all had contact with Tibetan and other alphabetic scripts such as Sogdian and were not shy about developing their own scripts; while the Uighurs and Mongols developed alphabetic scripts, 79 80 81

Walravens 1981; Chandra 1966–1968. Fuchs 1930, 1932; Bawden 1980; Chandra 1982. It has now been reprinted in a facsimile edition: Manwen dazangjing. Ha 1999, 263; China 2008, 96–100; Fujimoto 1999, 171–175.

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that of the Tanguts was largely logographic and was based upon the Chinese script. It is true that the Chinese script did not pose insuperable difficulties for those wishing to write other vernaculars, and in time ways were found in Japan and Korea to use Chinese graphs to represent elements of the vernacular such as proper nouns and later whole utterances. These developments took centuries, however, and it was a long time before any vernacular texts were committed to writing with Chinese graphs, and none of them were translations of Chinese Buddhist texts.82 Another problem was doubtless the difficulty of rendering Buddhist terminology in the vernaculars. Again, this could probably have been overcome just as it was in Tibetan, Uighur, and other languages, but in the end, for whatever reasons, the effort was not made, and even today the essential terminology of Buddhism in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam consists of loanwords from Chinese. Like all such loanwords in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, though, the phonological adaptations they have undergone have given them an unmistakably vernacular garb, for they are at heart graphic loans, not phonetic loans.83 A further consideration is the sacralization of Chinese as the language of Buddhism, which resembles that of Quranic Arabic as the language of Islam and the Latin of the Vulgate as the language of western Christianity. The process of sacralization results in hieroglossia—that is to say, the theological dependence of the vernacular upon the sacralized language.84 In Japan, Korea, and Vietnam the unwritten vernaculars could not compete with the textual might of Chinese Buddhism, and throughout the first millennium, Chinese was undoubtedly sacralized by its use as the language of Buddhism. However, although the status accorded to Chinese in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam remained high until the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, this was not due exclusively to a perception of the inferiority of the vernaculars in a Buddhist context, for Confucian, medical, and other texts emanating from China undermined the Buddhist aura of Chinese. Perhaps the most important consideration is that Chinese translations of Buddhist texts did not find their way to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in a vacuum but rather as part of a much larger package which included the whole literate culture and social organization of China. To some extent this was also true for the Tanguts and the Uighurs, but they were strong enough to be able to resist China militarily and in any case had contacts with societies other than China. In Japan, Korea, and Vietnam there were no such opportunities, with the result 82 83 84

Lurie 2011. On the concept of graphic loans, see Tranter, forthcoming. Robert 2006, 26, 46.

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that Buddhism in its textual life in these societies was not a vernacular religion but one conducted through the medium of the Chinese script. Conclusion Although Buddhism has indubitably been a scripturally based religion for more than two thousand years, Buddhism in practice is, of course, much more than just a matter of texts. Cult practices, rituals, therapies, and oral performance are inseparable from the history of Buddhism in East Asia.85 Nevertheless, texts have been central to Buddhism in these contexts, too. Rituals such as “rapid reading” in Korea and Japan involved a large assembly of monks “reading” the whole canon in one day by passing it before the eyes.86 Similarly, the hand-copying of sūtras, always in the form of the transmitted Chinese texts, was for centuries, and continues to be, a devout practice that is manifestly not dependent upon understanding. Thus, the production of Buddhist books, whether printed or in manuscript, was often imbricated in practices that were intended to accrue merit. Books were sometimes venerated, and monasteries were often the repositories of huge numbers of texts, far more than medieval European monastic libraries held and far more than could be mastered by the most assiduous of scholars.87 In these ways what Schopen has called the “cult of the book” was a feature of Buddhism throughout East Asia, and at times there was a “cult of the canon” as rival polities produced printed versions of their own and copies were desperately sought elsewhere.88 Is it going too far to see the printed canons sought so eagerly throughout East Asia as “totems” that were sometimes acquired principally for their symbolic, magical, or prestige value rather than their value as authoritative editions of texts?89 Texts were transmitted as manuscripts or printed books from one polity to another, and transmitted texts generated more texts. In the hands of legions of scholar-monks the composition of commentaries was a form of exegesis that not only confronted the difficulties of the transmitted texts and attempted to explicate them but also constituted the dominant intellectual practice in early East Asia.90 Even in the case of Chan Buddhism, which is much less reliant 85 86 87 88 89 90

On this, see McBride 2008. Vermeersch 2008, 360–361; Ōtsuka 2010, 62–63; de Visser 1935, 2:494–507. Kieschnick 2003, 164–185; Drège 1991, chap. 4. Schopen 1982; Ōtsuka 2010, 62. Cf. Cressy 1986. Henderson 1991, 3.

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upon mastery of a corpus of texts than other Buddhist traditions, texts were a recognized aid to understanding, both in the form of records of the sayings of Chan masters and in the form of texts such as the Blue Cliff Record, a collection of koans put together in the Song dynasty. The collected Buddhist scriptures presented formidable linguistic challenges and in response there have been some moves toward Buddhist vernacularization in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, as mentioned above. On the oral plane, the vernacular has always dominated in the case of sermons and doctrinal discourses; and monks or laypeople reading out or intoning the Chinese text of the scriptures do so in accordance with the vernacular phonology of their mother tongue. On the written plane, however, even the most recent vernacular translations of the canon are based not on originals in Indian languages (where they exist) but on the text of the Chinese Buddhist canon; and even at the level of the cultic practice of copying out scriptures, it is the Chinese text that is copied in Japan and Korea, not a translation. The Chinese Buddhist canon, it is fair then to say, is still the keystone of East Asian Buddhism, while “new religions” in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, many of which incorporate elements of Buddhism, have by contrast based themselves on vernacular scriptures and vernacular worship. References Ahn Kye-hyŏn 1991. “Buddhism in the Unified Silla Period,” in Lewis R. Lancaster and C.S. Yu, eds., Assimilation of Buddhism in Korea: Religious Maturity and Innovation in the Silla Dynasty. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1–45. Allon, Mark 2008. “Recent Discoveries of Buddhist Manuscripts from Afghanistan and Pakistan and Their Significance,” in Ken Parry, ed., Art, Architecture and Religion on the Silk Roads, Silk Road Studies 12. Turnhout: Brepols, 153–178. Bawden, Charles R. 1980. “A Volume of the Kanjur in Manchu Translation in the Library of the Wellcome Institute,” Zentralasiatische Studien 14, 2: 65–84. Berezkin, Rostislav 2011. “Scripture-Telling (Jiangjing) in the Zhangjiagang Area and the History of Chinese Storytelling,” Asia Major 24: 1–42. Borgen, Robert 2007. “Jōjin’s Travels from Center to Center (with Some Periphery in Between),” in Mikael S. Adolphson, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, eds., Heian Japan: Centers and Peripheries. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 384–413. Bowring, Richard 1992. “Buddhist Translations in the Northern Sung,” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 5, 2: 79–93.

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Braarvig, Jens 2000–2006. Buddhist Manuscripts, Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection. Oslo: Hermes. Brisset, Claire-Akiko, and Pascal Griolet 2010. Shaka no honji: La vie du Buddha racontée et illustrée au Japon. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Buswell, Robert E. 1990. “Introduction: Prolegomenon to the Study of Apocryphal Buddhist Scriptures,” in Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1–30. –––––– 2009. “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, 4: 1055–1075. Chandra, Lokesh, ed. 1966–1968. Sanskrit Texts from the Imperial Palace at Peking: In the Manchurian, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan Scripts. 22 vols. New Delhi: Institute for the Advancement of Science and Culture. –––––– 1982. “Was the Manchu Canon a Kanjur or a Tripitaka?,” Zentralasiatische Studien 16: 187–195. Chang Ae-sun 張愛順 2006. “Korae taejanggyŏng ŭi p’yŏnch’an paegyŏng” 高麗大藏 經의편찬 배경, in Chang Ae-sun, Chŏng Sŭng-sŏk 鄭承碩, Kai Hideyuki 貝英幸, and Matsunaga Chikai 松永知海, eds., Korae taejanggyŏng ŭi yŏn’gu 高麗大藏 經의硏究. Seoul: Tongguk taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu, 19–58. Cheung, Martha P.Y. 2006. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation, vol. 1, From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester: St. Jerome. Chibbett, David 1977. The History of Japanese Printing and Book Illustration. Tokyo: Kodansha International. Chikusa Masaaki 竺沙雅章 2000. Sōgen bukkyō bunkashi kenkyū 宋元佛敎文化史研 究. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin. China Teikan 知名定寛 2008. Ryūkyū bukkyōshi no kenkyū 琉球仏教史の研究. Ginowan: Gajumaru shorin. Cho, Eunsu 2005. “Wŏnch’ŭk’s Place in the East Asian Buddhist Tradition,” in Robert E. Buswell, ed., Currents and Countercurrents: Korean Influences on the East Asian Buddhist Traditions. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 173–216. Chŏng P’ilmo 鄭駜謨 2004. Koryŏ puljŏn mongnok yŏn’gu 高麗佛典目録研究. P’aju: Han’guk haksul chŏngbu. Cressy, David 1986. “Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England,” Journal of Library History 21: 92–106. de Bary, William Theodore, and Irene Bloom, eds. 1999. Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. de Visser, M.W. 1935. Ancient Buddhism in Japan: Sūtras and Ceremonies in Use in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries A.D. and Their History in Later Times. 2 vols. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Demiéville, Paul 1924. “Les versions chinoises du Milindapañha,” Bulletin d’École français d’Extrême-Orient 24: 1–258.

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The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea Wang Sixiang1

Introduction The experiences of official interpreters illustrate the many ways that language, both spoken and written, came to be important in Chosŏn Korea (朝鮮 1392– 1910). Interpreters of spoken Chinese, for example, facilitated diplomatic contact with Ming China (明 1368–1644), mediating between Chosŏn and Ming courtiers, who, despite sharing a common written heritage, could not speak each other’s languages. The significant roles played by these interpreters, however, did not necessarily bring them social or political prestige. They were excluded from the center of political power and largely barred from the civil service examinations that accorded the greatest eminence at the Chosŏn court. The skill that they mastered—spoken language—came to be denigrated as an area of knowledge unfit for aristocratic pursuit.2 These interpreters, thus, embodied a series of tensions that characterized the linguistic landscape of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While the social obscurity of interpreters belied their political indispensability, in a context where the universality of writing was privileged over the particulars of speech, interpretation was both the mechanism of overcoming linguistic difference and the very marker that exposed it. 1 I want to thank Professor Benjamin Elman and the PIIRS-EAS research cluster for making this project possible. In addition to all the other participants at the “Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies” workshop, I would also like to thank Professors Pamela H. Smith, Martina Deuchler, and Ross King for their suggestions and insightful comments, which have not only greatly improved my early drafts but also rescued the work from numerous infelicities. 2 A long-term manifestation of this attitude was the gradual coalescence of families of official interpreters into specialized descent groups by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along with those who mastered other fields of technical knowledge such as astronomy, painting, and medicine, they made up the chungin 中人, groups of professional bureaucrats selected for government office in organs responsible for these areas of expertise. See Hwang 2004, 108–109, 113, 117–118.

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This study of interpreters seeks to examine the politics of language in diplomacy through the relationship between spoken Chinese and “vernacular” Korean.3 This perspective requires a marked departure from earlier studies of language issues in Chosŏn Korea that have focused on the question of “diglossia,” understood in terms of dialectics between the “vernacular” (i.e., Korean) and the “literary/classical” (i.e., Chinese).4 Conceiving the linguistic and inscriptional space of Chosŏn Korea as diglossic, however, risks missing the connections between two different “spoken” languages: Korean and Chinese. To fully appreciate this connection, the problem of language must be rescued from two prevailing narratives: first, the alleged and often assumed teleology of inevitable “vernacularization” that has tended to dominate studies of language issues in Chosŏn Korea and, second, the privileging of written over spoken language in the diplomatic record. The first narrative essentially sees the elevation of the Korean alphabet from a “vernacular” script (ŏnmun 諺文) to the medium of a national language (kungmun 國文) as a natural outgrowth of the alphabet’s invention in the

3 While the term “vernacular” has its problems, for the purposes of this chapter I use it generally as an equivalent to the Korean expression ŏnmun 諺文, which was used to refer to the Korean alphabet during the Chosŏn period. As for different registers of the Chinese language, I use the term “spoken Chinese” to refer generally to what appears in late Koryŏ and Chosŏn period primary sources as hanŏ 漢語 or hwaŏ 華語, which is to be contrasted with literary or classical writing. As Shang Wei’s chapter in this volume, “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” shows, the situation becomes more complicated for textual renderings of nonliterary registers, such as oral edicts (kouyu 口諭), clerical writing (liwen/imun 吏文), oral records (yulu 語錄), or other texts written in so-called baihua 白話. For the early Chosŏn court, each of these represented some form of spoken Chinese that was the purview of specialists such as interpreters. In the case of clerical writing, the Chosŏn court received missives from Chinese bureaus in this documentary style and maintained an agency, the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence (Sŭngmunwŏn 承文院), for the drafting of these documents. 4 While recent scholarship has used the notion of “diglossia” as shorthand for Chosŏn’s linguistic landscape, this idea of two, complementary but distinct, linguistic spaces has its shortcomings. For instance, Ross King (1998, 36) identifies at least four broad written traditions coexisting in Korea by the nineteenth century. The interactions between different registers, scripts, and social spaces in Chosŏn Korea suggest the existence of a sociologically complex linguistic space that needs to be further explored. Boudewijn Walraven (2011, 43–45, 47–52) has attempted to study these phenomena through shaman songs and their relationship to discourses of nation in late Chosŏn Korea. See also Wells 2011, 12–18. See Hudson 2002 for a discussion of some of the controversies surrounding the term “diglossia.”

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fifteenth century.5 Taking King Sejong’s 世宗 (r. 1418–1450) famous opening lines to his edict promulgating the Korean alphabet in 1446—that “the sounds of our country [i.e., Korea] are distinct from those of China and are not compatible with its written characters”—to be an indication of irreconcilable difference between Chinese and Korean, these perspectives often see the subsequent development of writing in the Korean script to be a precursor to the actualization of linguistic nationalism in the nineteenth century.6 To view the development of the Korean script as a precursor to an allegedly inevitable process of vernacularization contorts fifteenth- to eighteenth-century cultural phenomena to fit a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative of nation building, a perspective long since incorporated within Korea’s modern national imagination.7 Besides the tinge of nationalistic overtones, such perspectives give short shrift to the dynamic ways in which language and script interacted before the nineteenth century and which are readily revealed by a cursory examination of linguistic and inscriptional practice from the period. Anxiety of cleavage from China contributed to the lukewarm attention that King Sejong’s linguistic project initially received. Officials at first protested the alphabet’s use. Declaring that only “barbarians . . . like the Mongols, Tanguts, Jurchens, Japanese, and Tibetans” had their own writing systems, they saw the new Korean script as a threat to Korea’s own civilization.8 Despite initial protests against the script before the sixteenth century, the alphabet did see early adopters.9 The court also sponsored several publication projects, such as 5 6

7

8 9

For a discussion of this elevation of the Korean alphabet in the nineteenth century, see Wells 2011, 19–24. Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄 (hereafter CWS, followed by the monarch’s temple name) Sejong 世宗 113:36b [1446.09.29/4]: 國之語音 異乎中華 與文字不相流通. Young-mee Yu Cho, for example, writes: “Although it took several centuries before the new script enjoyed the popularity it deserved, there was no better tool to start the process [of spreading literacy] when the call for modernization and nation-building finally arrived in Korea.” Cho argues that the very different morphologies of Korean and Chinese contributed to the separation of classical Chinese and vernacular Korean into two separate diglossic spaces. See Cho 2002, 4, 6. See Chŏng Taham 2009, 272–275, for a critique of the nationalist perspective. For an analysis of the debates surrounding language issues in late nineteenth-century Korea and how they figure into the politics of Korean identity, see King 1998. Ross King (2007, 211–234) compares language policy in modern North and South Korea and discusses the notion of “script nationalism,” which has elevated the Korean script to a central symbol for patriotic sentiment. CWS Sejong 103:19b [1444.02.20/1]. Most notably, the royal household made use of the alphabet in discrete and private correspondence. Letters written in the alphabet also appear as evidence for criminal cases

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the Song of Flying Dragons, a panegyric to Sejong’s royal ancestors, through an institution called the Vernacular Script Office (Ŏnmunch’ŏng 諺文廳).10 Emphasis on the alphabet’s invention as an assertion of linguistic difference conceals the significant roles that the new script took on as an instrument for mediating difference. Conceived as a universal code for the systematic representation of Sino-Korean phonology, it was also able to render the contemporary pronunciation of Chinese characters independently—that is, according to fixed phonological values instead of in relation to the phonology of other characters.11 The alphabet’s efficacy for notating Sino-Korean phonology also made it useful for many Chosŏn literati, who employed the “vernacular” for the cultivation of classical learning. These “vernacular explications” (ŏnhae 諺解) provided side-by-side classical Chinese text and Korean explication for a variety of works, including ritual handbooks, law codes, and Confucian classics.12 Furthermore, prosody in poetic composition and the parallel prose of diplomatic memorials, both documentary genres that played crucial roles in diplomacy, demanded perfect mastery of tonality and rhyme, which phonological glosses would have aided greatly.13 Court interpreters employed these methods in the glossaries and language textbooks they compiled as tools for learning contemporary spoken Chinese.14 The alphabet thus came to be an integral component in the ways these interpreters acquired and maintained linguistic knowledge. These technologies of language, linguistic practices, and political concerns fostered relationships between the vernacular script, spoken language, and classical knowledge that together suggest a more complex historical trajectory than one of gradual and inevitable “vernacularization.”15 In wresting language from the teleology of vernacularization, my aim here is not to attempt to depoliticize the historical narrative per se but to reinvestigate and resituate, in the proper historical context, how language came to matter, both as an area of knowledge and as a site of political contestation. The ready

10 11 12 13 14 15

and conspiracies in the late fifteenth century. CWS Sejong 124:21b [1449.06.20/2]; Munjong 文宗 10:24b [1451.11.17/2]; Tanjong 端宗 6:21a [1453.04.02/2]; Sejo 世祖 13:37a [1458.08.24/1]; Sŏngjong 成宗 185:9b [1485.11.09/7]. Yi Kibaek 1984, 193. For other uses of the Korean alphabet and its relationship to printing, see Evon 2009, 10–14. For the use of relative phonology in determining the phonetic values of Chinese characters, see Shang Wei’s chapter in this volume; and Liu 2004, 205–206. Kornicki 2008, 16–20; Park 2013, 2–10. For example, there are several cases where Korean diplomats were chastised for presenting memorials with incorrect use of tones. See Chen and Sim 2010. Court interpreters also compiled textbooks of Japanese, Jurchen, and Mongolian. King 1998, 33–35.

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adaptation of the Korean script by court interpreters demonstrated that its invention and implementation in the fifteenth century were at least partly related to the court’s desire to master spoken Chinese. Ironic only if we consider the rise of national vernaculars to be inherently opposed to the use of a classical or cosmopolitan language, these linguistic projects were in turn inextricably connected to Korea’s attention to the classical past and anxieties over commensurability with Ming China.16 The second narrative that obfuscates the relationship between spoken Chinese and Korean is the graphocentrism that emerges from the writings of the literati-envoys that dominate the diplomatic record. Korean court officials on envoy missions recorded travel diaries in classical Chinese, submitted memorials to the Ming throne in elegant prose, and exchanged Tang-style poetry with their Chinese counterparts. For them, written exchanges reinforced the notion of a civilized world, a literary and textual universe bound by a common writing system. Whereas the Ming usually employed document translators to convert the letters presented by foreign magnates into written Chinese, Korea’s use of literary Chinese absolved the Ming court of this task.17 A common expression used to describe imperial rule, and Korea’s inclusion in this vision of empire, was “writing in the same script; carts with the same axle widths” 書同文 車同 軌: the unification of culture that paralleled the (apparent) union of political institutions.18 Writing and culture were thus inseparable and mutually embedded, encapsulated in the concept of mun/wen 文. In a preface to accompany a poem written for envoys from the Koryŏ (高麗, 918–1392), the dynasty that preceded the Chosŏn in Korea, Song Lian 宋濂 (1310–1381), an adviser to the first Ming emperor, elaborated a vision of empire that saw the Ming’s civilizing power extending to foreign states and people. He saw Korea as a civilized place, where the “legacies of the former kings” were maintained. Korea’s attention to ritual placed it in a league apart from the “rulers of other countries,” who were “attached to barbarian ways” and “slighted ritual and righteousness.” For Song, it was “only appropriate that we [the Ming] see them [the Koreans] as among the ‘Chinese’” and not “in the same cate­gory as ‘foreign countries.’” Korea’s acceptance of ritual principles and its lite­rary accomplishments testified both to Korea’s “civilized” status and to the 16 17 18

Chŏng Taham (2009, 271) has observed that the connection between spoken Chinese and the invention of the Korean alphabet has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship. Ye 1991, 84–85. For examples of this and similar expressions, see CWS Sejong 4:27b [1418.07.27/2], 64:1b [1434.04.02/5], 103:19b [1444.02.20/1]; Kwŏn Kŭn, Yangch’onjip 陽村集, vol. 1, in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 (hereafter HMC), 7:15c.

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effective­ness of the Ming’s civilizing power. Even within this political imaginary of imperial authority and universalism, language still operated as a marker of difference. Like the “barbarians of the four directions” and despite all its unequivocal distinctiveness from them, Korea too came to court with “multiple interpreters” 重譯. Song’s attitude toward linguistic difference was thus unclear. How did the issue of linguistic difference figure into this rhetoric of ritual commensurability and cultural equivalence? Was the Korean mastery of written language and ritual enough to make the differences in language irrelevant in imperial eyes?19 Literary exaltations of written culture, such as Song’s, obscure the integral roles played by various specialists of spoken language in Korea’s diplomacy with the Ming. Interpreters were, in fact, essential to the conduct of diplomacy. Understanding their role does much to illuminate the politics of language in Chosŏn Korea. Although this chapter will focus on the early Chosŏn-Ming period (1392–1550s), understanding the linguistic and political context preceding the Koryŏ dynasty’s engagement with the Mongol-Yuan Empire (蒙元 1209– 1368) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is critical. Throughout Koryŏ’s engagement with the Mongol-Yuan, war, diplomacy, and finally political integration motivated the Koryŏ court to control linguistic knowledge and produced opportunities for linguistic specialists employed by the state to use their knowledge for their own, private ends. Though a polyglot Koryŏ elite emerged in this period, the dynastic transitions of the fourteenth century reoriented the relationship between diplomacy and linguistic knowledge. The early Chosŏn court no longer had ready access to speakers of Chinese and turned its efforts to the systematization of linguistic knowledge. New language manuals were developed after the invention of the Korean alphabet, which was itself derivative of linguistic technologies and practices of cosmopolitan empire. These projects of linguistic systematization were both responses to the challenge of maintaining what had once been tacit linguistic knowledge and consummations of Korea’s prior integration into the Mongol imperium. In diplomatic space, however, language meant more than communicating effectively or accurately and became fundamental to a host of other processes: sociability, ritual propriety, and political power. The possessors of this knowledge during the early Chosŏn period, court-based interpreters, had to navigate between rather contradictory forces: good interpreters were as indispensable as they were scarce, as pivotal as they were marginal, and as integral to the process of diplomacy as they were suppressed from its records. 19

Song Lian, Wenxianji 文憲集 9:42b–44a, in Siku quanshu 四庫全書; see also Chang Tong’ik 1997, 379–80.

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Anxieties of Language: Korea and Empire Koryŏ’s integration into the Mongol Empire in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries exposed a broad swath of Koryŏ society to a multilingual world where both elite and non-elite alike could have learned Mongolian and Chinese for trade, politics, and prestige. The wane of Mongol power in East Asia, however, dramatically shifted the linguistic landscape. When the Ming dynasty arose in China, King Kongmin 恭愍王 (r. 1354–1374) had already severed many of the links that Koryŏ had with the Yuan, markedly transforming Korea’s place in East Asia. Koryŏ-Ming relations did not feature the kinds of linkages that characterized late Koryŏ-Yuan interaction.20 Whereas many from Koryŏ once traveled frequently between their homeland and the imperial center, early Ming restrictions on maritime trade and the strict enforcement of the tribute system limited opportunities for contact, which occurred regularly only within the limited scope of envoy missions and border markets. Once open to Koryŏ literati, imperial civil service examinations were now prohibited to them. Attempts to send sons of Koryŏ elites to study in the Ming capital were rebuffed by the first emperor, Ming Taizu 明太祖 (r. 1368–1398).21 Although a Korean community in Liaoyang persisted through the fourteenth century, their intermediary position came to be perceived as a threat to this new, very different regional order.22 The experience of the Korean Confucian scholar Yi Saek 李穡 (1328–1396), who lived through these transitions, is illustrative. Although hardly a typical representative of a career bureaucrat, he did exemplify the possibilities for travel and exchange during the last years of Mongol-Yuan hegemony. Yi Saek had passed the highest-level civil service examinations at both the Koryŏ court and the Yuan court and served in the Yuan Hanlin Academy. He eventually returned to Korea and served in its bureaucracy, becoming one of the most prominent literary, intellectual, and political figures of his age.23 When Yi returned to China for the first time in decades in 1389 as a Koryŏ envoy to the Ming, he had the following encounter with the Ming emperor: 20 21

22 23

For Ming and late Koryŏ relations, see Robinson 2009, 274–284; Ye 1991. During the entire Ming period, only two cohorts of Korean literati were allowed to travel to Ming China to participate in the civil service examinations, both early in the Hongwu reign. See Ming shi lu 明實錄 (hereafter MSL, followed by the monarch’s temple name) Taizu 太祖 73:3b–4a, pp. 1340–1341 [1372.03]; 89:1b–2a, pp. 1574–1575 [1374.05]; Ye 1991, 38–40. Robinson 2009, 217–218, 282–284. See Yi Saek’s biography in Chŏng Inji et al., Koryŏsa 高麗史 (hereafter KS), 8115:1a–28a.

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The emperor [Ming Taizu] had long heard of Yi Saek’s name and summoned him forth. Speaking to him casually, he said, “You served the Yuan court as an academician—you must understand the Chinese language” 漢語. Then, Yi Saek responded in Chinese, “[My king] wishes to come to court himself.” The emperor did not understand what he had meant and asked, “What did you say?” The officials of the Board of Rites then transmitted what [Yi Saek had meant]. Yi Saek had not been to court for many years, and his speech was encumbered and rough. The emperor laughed and said, “Your Chinese is just like that of [the Mongol] Naγaču!”24 Yi Saek’s subsequent attempts to excuse his verbal fumbling only underscored the existence of barriers to communication. Even though Yi had once served as an official in China and been able to make himself understood in fluent spoken Chinese, that had been three decades ago. More importantly, the Ming emperor’s difficulty with Yi’s speech is possible evidence of broader, regional differences and historical shifts in spoken language. Whereas Yi had launched his official career in the northern Yuan court in Beijing, he was now in the southern early Ming court based in Nanjing.25 In Korea, a long period of political instability culminated in the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1392. Through this transition, language became a point of controversy with the Ming. Ming Taizu’s preexisting reservations regarding Koryŏ, coupled with his wariness of overpowerful generals in his own court, made him cautious toward the new regime, whose leader Yi Sŏnggye 李成桂 (T’aejo 太祖, r. 1392–1398) had come to power through a military coup d’état.26 A series of diplomatic missives from the Chosŏn court from 1394 to 1397 incurred the ire of the Ming emperor for allegedly containing inappropriate language: insulting puns and suggestive innuendos.27 To deflect accusations of intentional lèse-majesté, the Chosŏn court sent several missives that blamed the incompetence of their scribes and scholars. In the voice of the king, these letters excused the alleged offense through claims of ignorance: “[your] servant understands neither the Classics nor the Histories, and those who 24 25 26 27

CWS T’aejo 太祖 9:6b [1396.05.07/2]. Naγaču 納哈出 was a Mongol warlord who had recently surrendered to the Ming. Chŏng Taham 2009, 281–282. CWS T’aejo 2:14b [1392.11.27/1]. For the early Ming purges of military officials, see Dreyer 1982, 141–147. Pak Wŏnho 2002, 26–30.

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composed these writings [i.e., the inadvertently inflammatory letters] are all people from beyond the sea [i.e., not of China]. The sounds of their language are different; their learning is neither refined nor broad. . . . How dare we, on purpose, mock and insult?”28 Alleged ignorance of both classical texts and the Chinese language came to be Chosŏn’s defense. Among the envoys sent by the Chosŏn court to resolve the affair, one, Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409), managed to impress the Ming emperor with his impromptu poetic compositions and, to a limited extent, restored the emperor’s esteem for Korea. Kwŏn returned to Korea with an oral edict 口諭 from the emperor:29 For a small country to serve a large country, everything should be done straight and proper. Where does the sun rise and set? Under heaven there is just one sun, and you can’t hide things from the sun. When those envoys come again from that place of yours, if they understand Chinese, let them come; if they don’t have a clue about Chinese, don’t let them come. That time we were talking about the marriage of my grandkids to the king of Chosŏn’s grandkids, you sent a prime minister who knew Chinese, and I agreed to it right then and there, and let him go home. As for those four scholars who came before, this one named Kwŏn Kŭn seemed all right, so I let him go. Go tell this to him, the Chosŏn king: I won’t let any of the three who just came go free.30 The oral edict, presumably a verbatim repetition of the Ming emperor’s words, incorporated conventions from direct speech, including its colloquialisms and plainness of expression. The issue of language was not simply a matter of written genre or form, since the edict also explicitly demanded that, in the future, only envoys who knew spoken Chinese 漢兒話 should be sent to China. A premium was placed on the ability to not just read and write in classical Chi-

28 29 30

CWS T’aejo 9:9b [1396.06.14/1]; for other, similar examples, see T’aejo 12:12a [1397.12.28/1], 14:12a [1398.06.03/1]. For Kwŏn Kŭn’s poetry exchange with Ming Taizu, see Yangch’onjip, vol. 1, in HMC 7:14c– 18a; Alston 2008. CWS T’aejo 11:4b [1397.03.08/1]: 以小事大事事都要至誠直直正正 日頭那里起那里落 天下只是一箇日頭 慢不得日頭 爾那里使臣再來時 漢兒話省的著他來 一發不省 的不要來 我這裏孫兒 朝鮮國王孫兒做親肯的時節 著他漢兒話省得宰相來 我這 裏説歸他 先來的四箇秀才裏頭權近看的老實 放回去 這話朝鮮國王説與他 那三 箇新來的一箇饒不得.

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nese but also to speak Chinese.31 For the Ming emperor, who insisted on “sincere” behavior and the recognition of the one “sun” in the sky, the issue of language was more than a question of utility and convenience and belonged, rather, in the realm of the moral. If Korea’s place in the civilized order, in both a political and an ideological sense, rested on the ability to communicate effectively with the imperial center, the emperor’s edict directly rejected Korea’s claim of cultural and political legitimacy. For Korea, which had enjoyed the prestige of being a country that, in Song Lian’s words, should not be seen as “foreign” but virtually “Chinese,” the Ming founder’s statement challenged the notion that differences in language could be overlooked in guaranteeing Korea a special place in the imperial order. Partly as a response to the escalation of tensions with the Ming, the Chosŏn court rehabilitated a once-disgraced courtier, Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1341–1399), in 1394.32 In accordance with Ming Taizu’s demand that future Korean envoys speak Chinese, Sŏl led many of the subsequent envoy missions to the Ming from 1396 until his death, and he spoke with the Ming emperor directly, conversing in Chinese.33 Sŏl’s language skills had much to do with his personal background. Not natives of Korea but émigrés from Yuan China, his family had been classified as semuren 色目人 during the Yuan and belonged to an illustrious Uighur lineage, the Gaochang Xie 高昌偰, whose members served as career bureaucrats for the Yuan state.34 A branch of the family eventually settled in Koryŏ and became noted for their fluency in both Mongolian and Chinese.35 Along with Yi Saek, who had died in 1396, they were among the last representatives of a generation of men whose careers had been made in official service both in Korea and at the imperial court.

31

32 33 34

35

For Ming Taizu, the directness of oral speech may have been preferable to literary prose, which he thought had a tendency to obfuscate. See MSL Taizu 246:5b–6a, pp. 3566–3577 [1396.07]; Chan 1997, 2–3, 20–21. Sŏl had been dismissed from office and exiled in 1392 when King T’aejo ascended the throne. CWS T’aejo 1:43a [1392.07.28/3]. CWS T’aejo 11:9b [1397.04.17/1]; Xiao 2007, 729. Xie and Sŏl are the modern Chinese and Korean readings of the character 偰. For the official careers of the Gaochang Xie family, see Brose 2005; 2007, 53–81, 148–157; Xiao 2007, 706–748. As the Mongol Empire crumbled, one branch of the Sŏl/Xie family emigrated to Koryŏ. The Koryŏ ruler granted Sŏl Changsu titles of nobility. His sons began official careers in Koryŏ, taking and passing the civil service examinations. See CWS Chŏngjong 定宗 2:14b [1399.10.19/3]. Notably, Sŏl Changsu’s uncle Xie Si 偰斯 (fl. 1369) was Ming Taizu’s first envoy to Koryŏ. MSL Taizu 37:22a–23b, pp. 749–751 [1368.12 (Hongwu 1.12 renchen)].

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The very same linguistic skills that contributed to Sŏl Changsu’s political rehabilitation provided Sŏl with the opportunity to serve the Chosŏn dynasty as the first director of its Office of Interpreters. Upon his return from exile in 1394, Sŏl presented a plan for establishing examinations for the training of professional interpreters. Besides specific curricula, he also proposed ways to address a problem of general reluctance among potential students, who “rarely come of their own accord.”36 The concern over enrollment suggests that the Chosŏn institution was interested not only in selecting available talent through examination but also in systematically cultivating it. The Chosŏn institution, then, ought to be seen in a different light from its Koryŏ predecessor. Whereas the Koryŏ court sought to place the cultivation of interpreters under its supervision to address problems of reliability and loyalty, the Chosŏn institution faced the challenge of maintaining an increasingly rare skill, an emergent scarcity no doubt exacerbated in part by the general reluctance of court elites to acquire it.37 A skill set related to spoken Chinese was the mastery of “clerical writing” (imun/liwen 吏文), a documentary style that contained technical terminology and nonliterary prose used in the Ming bureaucracy. Master interpreters at the Chosŏn court were charged with deciphering such correspondence from the Ming and training specialists in reading and writing in this documentary style.38 A memorial submitted by State Councilor Yu Sun 柳洵 (1441–1517) described the relationship between the mastery of spoken language and the use of clerical writing in diplomacy: Our country’s service to the Central Court [i.e., the Ming] is not comparable to [how] other foreign countries [serve it]. All our memorials, requests, and correspondences use clerical writing. Yet, when Chinese envoys arrive, if they encounter a civil official and write words from their speech, [our officials] cannot understand the sounds and rhymes and have no way of responding. Confused and staring blankly, they are often laughed at by Chinese envoys.

36

37

38

CWS T’aejo 6:17a [1394.11.19/3]. These efforts included increasing salaries for instructors and the yearly conscription of one “youth, fifteen years or younger, from a good family, who was of a naturally intelligent disposition” from each region. For an overview of the institutional evolution of offices related to interpretation in Korea, see Song Ch’unyong 1998, 113–118. For the establishment of the Koryŏ Office of Interpreters, see KS 106:12a–14a, 76:46b–47a. See n. 75.

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Better communication with the Ming and the avoidance of ridicule were certainly part of the motivation behind the Chosŏn court’s acquisition and maintenance of this knowledge. But more importantly, the ability to operate within the linguistic and cultural sphere of the Ming court was exactly what was supposed to separate Korea from “other foreign countries” and thus made its maintenance absolutely critical. Yu Sun continued: If we send our students to [the Ming] for study and, returning with their understanding of clerical writing and Chinese language, they can be transferred to instruct [others], then those who comprehend Chinese sounds and understand clerical writing will increase in number. The king’s intentions are quite sound. But from the previous dynasty until now, we have not sent students for generations. During the reign of King Sejong, we requested permission, citing precedents from past dynasties, but until the very end, the Central Court would not permit it.39 Embedded in this account is both a sense of a cultural crisis and an epistemic dilemma. Access to the very knowledge that had become integral to the Chosŏn’s sense of self and to the exercise of politics vis-à-vis the empire had become increasingly difficult. Even though the anxiety over knowledge was localized in areas of technical expertise—documentary genres for diplomacy and spoken Chinese—the concern over the loss of knowledge was real. Linguistic anxiety animated broader concerns in other areas of knowledge. The connection between clerical writing and spoken Chinese is reinforced by the persistent concern over the maintenance of technical knowledge from the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty through the sixteenth century. The erudite scholar-official Yu Hŭich’un 柳希春 (1513–1577) exhorted his king in a 1573 royal lecture to pay due attention to the training of technical specialists, including language experts, at the Chosŏn court. Disconcerted by the possi­ bility of “incorrect” interpretations of technical terminology in legal and bureaucratic usage, Yu brought up an example of the kinds of errors that came with the neglect of such knowledge. For decades, Korean legal specialists had been misinterpreting a troublesome term in the Ming legal code, whose 39

CWS Chungjong 中宗 23:34a [1515.11.14/2]. Yu assumed that the Ming refused these proposals because they were keen to preserve their self-image, unwilling to let outsiders witness the empire in decline. The Ming court, however, rejected these earlier entreaties, ironically, by citing Korea’s already notable achievement in Chinese learning. For example, see MSL Xuanzong 宣宗 107:1b–2a, 2386–2387 [1433.11 (Xuande 8.11 yiyou)]; Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 107–108.

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original juridical interpretation was not recovered until a Ming envoy had been consulted on the matter in 1450. This case of misinterpretation illustrates the connection between technical knowledge, linguistic mastery, and the problem of authority. The “proper” meaning of such words was not self-evident, despite shared knowledge of the classical language.40 Despite numerous initiatives meant to encourage the learning of these specialist skills, the number of individuals of able talent fell short of demand. Thus, anxiety over this knowledge may have been compounded by the reliance on only a handful of key figures for its maintenance.41 In the early sixteenth century, the court sometimes debated the selection of qualified interpreters to send with envoys to Beijing; it worried that should too many accompany an important mission, none would remain at court by the king.42 The ideal resolution to the problem would have been to send students to China to study, but such proposals had been rebuffed repeatedly by the Ming. Officials continued to lament in 1539 that “our country’s civilization, rituals, and institutions are no different from those of China; only the sounds of the language are not similar”; and “ever since the beginning of the dynasty, [we have not been able to] send students to study [in China].”43 Such statements echoed expressions of woe spoken by their predecessors over a century before, in 1433: “henceforth our hopes of sending students to China are shattered; it remains that spoken Chinese is of utmost importance and is indeed a cause for worry.”44 In each of these instances, the encouragement of language learning in the Office of Interpreters became the second-best option, an imperfect alternative to directly accessing imperial centers of learning. The maintenance and use of linguistic knowledge presented significant challenges for the founders of the Chosŏn dynasty. Not only instrumental in diplomacy, this knowledge was seen as a prerequisite for achieving cultural parity with the Ming and for the cultivation of Korea’s status as a “civilized” country. Establishing an interpretation agency and attempting to send 40 41 42 43

44

From “Diary of the Classics Lecture” 學經筵日記 癸酉, in Yu Hŭich’un, Miamsŏngsaengjip 眉巖先生集, vol. 16, in HMC 34:464b–464c. See also CWS Sejong 127:26a [1450.01a.09/2]. CWS Chungjong 23:34a [1515.11.14/2]. CWS Chungjong 38:54a [1520.03.18/2]. CWS Chungjong 90:53b [1539.05.03/4]. The sending of students to foreign courts to learn languages was not without precedent. The Koryŏ court had done so for students learning Khitan, Jurchen, and Chinese. See Song Ch’unyong 1998, 102–105. CWS Sejong 62:26a [1433.12.13/1]. For the discussions at the Chosŏn court leading to the decision to request permission to send students to China, see CWS Sejong 51:35b [1431.03.19/3], 61:43b [1433.08a.21/3], 61:48b [1433.08a.28/3], 61:49a [1433.08a.29/1]. For the memorial sent to the Ming on the matter, see 61:51b [1433.09.03/1].

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scholars to study in the Ming capital were both court efforts to secure expertise in an essential area of knowledge. As a strategy, the training of professional interpreters in Korea was not understood as a final solution. It was instead a necessary contingency when the latter, more preferable option was no longer possible. The Chosŏn’s efforts, however, went beyond diplomatic entreaties and institutional reform. To address these problems of language, the court took it upon itself to systematize and codify linguistic knowledge. Codification of Language: Interpreters, Language Manuals, and the Korean Alphabet The publication and promulgation of linguistic knowledge in the early Chosŏn court should be understood in this broader context of cultural anxiety and as a gradual process of institutionalization. Early Chosŏn rulers imported and implemented the use of Chinese phonological texts such as the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Reign 洪武正韻 not simply to adopt intellectual and institutional developments in the Ming court but to acquire and maintain linguistic knowledge.45 Also, the court’s efforts at training better interpreters led to the compilation of a series of important language manuals.46 King Sejong himself took a great personal interest in learning to speak Chinese and had regular tutorial sessions with officials who had knowledge of the language. The culmination of these efforts was the promulgation in 1446 of the Correct Sounds to Teach the People 訓民正音: the Korean alphabet.47 This project was not just a codification of Korean phonology into a new, written form. One of the greatest motivations for Sejong’s invention was to develop a reliable and accurate way to note the pronunciation of Chinese characters and a mechanism for the universal representation of sounds, from human languages to even the “sounds of the wind, the cries of herons, the 45 46 47

CWS Sejo 3:33b [1456.04.09/2]. For the importance and application of the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Reign, see Chŏng Taham 2009, 288–291 For a thorough tabulation of language manuals used during the Chosŏn period, see Song Kijung 2001, 51–180. The argument made in this section echoes the conceptual premise of Chŏng Taham’s work, which also links the invention of the Korean alphabet to the Chosŏn’s relations with Ming China. Chŏng (2009, 289–301) understands King Sejong’s linguistic project to be an act of cultural appropriation from the Ming that simultaneously asserted Chosŏn’s autonomy as a civilized state. For an overview of the invention of the Korean alphabet, see Ledyard 1966, esp. 81–84, for King Sejong’s relationship with interpreters and his interest in learning spoken Chinese.

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crowing of cocks, and the barking of dogs.”48 With “twenty-eight characters that can be used in unison without exhaustion, simple yet keen, elegant and lucid,” the Correct Sounds was developed to be a codified technological system that was meant to be transmittable, easily learned, and universally applicable.49 Sejong’s script was also a legacy of Korea’s earlier engagement with the world of the Mongol Empire and its technologies of knowledge. Elements of the new Korean script not only drew from Chinese rhyme tables, dictionaries, and phonological scholarship but also demonstrated awareness of alphabetic scripts used in the Mongol Empire, such as the Mongol-Uighur script, ’Phags-pa, and the Tibetan script.50 The new alphabet, able to transcribe the sounds of Chinese characters, found ready use in manuals of Chinese phonology, systematizing what had once been only tacit knowledge of spoken language into a written model.51 The alphabet could thus be applied to Chinese as it was spoken in China. One text that did so, a manual titled the Compass for Interpretation 譯學指南, is no longer extant, but its preface, written in 1479, remains. The author of the preface, Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正 (1420–1488), wrote that Korea’s “ritual and music, writing and documents, all approximate those of China,” but he found “lamentable” that, because between China and Korea “the winds and material force are not the same, the languages are different as well.” Crediting the establishment of the Office of Diplomatic Correspondence and the Office of Interpreters for mitigating the problem through the “study of the sounds of China,” he praised the Compass, a new compilation, as an improvement over existing textbooks. Describing it as a glossary in which “words were divided according to [their] category,” he attributed its successful completion to the collaboration of  48 49

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The codification of pronunciation was facilitated by the promulgation of the Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Kingdom東國正韻 in 1447. See CWS Sejong 117:22a [1447.09.29/2]. This is based on the preface to the Correct Sounds to Teach the People. See CWS Sejong 113:36b [1446.09.29/2]. The alphabet was eventually expanded to include letters that represented phonemes that existed only in spoken Chinese, not Korean. See Ledyard 1997, 45–46. Gari Ledyard (1997, 31–87) has proposed that the ’Phags-pa script implemented by Qubilai Khan as a universal phonetic inscriptional system was an inspiration for the Korean script’s base letter forms for the consonants. Although Song Kijung (1997, 218–220) has argued that it is unlikely the Korean alphabet was directly modeled after the ’Phags-pa alphabet, he still situates the alphabet within a broader tradition of linguistic innovation through the invention of scripts in northeast Asia. For example, see the preface to the Vernacular Manual to the Correct Rhymes of the Hong­wu Reign 洪武正韻譯訓, in Sin Sukchu, Pohanjaejip 保閑齋集, vol. 15, in HMC 10:126a–127b.

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several official interpreters and court officials, who “translated into the vernacular script of this country” the “words for the names of things in China.” Besides describing its efficacy as a tool for interpreters in conducting diplomacy with China, he also praised the technical innovations that the new alphabet made possible: His Majesty, King Sejong, whose divine inspiration and brilliant wisdom exceeded that of a hundred kings, had first created the vernacular script. In translating the language of China, with its thousand transformations and myriad combinations, it suffers no obstruction. For this reason, it was possible for the Compass for Interpretation to be created. Indeed! What former sages have expounded before, later sages have continued since. He established [the vernacular alphabet] in order to be reverent to the Central State and attentive to the duty of rule, not simply for use only in words and writing. For these reasons, this [vernacular alphabet] has been sought, and the rules regarding what are called the clarity and turbidity of the seven sounds and four tones in the rhyme books can be reached in their variety and depth. And all the sounds in the world and in the myriad countries can also be approximated and then understood. How marvelous indeed!52 That this signature royal achievement is couched within an idiom of sage rulership should not detract from the literal appreciation of technical innovation. Claiming the alphabet’s universal applicability and its potential to reproduce “all the sounds of the world,” the preface underscored the value of this new technical knowledge for bridging linguistic differences, not just with the Ming but with all “the myriad countries.” Elsewhere in the preface, Sŏ contrasted the Compass for Interpretation’s innovative use of the Korean script in representing spoken Chinese with two other textbooks, the Nogŏltae 老乞大 and Interpreter Pak 朴通事.53 While the original versions of these texts were written entirely in Chinese characters, without additional explication or annotations, subsequent editions incorpo-

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“Preface to the Compass for Interpretation” 譯語指南序, in Sŏ Kŏjŏng, Sagajip 四佳集, vol. 4, in HMC 11:250b–250d. The abundant references to the banalities of daily life in these texts evoke a world quite different from the Chosŏn-Ming and more characteristic of the Koryŏ-Yuan, when borders were more porous and nonofficial travel more frequent. For an English translation of Interpreter Pak, see Dyer 2006 (129–147 for a summary of its contents).

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rated both phonological glosses and explanations in the Korean alphabet.54 The early “vernacular” translations are attributed to an interpreter named Ch’oe Sejin 崔世珍 (?–1542), who had, on several occasions, been part of the Korean delegation to Ming China.55 Charged with training new interpreters, Ch’oe also compiled a dictionary called the Comprehensive Explanation of the Four Tones 四聲通解, among other works.56 Later interpreter manuals, such as the 1677 print edition Vernacular Explication of “Interpreter Pak” 朴通事諺 解, followed Ch’oe’s technique, using the “vernacular” Korean alphabet to note pronunciation of Chinese characters and explain their meanings. This technique of “vernacular explication” 諺解 was used, not just for language textbooks, but also for other works, most notably Buddhist sutras and Confucian classics.57 The examinations for selecting Chinese language interpreters required mastery of both Interpreter Pak and the Nogŏltae, which likely contributed to their continual institutional use.58 Though the specific curricula of these examinations could vary, they generally also tested candidates in their knowledge of 54

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While editions of these texts from the fifteenth century and earlier are written entirely in Chinese characters, a mid-sixteenth-century edition in the Korean alphabet does exist as well. Annotated ŏnhae 諺解 editions date from at least 1670. For Interpreter Pak, the earliest known text dates from 1423, a translated version is from the mid-sixteenth century, and the annotated vernacular edition is from 1677. See Song Kijung 2001, 60–71. The discovery of a fourteenth-century version of the Nogŏltae (along with its particular content matter, early recorded dates of use, and archaic language) firmly places it as a Koryŏ-Yuan period text. See Chŏng Kwang, Nam, and Yang 1999. This assertion is also reinforced by Chosŏn period records. For example, efforts to revise these texts cited the obsolescence of the “Yuan period language” contained in them. CWS Sŏngjong 122:7a [1480.10.19/3]. For reprints of extant editions, see Nogŏltae; Nogŏltae Ŏnhae (14th–17th cents.) 2003; Pak T’ongsa ŏnhae 2004. Song Kijung 2001, 29. Song Kijung 2001, 56; CWS Yŏngsangun 燕山君 49:25a [1503.05.08/2]. The first pages of the Comprehensive Explanation of the Four Tones contain consonant charts that make use of modified letter forms to represent Chinese phonemes that did not exist in Korean, illustrating how the Korean alphabet had been adapted for Chinese phonology. Ch’oe Sejin, Sasŏng t’onghae 四聲通解, 1–5. What is notable about the language textbooks given above is the use of a dual gloss: two sets of alphabetic transcriptions to notate the reading of each Chinese character. Song Kijung (2001, 56) identifies the two readings as the “correct” sounds 正音 and the “vulgar” sounds 俗音, where the latter reflected contemporary Mandarin readings. For an example, see Pak T’ongsa ŏnhae 2004, 66. The textbook Nogŏltae would not just be used for Chinese instruction, but its content would be translated into Mongolian, Japanese, and Manchu as well and would serve as a basis for training in those languages. See Song Kijung 2001, 69, 87, 135.

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Confucian classics such as the Analects, Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean.59 Mastery of spoken Chinese thus had to be accompanied by at least a rudimentary familiarity with core canon texts as well. Given that interpreters had to mediate between Ming and Chosŏn envoys, generally individuals steeped in Confucian learning, such a requirement was consistent with the actual role that interpreters played, relaying in speech the formalized and ritualized language that characterized such exchanges. It was the case, however, that Interpreter Pak and the Nogŏltae used spoken Chinese expressions that dated from the Yuan dynasty. By the mid-sixteenth century, some of their expressions and grammatical forms were already seen to be obsolete.60 Although these texts were held to be authoritative through the nineteenth century, their contents had to be repeatedly revised throughout the duration of their use. Efforts to update linguistic knowledge motivated new publications, such as one annotated text based on the libretto of a contemporary Chinese didactic drama piece. The compilers of this text recognized not only the divergence of contemporary Chinese phonology from classical norms but also how even nonliterary language changed over time: In the Comprehensive Explanation, the pronunciation of the characters often followed what was “vulgar,” and now the speech common in China has changed greatly from the “vulgar” pronunciation of the Comprehensive Explanation. This is because of the gradual corruption of the “correct sounds.” We dare not follow it.61 Nevertheless, these later editions retained the earlier practice of dual glossing. By providing classical readings alongside contemporary Chinese pronunciation, these texts not only served as a repertoire of linguistic models for the training of interpreters but also preserved the authority of classical phonology. The codification and standardization of linguistic knowledge shifted the burden of preservation to the printed text; but for all its careful annotation and explication, it still struggled with the problem of linguistic change.62 One should be reminded, however, that for interpreters who had to cross gulfs of linguistic difference, effective mediation meant more than 59 60 61 62

T’ongmunʼgwan chi 2006, 53–60; Yang 2007. See n. 54. Oryun chŏnbi ŏnhae (1721) 2005, 10. The linguistic relationships between classical phonology, contemporary Chinese speech, and a variety of Korean usages were complex. See Dormels 1999 for a thorough examination of these issues.

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phonological fidelity. The task of the interpreter extended beyond language in the narrow sense. It involved communicating on other levels too—the social and the cultural—requiring synaptic crossings over ascriptive social boundaries and the political borders of king and country. The Silent Interpreter: Mediating Language in Chosŏn-Ming Diplomacy The early Chosŏn court kept the existence of the Korean alphabet a secret from Ming officials.63 The effacement in diplomacy of a key mechanism for crossing linguistic boundaries and a symbol of their existence discloses a tension embedded in the process of translation: the demands of commensurability required the means of traduction to be hidden. The act of interpretation, though important as a way of bridging linguistic distance, also marked the existence of difference. It too became subject to marginalization, both as an area of knowledge and as a historical phenomenon, during the early Chosŏn period. While several notable civil officials, such as Sin Sukchu 申叔舟 (1417–1475), participated in King Sejong’s linguistic projects and played the role of interpreter on various occasions, by the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, interpretation became a marginalized, specialist area of knowledge.64 Its increasing marginality in the hierarchy of knowledge went hand in hand with the cursory way in which interpreters appear in the writings of early Chosŏn court officials.65 Though elite writing seldom describes the discrimination of interpreters explicitly, we may infer the prevalence of such attitudes from descriptions of personal virtue and social propriety. For example, the posthumous biography of the scholar-official Yi Sŏkhyŏng 李石亨 (1415–1477) illustrates the inferior position of linguistic knowledge vis-à-vis classical learning:

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One Chosŏn interpreter was almost punished after being accused of “showing writing in the vernacular” to a Ming envoy. See “Diary of the Royal Lecture,” in Yu Hŭich’un, Miamsŏnsaengjip, vol. 18, in HMC 34:504b. It should be noted that during the fifteenth century, notable scholars, especially those connected with the invention of the Korean alphabet, such as Sin Sukchu, were not interpreters per se and served as court officials. An (2001) demonstrates that during the early Chosŏn dynasty, the roles of “civil officials” 文臣 and specialist officials could overlap significantly. An important exception is the P’aegwan chapki 稗官雜記, a miscellany written by an interpreter, Ŏ Sukkwŏn, containing numerous anecdotes about Chosŏn court life, including the activities of interpreters. This work is partially translated in Ŏ and Lee 1989.

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At the age of fourteen, he entered school in the Eastern Academy. Because he was young and bright, he was culled to be an apprentice of clerical writing. His Lordship [Yi] was angry and said, “How can a true man ape the actions of the ‘tongue people’ 舌人?” and he left [the school] flinging his sleeves. Because he attained the highest rank [in the preliminary civil service examinations], he enrolled in the National University.66 This account suggests the existence of two distinct but related phenomena. While talented individuals were encouraged to pursue career paths related to language, young men of aristocratic pedigree like Yi found the practice of clerical writing to be below their station. For him, the specialist skills involved in managing bureaucratic correspondence with the Ming was the purview of ignoble “tongue people.”67 Yi’s haughtiness was taken to be cause for praise, and his ardent refusal only illustrated his commitment to greater pursuits. As tongue people, specializing in spoken language and clerical writing, interpreters were also seen to lack moral and literary cultivation. The Chosŏn court official Kang Hŭimaeng 姜希孟 (1424–1483), in a preface to several poems of parting, encouraged a promising young scholar to learn as much as possible when he accompanied his uncle, an official envoy, to Beijing. Describing the youth as a “gentleman who loved antiquity, widely learned and elegant,” Kang was sure that he would appreciate the historical sites and cultural significance of the Ming capital. In the same document, Kang denigrated the court interpreters: In this world there are “tongue-people” who in the morning are in Hanyang [the Chosŏn capital] and at night are in Yanjing [Beijing] and who die old as seasoned travelers. But when it comes to understanding the sights of the Greater Country [the Ming Empire], they do not. When it comes to taking up the transformative influence of civilization, they do not.

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“Chŏhŏnjip haengjang” 樗軒集行狀, in Yi Sŏkhyŏng, Chŏhŏnjip 樗軒集, in HMC 9:440c. The pejorative implications of this term for interpreters, “tongue person” (sŏrin), is also evident in the context of its early usage in the Koryŏ History. See KS 76:46b–47a, 106:12a– 14a.

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The scholar’s refined knowledge of history and his cultivation in classical learning distinguished him from the interpreter, despite the latter’s more regular and arguably more direct access to “China.”68 Kang Hŭimaeng’s low esteem for interpreters evidently did not extend to all those who served in that capacity. He held the famous interpreter Ch’oe Sejin, the very same man who compiled several language manuals that made use of King Sejong’s new Korean alphabet, in particularly high regard.69 The rest of Chosŏn officialdom was not necessarily so generous. Ch’oe, himself a son of an interpreter, was only able to take the highest munkwa 文科 civil service examinations with special royal permission. As an individual who crossed ascriptive social boundaries, his rare case well illustrates the limitations to personal achievement within early Chosŏn’s social system. Ch’oe was impeached numerous times throughout his career. Called “immoral and base” and “unfit for high office,” he was censured for overstepping sumptuary regulations, participating in commerce, and violating ritual norms.70 A damning assessment of Ch’oe from the Veritable Records described him as someone who “domineered with his high position.” With a “ravenous and base nature,” his greed was revealed when “unscrupulous men competed with one another to pay visits to him,” and “those who traveled from China would bring all the rarities and treasures they acquired to his home.”71 How Ch’oe was described fits squarely within the conventions that govern the biographical accounts in the Koryŏ History, which tells how upstart individuals, to enrich themselves, made use of their language skills to usurp authority reserved for the civil bureaucracy.72 These 68 69 70

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From Kang Hŭimaeng, Sasukjaejip 私淑齋集, vol. 8, in HMC 12:118a: 世有舌人。朝漢都 而暮燕京。卒老于行。至訊上國之光則未也。訪文明之化則未也。 Kang Hŭimaeng, Sasukjaejip, vol. 8, in HMC 12:058a–58d. The Censorate impeached Ch’oe Sejin in 1509 for “acquiring a concubine during mourning.” His “status, base and ignoble,” and his frequent engagement with commerce made him “without a doubt unfit for duty as a teacher and exemplar.” These accusations targeted Ch’oe Sejin’s failure to adhere to the customary regulations for yangban elites during this time. His participation in commerce and his failure to observe mourning put his eligibility for official status at stake. That reproof would not be the last. The CWS records that on the seventh day of the twelfth month of 1517, “the Censorate petitioned [again] about the earlier matter, stating that Ch’oe Sejin is immoral and base and is not fit for high office.” See CWS Chungjong 7:42b [1509.01.04/2], 31:03a [1517.12.07/1], 39:19b [1520.04.18/2], 21a [1520.04.19/4], 23a [1520.04.21/2], 24b [1520.04.23/1], 25a [1520.04.24/3]. CWS Chungjong 31:3a [1517.12.07/1]. Cho I 趙彝, for example, was a former monk who, after becoming an interpreter, attempted to profiteer illicitly from the tribute horse trade. His biography is included among the “betrayers” 叛逆 in KS 130:27a–30a. Other interpreters from this period appear in sections reserved for “evil officials” 奸臣 and “panderers” 嬖幸. For more information

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criticisms of Ch’oe seem to accord with general elite attitudes toward interpreters in early sixteenth-century Chosŏn. In a funerary inscription praising a local official of a district frequented by envoy missions to the Ming for his uprightness and incorruptibility, we find his refusal to entertain “the tongue-people,” who often attempted to visit him bearing gifts, listed as evidence of his rectitude.73 Though interpreters were disparaged, the service of talented interpreters was still greatly valued by the Chosŏn monarchy. King Chungjong 中宗 (r. 1506–1544), for example, maintained his confidence in Ch’oe despite requests for his dismissal.74 Ch’oe’s ability to understand sensitive documents from the Ming that contained colloquial diction and nonliterary usage probably also reinforced Chungjong’s faith in him.75 Well respected by some and reviled by others, this controversial figure testifies to the complex ways in which language had become politicized in Chosŏn Korea’s social space.76 Given the importance of linguistic knowledge for diplomacy, the low social esteem accorded to individuals who possessed it appears counterintuitive. Certainly, the debasement of linguistic skill in Chosŏn times may be attributed to existing social prejudices. Since its inauguration, it was difficult for the Office of Interpreters to attract qualified students, and highborn sons of elite families refused to participate.77 Such perceptions may have been socially self-fulfilling: the reluctance of the aristocracy to participate in these careers reinforced their marginality. On further examination, however, the construction of social distance may in fact reveal intricate ties between language and power. Inverting the customary denigration of interpreters and linguistic

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on the social backgrounds of these interpreters, see Song Ch’unyong 1998, 109–110, 171–172, 214–215. Ki Taesŭng, Kobongjip 高峯集, vol. 3, in HMC 40:111a–111b. As these examples illustrate, interpreters, through their connection to the tribute system, could profit immensely from trade. See also Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 141. CWS Chungjong 38:55b [1520.03.20/1]. Ch’oe, for example, deftly translated a sensitive Ming missive in clerical writing (imun) that announced the imminent arrival of the imperial guard sent to arrest two Ming envoys who had lingered too long in Chosŏn Korea. See CWS Chungjong 42:36a [1521.07.06/1]. Attention to Ch’oe should not detract from the existence of other capable interpreters. See Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 38, 158–159. The lack of a scholarly consensus on Ch’oe’s social status highlights this point. For two views of the relationship between Ch’oe’s social background and his bureaucratic employment, see Kim 1994, 73–85; and An 2001. Secondary sons (i.e., offspring of elite men and commoner women), who were barred from other avenues of political access, did often take up specialist positions. Ŏ Sukkwŏn, a secondary son, is a case in point.

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knowledge, the sixteenth-century Chosŏn interpreter Ŏ Sukkwŏn 魚叔權 wrote in his P’aegwan chapki on the merits of learning spoken Chinese and its importance to diplomacy.78 He also wrote dismissively of venerable court officials who exposed their ignorance of spoken Chinese in interactions with Ming envoys by committing gaffes in diplomatic encounters or botching the prosody of poetic compositions.79 The mastery of both literary Chinese and spoken Chinese was key to Chosŏn’s political relationship with the Ming, and interpreters like Ch’oe Sejin and Ŏ Sukkwŏn had in fact mastered both categories of knowledge, with spoken Chinese providing a separate point of access to canonical knowledge. The very emphasis on social distance between aristocratic court officials and lower-born interpreters who had mastered an ostensibly inferior but related set of skills masked the actual proximity of their respective knowledge areas.80 The Chosŏn court probably recognized both the potential of linguistic knowledge for social mobility and its capacity to usurp political access, and sought to control it. David Laitin’s work on African linguistic repertoires makes use of the concept of “elite closure,” which describes a situation in which exclusive access to language functioned as a barrier to social mobility.81 Applying this concept of elite closure to the politics of language in early Chosŏn, the social debasement of linguistic knowledge in relation to the mastery of classical Chinese becomes understandable. The existence of professional interpreters, especially those who also displayed literary skills or classical knowledge, could have threatened the existing social order. Without the enforcement of social boundaries in the court, the monopoly over classical learning and literary erudition exercised by the elite and by the court, and even political access to Ming China, could be usurped and the avenues of access that these skills provided easily acquired by social inferiors who secured knowledge of the spoken language. Interpreters were discriminated against not only by their colleagues at the Chosŏn court but also by Ming envoys.82 While Ming envoys and their Chosŏn counterparts exchanged poems of friendship that fostered a sense of social 78 79 80

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Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 38, 92. Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 152–153, 213–214. Ŏ Sukkwŏn, for example, was a secondary son of an aristocrat. For discrimination against secondary sons, institutional origins, and relevance to Korea’s social system, see Ŏ and Lee (17th cent.) 1989, 33; Deuchler 1988, 121–142. Laitin 1992, 57–60. The mitigation of linguistic difference may have motivated the continued use of Koreanborn eunuchs by the Ming through the early sixteenth century. Ming officials also made it a point to distinguish themselves from them. For example, the 1488 envoy, the imperial

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parity, the poetry that the Ming envoys wrote for the Korean interpreters exemplified the social distance between them. An excerpt from one such poem reads as follows: “who says that speech and language are base things, / not as deep as the intentions of a person’s heart? / We all depended on your Lordship’s three-inch tongue / to understand one another’s heart.”83 Though laudatory, the poem’s praise rests upon assumptions of low social esteem accorded to the masters of spoken language. The tongue was valuable only insofar as it served as a tool for building intellectual and emotional rapport. The construction of social distance between the interpreters and the official envoys of the Chosŏn and Ming courts maintained a parallel hierarchy of knowledge between classical learning and technical expertise. Interpreters were left on the margins of a diplomacy that emphasized literary commensurability and elevated the written over the spoken, the literary over the technical. At times, even the aptitude of interpreters was scrutinized and doubted. In describing their preference for written communication over oral transmission, diplomats cited the “unreliability” of these interpreters. The 1460 emissary Zhang Ning 張寧 (1426–1496) did exactly that when he called for the use of brush and paper and dismissed the Korean interpreters, preferring to engage in written conversation with the Korean king.84 After the successful conclusion of his mission, Zhang returned with an anthology that collected the poetry he wrote with his Chosŏn hosts.85 In the end, it was the literary production—the poems written in classical Chinese—that was the monumental accomplishment of Zhang Ning’s embassy. Zhang Ning was not alone. When the 1537 Ming envoy Gong Yongqing 龔用 卿 (1500–1563) found himself at odds on many issues with Chosŏn’s ritual officials, he, “concerned that the interpreters did not transmit words honestly,” chose to rely on written communication instead.86 Gong also left extensive records of his mission to Korea and saw his own writing as helpful to future Ming emissaries. Exhorting his would-be successors, Gong wrote in the preface to his Record of an Embassy to Chosŏn 使朝鮮錄 that “the civilized and barbar-

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tutor Dong Yue 董越 (1430–1502), when displeased by some ceremonial details, complained to his hosts, “Do you think we are just Korean eunuchs?” (De Heer 1993, 250–51). Gong Yongqing, Shi Chaoxian lu 使朝鮮錄, 2:14a. Zhang Ning, Feng shi lu 奉使錄, 1:1–2. Written conversations such as these, commonly known as p’iltam 筆談 (lit., “brush talk”), figure more prominently in later diplomatic exchanges, especially in situations where interpreters were not present. The compilation is the Hwanghwajip 皇華集, a title it shared with a series of Ming envoy poetry compilations sponsored by the Chosŏn court from 1450 to 1633. See De Heer 1993, 247–50. For an extensive study of these compilations, see Du 2010. Pak Wŏnho 2005, 61–77.

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ian are one, and although Chosŏn is in the distant marches, it has long upheld ritual and respected the distinction between high and low. And so, one [should] treat them not as ‘barbarian’ but as Chinese.”87 Problems of spoken language remained secondary to the concerns of ritual propriety, and spoken language appeared only tangential to the problem of cultural commensurability. In both the Zhang Ning and Gong Yongqing cases, spoken language had failed to achieve its end; the burden of discourse and negotiation fell on the written word. Writing 文, emblematic of Korea’s status as a civilized country, had triumphed over the spoken, which was unreliable and uncertain. In a sense, the construction of social distance between literati envoys and interpreters was a by-product of a desire to maintain social parity between Chosŏn officials and Ming ambassadors. Despite their shared knowledge of literary Chinese and commonalities in their educational and social backgrounds, the distance created by spoken language was left to be bridged by a Korean interpreter. This mechanism of differentiation produced a paradox of historical representation in which the interpreters, though ubiquitous in diplomatic encounters and vital to effective communication, appear only tangentially in historical sources such as envoy travel writing or are mentioned only briefly as messengers and errand runners. Despite the privileged status of the written language in this discourse, spoken language and its interpreters bore the brunt of facilitating daily interactions between the Ming ambassador and his counterparts. In his journal, Yu Hŭich’un wrote of his encounter with a Ming envoy: The [Ming] assistant emissary asked the interpreter, “Your state is a country of manifest civility. Do the learned among you include those who study things like the Cheng and Zhu schools?” [The interpreter?] replied, “Yes.” He then asked, “What are their names?” He replied, “In the past there were Chŏng Mongju and Kwŏn Kŭn. In latter times there were Cho Kwangjo and Yi Ŏnjŏk and others. As for the rest, there are many others, but I cannot remember all of their names.” The assistant emissary asked, “Then, there must be written works or literary collections that have been transmitted to the world.” [He] replied, “Although there are, because their descendants may not have been worthy or because they cannot transmit or hold on [to these works] there are also those that are lost. Of those that still survive, complete editions are few.” 87

Gong Yongqing, Shi Chaoxian lu, 1:4a–4b.

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The assistant emissary laughed and said, “All is the same in this world. It is like this in China as well. Some may sell the myriad volumes collected by their family, and even the writings of their ancestors get discarded. Even if you do not have a complete edition, if I can see a few pieces, that would suffice. Please tell this to the welcoming emissary.” I told the interpreter to answer this way: “Our country receives the civilizing transformations of the Central State, and generation after generation there are those who put their efforts in study. But we do not know whether what they learned is refined or flawed. Nevertheless, there often are written works. If you want to take a look, we will seek them out and present them to you.” The assistant emissary then answered, “With so many pieces of writing, there must be something worth reading. I wanted to know the splendor of human talent and the attainment of learning, and now that I have received your reply, I am greatly thankful. I just want to take one look.”88 The above oral exchange could not have been accomplished without the intervention of an interpreter. Presented as a conversation between Yu and the Ming emissary, the interpreter seems to serve no other purpose than to transmit faithfully the intention of the two courtiers. The illusion of seamlessness may have been a function of linguistic fidelity; but the nuances of presentation and affect––flattery, humility, and appreciation––appear on the page as transparent sentiments. The curious but courteous guest and the humble, hospitable host emerge not through direct conversation but via the mediating, but also conspicuously silent, voice of their actual interlocutor, the nameless interpreter. We cannot know, at least in this case, how much the interpreter’s mediation in fact shaped the emotive contours and ritualized affects that characterize this exchange. The existence of a linguistic gulf may very well have provided an opportunity to reassert and reinvent diplomatic convention: its discourse and politesse were constructed through the mediating potential of language in translation. The above conversation also illustrates the opportunity for self-representation that linguistic distance provided. By mediating exchanges, the process of interpretation staved off the pressures of immediacy, allowing both parties time and space to develop a carefully calculated response. In other words, the interpreter’s role was not reducible to the direct conversion of spoken words from one language to the other. As constant companions to Ming envoys dur88

Yu Hŭich’un, Miamsŏnsaengjip, vol. 6, in HMC 34:250c–250d (my italics).

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ing their sojourn in Korea, the interpreters should be understood not simply as passive conduits of information but as key actors in their own right: An envoy who was a famous man from Jiangnan, proud of his own literary accomplishments, came from China. He said that in the Eastern Country [i.e., Korea], there were none who could compare with him. When he reached Yangch’aek Post, he was eating gingko nuts and wrote the first line of a couplet, “inside the shell of the silver apricot [gingko] is hidden a green jade” 銀杏甲中藏碧玉, and asked the interpreter P’yo Ch’ŏngno 表廷老 to ask the welcoming emissary to come over and match the verse. A situation in which an interpreter effected social interaction between his social superiors was not itself remarkable. The record, however, continues: [But instead,] he [P’yo] went over and wrote the following: “under the skin of a stone durian [i.e., pomegranate] are spotted cinnabar pebbles” 石榴皮下點朱砂. The Chinese envoy was greatly astonished and praised it immensely, saying, “If even the interpreters are [as talented as] such, I must not look down on the welcoming emissaries!”89 While literary exchange remained the purview of the Ming envoy and high officials in the Chosŏn court, the very functioning of their literary sociability required the mediation of these interpreters. P’yo had been called over by the Chinese emissary to communicate to his Korean counterparts. Though the Ming envoy had rather low expectations of Korean literary accomplishment, in this and similar narratives the Ming envoy recants his original calumny once his hosts demonstrate their abilities. In such situations, literary virtuosity from an erudite interpreter could go far in impressing his Chinese guest through the demonstration of not only his own talent but also the overall refinement of the country he represented. In the context of diplomacy, the insistence on constant decorum required attention to ritual detail by all participants, including the interpreters, who alone were charged with representing Chosŏn through speech. In his record of a conversation with King Chungjong, the envoy Gong Yongqing reveals how an interpreter’s minute interactions with a Ming envoy played a role in maintaining Chosŏn’s image as a “civilized” country: 89

T’ongmun’gwan chi 2006, 7:12b–13a. This compilation contains numerous similar anecdotes.

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During the royal banquet at the Hall of Great Peace, the king commanded the interpreter to say to us, “This small country is at the edge of the sea. But, today, now that we have met you two Celestial Envoys [Gong Yongqing and his deputy], our joy and exuberance are overwhelming. It is as the Classic of Poetry says, ‘Now that I have met the noble man, my heart is indeed glad’ 既見君子 我心則喜.” We [Gong and his assistant] answered back, “We live in China, upholding the upright command of the Son of Heaven, and have brought his edicts to your country. And we also have known that your country has been able to observe ritual and righteousness. We have also heard that the king lives frugally, and today we have seen these [things]. They are all truly not contrary to what we have heard.” The king said again, “[You,] the two Celestial Envoys, are attendants and important officials of the Son of Heaven. If it had not been for this great cause for celebration [i.e., the emperor had just appointed a crown prince], how else could I have seen your faces?”90 The intertwining of politesse and elegant language produced an effect of formalism, a conversation predetermined in semantic content, rhetorical fashioning, and gesture. The language drew upon classical allusions and reiterated the tropes conventional in envoy poetry of this time. Because Gong’s record is entirely in classical Chinese, we cannot be certain whether the words recorded were verbatim or a “literary summary” of actual speech. Though citing the Classic of Poetry could probably be achieved by any classically educated Korean at the time, the interpreter had to do so while rendering the language in a way immediately comprehensible to the Ming envoy. In this way, the ritual function of the interpreter was as much the performance of cultural literacy as the transmission of the king’s sentiment. In turn, the ritual moment thus created from the utterance of these words concealed linguistic difference. A mediated exchange was performed as the expression of authentic sentiment and, through Gong’s intervention as a writer documenting the affair, was inscribed in text as an idealized moment. In addition, the very construction of this ritual moment celebrated in Gong’s envoy account depended not only on the careful use of language but also on the Chosŏn state’s orchestration of numerous personnel and the employment of its institutional knowledge. All matters of the Ming envoy’s reception had been prepared well in advance of his arrival, including the actual words to be spoken on such occasions.91 90 91

Gong Yongqing, Shi Chaoxian lu, 1:39a–39b. A memorial describing this process is preserved in O Kŏn, Tŏkkyesŏnsaeng munjip 德溪 先生文集, vol. 4, in HMC 38:126d–127a.

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Chosŏn’s assiduous representation of itself as a civilized state went hand in hand with exaltations of the Ming’s civilizing project. Likewise, Gong’s praises of Chosŏn’s cultural achievements also served as encomia of the Ming: “it is because the teachings of the imperial Ming reach far that the cartwheel tracks and writing are unified with the mountains and rivers.” These two rhetorical demands created a context in which it was to the advantage of both the Ming envoy and his Chosŏn hosts to produce a literary legacy of mutual commendation. Like those of his predecessors, Gong’s poems in praise of his Chosŏn hosts emphasized commonality in language and culture. Whatever differences there were between the Ming and the Chosŏn were resolved through shared cultural institutions. And so, Gong was “ever happy that literature and culture are resplendent in the Eastern Vassal [i.e., Korea], [where] all those who wear caps and gowns are men who read books.” Through these achievements, the classical past was revived, and the spatial distance of Chosŏn Korea from ancient China became inconsequential through temporal conflation. Gong asked, “Who says that this small place is far and obscure? I have already seen that their robes and caps follow ancient customs.” And through the mastery of not just knowledge but the performance of culture, Korea became China’s equal: “The rivers and streams [of Korea] do not fall short of China’s greatness; its people have always been cultivated in air and bearing.” In transforming Korea into a recipient of Ming “civilization” and an exemplar of classical ideals, even the embodiment of linguistic difference—interpreters, erstwhile inconvenient barriers to the communication of ritual order––was transformed into an emblem of commensurability (“Their interpreters are all selected from among the students and scholars”), buttressing Ming claims to universal civilization and moral empire.92 In his poetry, Gong asserted cultural commensurability over linguistic difference, largely ignoring the problems of spoken language. Both audience and participant in this ritual performance, the Ming envoy refracted experience into a model of ritual through a written account that eschewed the nitty-gritty, the mishaps, and the contentions in favor of an idealized representation. As a sign of incommensurability, linguistic difference became merely a slight inconvenience to the satisfactory communication of broader political concerns. It was, however, the act of interpretation that rendered the seam of linguistic distinction invisible. In this ritual production, the discursive marginality of interpretation belied its very centrality.

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Zhang Ning, Feng shi lu, 1:45a, 45b, 52b, 53a.

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Conclusion and Postscript In positing an alternative narrative in which to situate the invention of the Korean alphabet, I have taken the opportunity to discuss the politics of language in early Chosŏn Korea. The Chosŏn court’s linguistic projects––institutional efforts at training interpreters, the publication of language manuals, and even the invention of the “vernacular” Korean alphabet––were at least partly in reaction to the sense of institutional cleavage in early Chosŏn perceptions of its relationship with the Ming. Even as professional interpreters became indispensable to Korean diplomacy with the Ming, they remained marginal figures, both as social actors and as historical figures. On the one hand, facilitating social interactions with Ming envoys and, on the other, subject to exclusion and social discrimination, interpreters in the early Chosŏn straddled several social spaces. The operating logics of each of these spaces did not cohere but rather undergirded a set of anxieties and contradictions in Chosŏn attitudes toward learning and knowledge, its own identity as a civilized state, and its relationship with Ming China. Language, as a site of symbolic contestation, was intermeshed with the practice of diplomacy, in both the quotidian, routine exercise of political negotiation and the orchestrated performance of elaborate ritual. Nevertheless, the picture that I have tried to paint is schematic at best and only outlines some of the critical issues pertaining to the politics of language during this period. For one, the “vernacular alphabet” was not the only technology of language that figured into questions of translation, cultural exchange, and knowledge. I have not discussed a wide range of linguistic practices and inscriptional conventions.93 Neither was diplomacy the only context in which language mattered.94 Nor were these issues exclusive to the fourteenth–sixteenth centuries. In Korea, the question of linguistic divergence also came to be connected to the issue of Chosŏn cultural legitimacy after the rise of the Qing in the mid-seventeenth century, when “barbarian” Manchu conquerors replaced the Ming in China.95 An intellectual shift among eighteenth-century Neo-Confucian thinkers sought to reposition Korea, displacing China as center and rejecting Manchu claims to imperial legitimacy. The fall of

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Idu, hyangch’al, and kugyŏl are among the other systems. See Buzo 1980. Gender also played a significant role in linguistic/inscriptional practice in Chosŏn society. See Haboush 2002. Haboush 2005; Sun 2007. The Manchu invasions also present an interesting period of time for studying the role of interpreters in diplomacy, and parallels can be drawn between the seventeenth century and the Mongol period.

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civilization to “barbarians” allowed the Korean ruling class to see itself as the last bastion, if not a new fountainhead, of classical civilization.96 Intellectual rejection of the Qing did not, however, translate into political isolation. Diplomacy remained a central concern. The idea that Chosŏn Korea was now Ming China’s cultural and political heir may have actually exacerbated anxieties over proper linguistic knowledge. Yu Hyŏngwŏn 柳馨遠 (1622– 1673), a reform-minded scholar in official retirement, for example, called for the revival of King Sejong’s linguistic projects and proposed reforms to revitalize the study of spoken Chinese among civil officials. Even though Yu called for adopting “Chinese-style” pronunciations over what had become standard Korean ones, he encouraged the use of the Korean alphabet as a mediating device for comprehending classical texts.97 If we keep this context in mind, we can see that even the debate over the pronunciation of a single Chinese character carried new significance. Hong Taeyong 洪大容 (1731–1783), who traveled to Beijing with a Korean embassy, questioned a Chinese scholar named Deng Shimin over his rhyming of “poverty” (pin 貧) and “lute” (qin 琴) in their poetry exchange.98 Remarking that these two characters belonged to two separate rhyme categories, he wrote: Is this perhaps a mistake? Our eastern country [i.e., Korea] has a different script for the vernacular. It has sound, but no meaning. There are fewer than two hundred characters, vowels and consonants are clearly differentiated, and all the myriad sounds can be expressed with them. Women and simple folk who do not know Chinese characters use this vernacular script and write in our local language. All letters and documents written in this script are readily comprehensible, often more so than those written in the “true script” [i.e., Chinese]. Though it lacks elegance, its clarity and usefulness are also a help in cultivating the people. We transcribe the sounds of all the characters in the classical writings in this script; therefore, there are no deviant pronunciations for any of the characters

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Haboush 1999. Palais 1996, 639–640. Note that while in Mandarin, the final consonants of these two characters would have merged from -n and -m into -n by this period, Korean orthography and pronunciation preserved this distinction. Though the poem in question probably rhymed in eighteenthcentury Chinese, as it does in modern Mandarin, it does not do so in Korean readings, where pin 貧 is read pin, and qin 琴 is read kŭm. Indeed, the two different final consonants place these two characters into different rhyme categories.

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contained in the classics throughout the country, and the pronunciations do not change over time.99 According to Hong, the use of the Korean alphabet allowed the Koreans to successfully preserve older pronunciations of Chinese characters, “correct” according to rhyme tables, whose rules the Chinese literatus had failed to observe. By claiming that the Korean alphabet could more faithfully represent classical models, Hong was in fact demonstrating to Deng the authority of his own learning. For him, the “vernacular script” became a technology of transmission that provided an authoritative source of knowledge that was not only independent of but superior to contemporary Chinese practice. In contrast, Pak Che-ga 朴齊家 (1750–1805), in his Discussion of Northern Learning, saw the Korean use of “vernacular explications” and the “barrier of language” to be why Koreans, despite their dedication to literary and classical learning, supposedly fell short of the Chinese. Noting that in China even “women and children who are illiterate” speak in literary flourishes because of the similarity of spoken Chinese to the literary language, Pak even proposed that the whole country of Korea should “discard their native speech” so that they may “finally be rid of the label ‘barbarian.’”100 Though contemporaries, Pak’s and Hong’s opinions on the relationships between Korean, spoken Chinese, and classical learning could not have been more different. Through the late Chosŏn period, the Office of Interpreters continued to play important roles in diplomacy. It was responsible for training not only specialists in Chinese language but, up until the end of the dynasty, experts in Japanese, Manchu, and Mongolian. In the late nineteenth century, after Chosŏn Korea had to grapple with a new diplomatic order in East Asia, the Office of Interpreters was abolished in the Kabo reforms of 1894.101 Subsequently, many of its former members came to play pivotal roles in late Chosŏn Korea’s efforts at “modernization.”102 Connecting the Office of Interpreters to the “modernizing” reforms of the nineteenth century is less an attempt to somehow locate the seeds of the modern in earlier institutions than to reframe our understandings of these historical trajectories. The elevation of the vernacular script to official status in 1894 was not a logical or inevitable development from the 99 100 101 102

Hong Taeyong, “Letter to Wenxuan,” in Tamhŏnsŏoejip 湛軒書外集, vol. 2, in HMC 248:127c; translated by Marion Eggert in Haboush 2009, 209. Pak Che-ga and Kuksa p’yŏnch’an wiwŏnhoe, Chŏngyujip: Pu Pukhagŭi 貞蕤集 : 附北學 議, 412. Song Kijung 2001, 9–10. Hwang 2004, 106–160.

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script’s earlier invention but was shaped by the particular political pressures, intellectual shifts, and changing cultural attitudes that characterized the last decades of the Chosŏn dynasty.103 On the other hand, neither does the vernacular script owe its preferment simply to the convulsions of the nineteenth century. As this chapter has shown, the vernacular script already had important institutional and political uses and had become an integral medium for knowledge production and the exercise of diplomacy. Although an awareness of Korea’s distinct language figured in the discourse of both King Sejong’s court and nineteenth-century language reformers, revealing shared concerns about the commensurability of speech and text, the moment of the alphabet’s promulgation in 1446 and its eventual apotheosis after 1894 were informed by rather different political and ideological motivations. And between them lay a complex negotiation between language, politics, and culture that I have attempted to reveal. Beyond the practice of diplomacy, language and script were central to politics and society in Chosŏn Korea, and these connections deserve closer study. References Alston, Dane 2008. “Emperor and Emissary: The Hongwu Emperor, Kwŏn Kŭn, and the Poetry of Late Fourteenth Century Diplomacy,” Korean Studies 32: 101–147. An Pyŏnghŭi 安秉禧 2001. “Kyŏngguk Taejŏn ŭi ‘Pyŏngyong Mun’gwan’ kwa Ch’oe Sejin ŭi sinbun” 經國大典의 ‘竝用文官’ 과 崔世鎭의 身分 [Dual employment of civil officials in the National Code and the status of Ch’oe Sejin], Kugŏhak 38: 329–347. Brose, Michael C. 2005. “Uyghur Technologists of Writing and Literacy in Mongol China,” T’oung Pao, 2nd ser., 91, 4/5 (January 1): 396–435. –––––– 2007. Subjects and Masters: Uyghurs in the Mongol Empire. Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University. Buzo, Adrian 1980. “Early Korean Writing Systems,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch 55: 35–62. Chan Hok-lam [Chen Xuelin] 陳學林 1997. Mingdai renwu yu chuanshuo 明代人物與 傳說 [Famous figures and their legends in the Ming period]. Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe. Chang Tong’ik 張東翼 1997. Wŏndae Yŏsa charyo chimnok 元代麗史資料集錄 [Collected sources of Koryŏ history from the Yuan period]. Seoul: Sŏul Taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu.

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Sin Sukchu 申叔舟 (1645) 1988. Pohanjaejip 保閑齋集, in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 10. Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正 (1705) 1988. Sagajip 四佳集, in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vols. 10–11. Song Ch’unyong 宋春永 1998. Koryŏ sidae chaphak kyoyuk yŏn’gu 高麗時代雜學教育 硏究 [Study of miscellaneous studies education in the Koryŏ period]. Seoul: Hyŏngsŏl ch’ulp’ansa. Song Kijung [Song Ki Joong] 宋基中 1997. “Tongbuk Asia yŏksasang ŭi chemunja wa Han’gŭl ŭi kiwŏn” 동북아시아 역사상의 제문자와 한글의 기원 [The invention of scripts in Northeast Asia and the origins of the Korean alphabet], Chindan Hakpo 84: 203–226. –––––– 2001. The Study of Foreign Languages in the Chosŏn Dynasty, 1392–1910. Seoul: Jimoondang. Song Lian 宋濂 1983. Wenxian ji 文憲集. 32 vols. In Yingyin Wenyuange Siku quanshu 影印文淵閣四庫全書 1223–1224. [Taipei]: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan. Sun Weiguo 孫衛國 2007. Daming qihao yu xiao Zhonghua yi shi: Chaoxian wangchao Zun Zhou Si Ming wenti yanjiu 1637–1800 大明旗號與小中華意識: 朝鮮王朝尊周 思明問題研究. [The banner of the Great Ming and Little China consciousness: A study of the Chosŏn dynasty’s reverence for the Zhou and remembrance of the Ming]. Beijing: Shangwu yinshu guan. T’ongmunʼgwan chi 通文館志 [Compendium of the Interpreter’s Bureau] 2006. Seoul: Sŏul Taehakkyo Kyujanggak Hanʼgukhak yŏnʼguwŏn. Walraven, Boudewijn 2011. “Divine Territory: Shaman Songs, Elite Culture and the Nation,” Korean Histories 2, 2: 42–58. Wells, W. Scott 2011. “From Center to Periphery: The Demotion of Literary Sinitic and the Beginnings of Hanmunkwa—Korea, 1876–1910,” M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Xiao Qiqing 蕭啟慶 2007. Nei Beiguo er wai Zhongguo: Meng Yuan shi yanjiu 内北國而 外中國 : 蒙元史研究. [Making the Northern Country interior while the Central State exterior: Studies of Mongol-Yuan history]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Yang Ojin 梁伍鎭 2007. “Chosŏn sidae Chunggugŏ yŏkkwan sŏnbal” 朝鮮時代 中國 語 譯官 선발을 위한 出題書와 評價 方式 [Examination questions and evaluation methods for the selection of Chinese language interpreters in the Chosŏn period], Chunggugŏ ŏmun nonyŏk chŏnggan 19: 31–49. Ye Quanhong 業泉宏 1991. Mingdai qianqi Zhong Han guojiao zhi yanjiu: 1368–1488 明 代前期中韓國交之研究 [Study of Sino-Korean diplomacy in the early Ming period: 1368–1488]. Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan. Yi Kibaek 1984. A New History of Korea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, for the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

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Yi Sŏkhyŏng 李石亨 (1589) 1988. Chŏhŏnjip 樗軒集, in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 9. Yu Hŭich’un 柳希春 (1869) 1989. Miamsŏnsaengjip 眉巖先生集, in Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 34. Zhang Ning 張寧 (15th cent.) 1936. Feng shi lu 奉使錄 [Record of an embassy]. Congshu jicheng chubian 叢書集成初編 2142. Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan.

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Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam John D. Phan1 Introduction For most of its history as a written language, Vietnamese took the form of the Sinitic-based morphographic script known as Chữ Nôm (𡨸喃, 𡦂喃, or 字 喃). Like the Han script it mimics, Nôm comprises square graphemes designed to represent discrete morphosyllables in the language. In Vietnam, as in Korea (and, to some extent, Japan), Literary Sinitic remained the dominant mode of intellectual and imaginative expression for most of the second millennium. Vernacular Vietnamese would not fully displace Literary Sinitic until the first third of the twentieth century, and then, not in the form of Nôm, but in the Romanized alphabet called Quốc Ngữ. Nevertheless, the Nôm vernacular achieved great prominence over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a mode of avant-garde poetic expression, when it was used alongside Literary Sinitic to produce some of the most enduring works of Vietnamese literature. Yet, when considering the history of Nôm, scholars have tended either to inflate its significance (at the expense of Literary Sinitic) or to dismiss it as unimportant when compared with the revolutionary effects of Quốc Ngữ. Most recently, Sheldon Pollock wrote: “In Vietnam . . . regional individuation in the cultural-political sphere was asserted hesitantly in the late medieval period but then arrested, and vernacularization was consummated only under the vastly changed circumstances of colonialism.”2 Compare these comments with those of Huỳnh Sanh Thông over twenty years earlier, who described the author of the early nineteenth-century Nôm epic the Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiều 傳 翹) as “triumphantly rescuing the Vietnamese language from the stranglehold of classical Chinese.”3 Pollock’s remarks are informed by his focus on the South Asian case and its European parallels, and he admits that a substantive comparison between his “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” and East Asia lies beyond the scope of his book. Huỳnh Sanh Thông, on the other hand, appears to be engaging in 1 Many thanks to the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies for their support and to Nguyễn Tuấn Cường for his extremely helpful feedback. All errors are my own. 2 Pollock 2006, 259. 3 Huỳnh 1983, xxi.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004279278_005

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a narrative of nationhood, and it is difficult to ignore the political and overtly nationalistic overtones of his comments on the Vietnamese and Chinese languages. Though of different qualities and motivations, Pollock’s and Huỳnh’s analyses do share one point in common: they both view the cosmopolitan (Sinitic) mode as definitively in competition with the vernacular (Vietnamese) mode. Under this model, the displacement of the one by the other is an inevitable outcome. Although, as Pollock suggests, this model may be fruitfully applied to later cycles of vernacularization in Vietnam, it is unequipped to illuminate the nature of Nôm or its historical development. When viewed on its own terms, the history of Nôm describes a very different conceptualization of the vernacular—one in which the overt goal is a fusion or union of the two socio-intellectual and literary modes. This concept of the vernacular, which fueled the hybridizing poetic experimentation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is remarkably articulated in the prefatory material of a seventeenth-century Sino-Vietnamese dictionary called Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds (Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa 指南語音解義; hereafter, Chỉ nam). The dictionary bears two prefaces: one in Vietnamese (Nôm) and one in Literary Sinitic. As I have discussed elsewhere, the prefaces interlock to form a single, continuous text that describes Nôm, not as a regional alternative to Han characters, but as an augmentation of the civilizing technology they represent.4 Critically, this unique text was produced at a crossroads in the history of vernacular writing, between a period in which Nôm writing was constrained to marginalized Buddhist enclaves, typified by texts like the Sutra of the Buddha’s Teachings on the Profound Grace of Parents (Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh 佛說大報父母恩 重經) and the Recorded Sayings of the Native Practices of the Cloud-Dharma Buddha of Cổ Châu (Cổ Châu pháp văn phật bản hành ngữ lục 古州法雲佛本 行語錄), and the “golden age” of the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries, which produced works like the Tale of Kieu. The prefaces of the Chỉ nam articulate an attempt to “reboot” the vernacular by redefining its nature and quality. Critically, Nôm was reconceived, not as a distinctive, regional competitor or alternative to Sinitic writing, but as a legitimate extension of its scope. I will begin this study with a brief discussion of Nôm before the fifteenth century, followed by a discussion of its cultivation by marginalized Buddhist intellectuals during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I will then turn to the Chỉ nam itself and provide a unified analysis of its bilingual prefaces in the context of Vietnam’s vernacular evolution. Nota bene: 4 Phan 2013b.

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Summary of Vietnamese vernacular development with key texts.

I will use the accepted term “Literary Sinitic” to refer to Vietnam’s classical language throughout this study. When referring to the Chinese script itself, I will follow Vietnamese usage and use the term “Han” (cf. Viet. “Hán” 漢) in opposition to “Nôm” (i.e., 喃, for Chữ Nôm). Evidence for Vernacular Writing before the Fifteenth Century Due to a scarcity of textual evidence before the fifteenth century, our picture of early Vietnamese vernacular writing is rather vague.5 Building on older work 5 Virtually all surviving Nôm texts were printed after the fifteenth century, and most during the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. The paucity of pre-fifteenth-century texts is usually attributed to the twenty-year Ming occupation of Đại Việt (1407–1427), and explicit claims of Mingsponsored vandalism can be found in a number of historical studies on Vietnam. Nguyễn Khắc Viện (2009, 72; originally published in French in 1976) rather exuberantly claims that “Ming troops sought to destroy all traces of our nation’s culture; they burnt or took away books that were specifically Vietnamese.” Huỳnh Sanh Thông (1996, 6) levies the same accusation: “Unfortunately, all such [vernacular] works were lost in the early part of the fifteenth century; during that holocaust, the Ming occupation, the avowed policy of the Chinese emperor Ch’eng-tsu [Ming Chengzu] was to destroy Vietnamese culture through book burning and other means.” Trần Trọng Kim (1964, 199) also mentions such an event in his Historical Outline of Vietnam (Việt-nam sử lược), the first vernacular history of Vietnam composed in the Quốc Ngữ alphabet. Alexander Woodside also notes this in his influential Vietnam and the Chinese Model (1971, 125), where he mentions three titles supposedly lost at this time: the Lý dynasty Book of Justice (Hình Thư 刑書), the Trần dynasty Comprehensive Rites of the Royal Court (Quốc triều thông lễ 國朝通禮), and Statutes of the Trần Court (Trần triều đại điển 陳朝大典). William Nienhauser (1986, 298) also replicated this claim. Although there are substantial historical indications of the Ming removal of books at this time, the notion was greatly amplified by the national sentiments of the twentieth century. The idea of Ming vandalism has become an important cornerstone of the national mythos of the Vietnamese and has generated firm belief in an ambiguously defined (but always extensive) library of lost works. The

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by Đào Duy Anh, Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, and others, Nguyễn Quang Hồng discusses references in the Lê 黎 dynasty (1428–1778) historical chronicles called the Complete Records of the History of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư 大越史紀 全書; hereafter, ĐVSKTT) to Nôm poems by Nguyễn Thuyên 阮詮 (thirteenth century) and Nguyễn Sĩ Cố 阮士固 (?–1312) and to a rhapsody (phú 賦) and a ballad (ca 歌) attributed to Emperor Trần Nhân Tông 陳仁宗 (i.e., Trần Khâm 陳昑, 1258–1308), who was famous for his Buddhist erudition and skill in poetry.6 However, the earliest layer of the ĐVSKTT dates to the late fifteenth century, while the two poems of Emperor Trần Nhân Tông survive only in a Chan Buddhist collection entitled Native Practices of Our Chan Ancestors (Thiền tông bản hành 禪宗本行), the extant version of which was published in 1802. Đào Duy Anh mentions a few other lost vernacular titles attributed to this era, notably a poetic anthology called Collected Poems in the Kingdom’s Language 國語詩集 attributed to Trần dynasty educator Chu Văn An 朱文安 (?–1370).7 It is possible that these were among the books lost during the Ming occupation of 1407– 1427,8 though that is difficult to verify. Additionally, Đào discusses three Nôm Lê 黎 dynasty (1428–1778) historical chronicles called the Complete Records of the Historical Annals of Đại Việt (Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư大越史紀全書) do note that in the seventh lunar month of the year mậu tuất 戊戌 (1418), the Ming court “dispatched the courier Xia Qing 夏 清 and the metropolitan graduate Xia Shi 夏詩 to come and collect works and records of our country from past to present” (ĐVSKTT, 10:3b). However, there is no mention of their number or linguistic composition, nor of their destruction or removal from Vietnam. The Nguyễn dynasty Bureau of History (Quốc sử quán 國史館) provided an account of the Ming removal of books in its Officially Mandated Detailed Sketch of the Comprehensive Mirror of Việt History (Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục 欽定越史通鑑綱目); this account differs slightly from what is found in the earlier ĐVSKTT. In the Detailed Sketch, the Bureau of History claims that in 1419 (1418 in the ĐVSKTT), all manner of literature pertaining to the kingdom since the Trần dynasty was seized and taken to Jinling 金陵 (Viet. Kim Lăng; modern-day Nanjing) (Quốc 1998, 765). Finally, the ĐVSKTT does note several cases of what appears to have been a broad movement of social reform initiated by the Ming, including the establishment of Confucian temples in all districts, the regulation of sacrifices to all local geomantic spirits, the enforcement of northern hair and dress codes, and the opening of schools, and a general summons for all Confucian scholars, medical doctors, physiognomers, Buddhist monks, and Daoist priests was issued (all in 1414; see p. 25b of the Chính Hoà edition). The ĐVSKTT does mention that in the following year (1415), the Ming ordered imperial officials to forcefully escort groups of Confucian scholars, medical doctors, physiognomers, Buddhist monks, and Daoist priests back to Yanjing (燕京, i.e., Beijing) to be given official duties and redistributed for work among the various mandarinates (26b). Thus, it is possible that some removal or even destruction of texts took place, but I do not know of any direct evidence for such an event. 6 Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008. 7 Đào 1975, 16. 8 See n. 5.

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rhapsodies and one Nôm ballad discovered at Hoa Yên Temple in present-day Quảng Ninh Province (northeastern Vietnam), which are claimed to have been written by Trần dynasty authors.9 Đào himself expresses doubt over the attribution but nevertheless theorizes that these are pre-Lê texts. In lieu of verified extant texts, evidence for vernacular writing from before the fifteenth century, therefore, derives mostly from later historical references in annals like the ĐVSKTT.10 As noted above, Nguyễn Thuyên is widely credited with jump-starting Vietnam’s vernacular poetic tradition due to one such passage. In a brief note from the ĐVSKTT, Nguyễn Thuyên is said to have driven away a crocodile from the Lô (i.e., Red) River by casting a charm into the waters (ĐVSKTT, 5:41b). The emperor (Trần Nhân Tông) then renamed him Hàn Thuyên after the Tang Confucianist Han Yu 韓愈 (Viet. Hàn Dũ, 768–824), who drove away a crocodile in Chaozhou 潮州 by issuing it an official proclamation.11 In the same passage, the ĐVSKTT makes the following aside: Note that [Nguyễn Thuyên] could also compose poems in the vernacular, and an increase in using the vernacular to compose poems in our country actually began with him [lit., “this”].12 詮又能國語賦詩，我國賦詩多用國語，實自此始。(ĐVSKTT, 5:41b)13 Of course, Nguyễn Thuyên’s poetry does not survive, nor can we take this claim at face value. Yet even if the details are not accurate, the implications for a vernacular tradition are compelling. When examined in sequence, notes of this kind describe an increasing momentum to vernacular practices, especially over the fourteenth century. Near the turn of the fifteenth century, these follow the ascendance of a man named Hồ Quý Ly 胡季犛 (1336–1407?). Hồ Quý Ly was an official under the Trần dynasty who deposed the last Trần emperor, placing himself and his son on the throne and inaugurating the short-lived Hồ 胡 (1400–1407) dynasty, which fell to the Ming in 1407. There are five references 9 10

11 12 13

Đào 1975, 20. As discussed in the next section, certain layers of accretive texts like the Phật thuyết and the Cổ Châu have also been theorized to predate the fifteenth century, sometimes substantially. See Han Yu’s 鱷魚文. A translation is included in Birch and Keene 1965, 23–255. Note that I have somewhat loosely translated 國語 (quốc ngữ) as “the vernacular” and have elsewhere translated it more strictly as “the kingdom’s speech.” Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 355.

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to vernacular writing of note over the period of Hồ’s ascension to power. I will briefly discuss each of these in turn. The first involves an imperial prince, Trần Ngạc 陳顎 (?–1391), who exchanged poems discussing the need to restrain Hồ Quý Ly’s power at court with retired official and fellow imperial clansman Trần Nguyên Đán 陳元旦 (1325–1390). When Hồ Quý Ly found them out, Prince Ngạc turned on Nguyên Đán, using the vernacular in a literary attack:14 Ngạc then composed a two-part allegorical poem in the vernacular, satirizing Nguyên Đán with it. 顎又作國語歇後詩，以諷元旦。(ĐVSKTT, 8:7b)15 This suggests that vernacular writing had attained some prevalence among the Trần literati and had already secured a place among their intellectual arsenal. Later in the same year (1385), Nguyên Đán’s daughters were supposedly seduced by their classical tutors via poems and songs composed in the vernacular: Nguyễn Ứng Long taught Thái, and Nguyễn Hán Anh taught Đài. Ứng Long thereupon became inappropriately intimate and composed vernacular poems and songs to arouse Thái and have congress with her. Hán Anh also composed vernacular poems to imitate him. 阮應龍教太，阮漢英教臺，應龍因狎近，作國語詩歌，挑太通 焉。漢英亦作國語詩效之。(ĐVSKTT, 8:7b)16 This anecdote is interesting because it suggests the prevalence of vernacular songs and poetry outside the narrow scope of orthodox literacy, not to mention including an overt description of female education as well. The condition suggested here is one in which vernacular writing was more readily accessible than Literary Sinitic—a situation quite different from that of Annamese society during Tang administration and possibly even during the early Lý dynasty.17

14 15 16 17

Chen Jinghe supplies the character [奭+頁] for Prince Ngạc’s name (Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 458). Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 458. Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 458. See Phan 2013a.

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The third instance involves an exchange with the emperor himself. In 1387, Hồ Quý Ly was bestowed a new title and gifts and thanked the emperor by composing a vernacular poem: In the third month, because Lê Quý Ly [was made] joint manager of affairs, [the emperor] bestowed one sword and one banner with motifs reading “Complete Endowments of the Civil and Martial” and “Lord and Servant United in Virtue.” Quý Ly composed a vernacular poem in thanks. 三月，以黎季犛同平章事，賜釼一把，旗一隻，題曰：「文武 全才，君臣同德。」季犛作國語詩謝之。(ĐVSKTT, 8:10a)18 This anecdote is remarkable, since a poem of gratitude for an imperial title would naturally call for an orthodox composition in Literary Sinitic. It is possible that Quý Ly was making some kind of political statement by deliberately using the vernacular (his power at court was steadily growing); however, if so, no comment is made in the chronicle, and Ngô Sĩ Liên only pauses to note that Hồ’s scheme to usurp the throne was long in the planning. Rather, this kind of exchange suggests that vernacular poetry had already gained considerable prominence in Trần intellectual society. Recall that Emperor Trần Nhân Tông, who lived roughly a century earlier, was also said to have composed in the vernacular. Although rare and vague, these comments suggest a substantial degree of cultivation of the vernacular over the course of the Trần. The last two anecdotes are perhaps the most suggestive because they describe pedagogical translations of classical texts. In 1395, Hồ Quý Ly was given even greater access to the imperial center of the government, and he used this opportunity to start effecting serious changes in Đại Việt society.19 Of particular note, Hồ compiled a translation of a section of the Book of History to help in the education of the elite: Thereupon Quý Ly compiled the chapter “Against Leisure,”20 translated it into the vernacular, and used it in the education of government officials.

18

19 20

Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 459. Hồ Quý Lý’s clan had adopted the Lê 黎 surname in the thirteenth century, and Hồ Quý Lý was in the fourth generation to have borne the adopted name. Chen Jinghe (Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 456) notes that 釼 was later changed to 劍. Whitmore 1985, 40. More literally, “Lacking Leisure” or “To Lack Leisure.”

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季犛因編無逸篇，譯為國語，以教官家。 (ĐVSKTT, 8:25a–25b)21 The chapter that Hồ selected (無逸) pointedly focuses on the Duke of Zhou, in whose role Hồ was transparently casting himself. But the important point here is that Hồ chose to produce an official pedagogical text (for the emperor’s education) in the vernacular, suggesting not only that a systematic form of Nôm was in place but that the vernacular was being drafted in the service of learning Literary Sinitic. This is, furthermore, not the only time Hồ Quý Ly produced such a pedagogical text. Near the end of 1396, Hồ also composed a vernacular exegesis of the Book of Songs for similar purposes: In the eleventh month, Quý Ly composed the Vernacular Explication of the [Book of ] Songs, with a preface, and commanded female teachers to instruct the empress, concubines, and palace folk in its study. The contents of the preface mostly forwarded his own ideas and did not follow the collected writings [lit., “transmissions”] of Zhu Xi. 十一月，季犛作國語詩義幷序，令女師教后妃及宮人學習，序 中多出己意，不從朱子集傳。(ĐVSKTT, 8:27b)22 Here the vernacular is explicitly described as a pedagogical stepping stone used to facilitate mastery of Literary Sinitic rather than as a dilettante script used only by those already in possession of strong classical skills.23 Once again, none of the texts referred to in these five instances is extant, making it difficult to reconstruct a clear picture of vernacular practices during this time. However, Ngô Sĩ Liên was writing during the High Lê, an era in which Neo-Confucian ideas were vigorously embraced by Đại Việt intellectuals. This is evident even in the last passage discussed above, in which Ngô pointedly remarks on the disparity between Zhu Xi’s orthodox writings and Hồ Quý Ly’s preface. Indeed, the Lê embrace of Neo-Confucianism recharged Literary Sinitic studies, and it is from this time that regular civil service examinations became a feature of Vietnamese society and politics.24 Thus, Ngô probably had 21 22 23 24

Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 459. Ngô, Chen, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984, 470. Keith Taylor (2011, 187) made a similar claim for Nôm in his discussion of the Chỉ nam and literacy in the seventeenth century. Examinations had been held irregularly during the Lý and Trần dynasties, mostly as a means of staffing the government in times of emergency (Taylor 2002).

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little investment (or even interest) in vernacular writing, and it is unlikely that he was deliberately amplifying a vernacular presence in these passages. Unfortunately, we can say little about the nature of the vernacular writing described here—especially regarding its structural continuity (or lack thereof) with later forms of Nôm. But what these passages do give us is a strong impression of the relative normalcy of vernacular writing over the course of the Trần, of its popularity among the aristocracy, and of its function as a pedagogical tool for mastering the classical language. However, whatever vernacular practices were in place by the end of the Trần and the brief rule of Hồ Quý Ly were severely disrupted by the Ming occupation of Đại Việt in 1407. Aside from the possible loss of vernacular texts at this time, one effect of the occupation was the establishment of a strong Neo-Confucian tradition (to which ĐVSKTT author Ngô Sĩ Liên belonged), which invigorated the role of Literary Sinitic and produced the first robustly Confucian society in Vietnam’s history. Despite the initial production of some notable Nôm poetry during the High Lê, overall it appears that the vernacular momentum described in the ĐVSKTT passages above was interrupted and even reversed at this time. Nevertheless, Nôm appears to have been picked up by one segment of Đại Việt society that found itself suddenly bereft of social and political power: the Buddhists. A Buddhist Exile for Vernacular Writing? The Lý and Trần dynasties (eleventh–fourteenth centuries) had heavily patronized Buddhism, and Buddhist intellectuals had occupied the mainstream of elite society. However, the pervasive Neo-Confucian reforms enacted under Ming rulership deeply altered these conditions, and Confucianized models of state and society were embraced by the subsequent Lê emperors—dispossessing Buddhist intellectual elites in the process.25 As Keith Taylor has suggested, the ascendance of the Neo-Confucians during the Lê dynasty actually catalyzed the development of Nôm vernacular writing to some extent, because “Buddhist leaders, distanced from centers of political power, reoriented their attention to the villages and began to translate their texts into more popularized forms of language.”26 The role of Buddhism in early Lê vernacular history is complex, though its preeminence in Nôm production before the seventeenth 25 26

Taylor 2002, 345. For a discussion of Hồ Quý Lý and the Ming, see Whitmore 1985. See also n. 5 above. Taylor 2002, 349.

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century is uncontroversial. There are two important texts for exploring this issue. The first is an imported sutra entitled Sutra of the Buddha’s Teachings on the Profound Grace of Parents (Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu n trọng kinh 佛說 大報父母恩重經; hereafter, Phật thuyết). The second, the origin myth of Vietnam’s oldest temple lineage, is entitled Recorded Sayings of the Native Practices of the Cloud-Dharma Buddha of Cổ Châu (Cổ Châu pháp văn phật bản hành ngữ lục 古州法雲佛本行語錄; hereafter, Cổ Châu). Both texts appear to demonstrate a Buddhist attempt to popularize religious texts for an audience incapable of accessing Literary Sinitic. The original Phật thuyết is composed in Literary Sinitic, is considered a “false scripture” (ngụy kinh 偽經) as opposed to sutras treated as authentic transmissions of the Buddha’s words (i.e., chân kinh 真經), and is primarily concerned with the subject of filial piety.27 The title 父母恩重經 appears in a number of Buddhist texts from 730, and a version of this text probably made its way into neighboring kingdoms (notably Korea, where it has been widely studied) toward the end of the Tang dynasty. Its preservation and study during the early centuries of Vietnamese independence are consistent with the Buddhist patronage by the Lý and Trần dynasties mentioned above. The addition of the Nôm glosses is of particular interest, but the date of their composition is rather unclear. The extant version, held by the Societé asiatique, was printed around the end of the seventeenth century or the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the grammar and phonological forms of the glosses indicate a much older origin. For several reasons, Nguyễn Quang Hồng believes the earliest layers of the text to have been produced no later than the twelfth century, while Shimizu Masaaki argues for a fifteenth-century date. As discussed here, I will eventually endorse Shimizu’s view.28 Both Shimizu and Nguyễn Quang Hồng discussed the presence of archaic consonant clusters and/or minor syllables phonographically rendered in the Phật thuyết, either by combining two characters into a single grapheme or by a prefixed character (in a two-character compound), for example, 可如: HánViệt khả-nhữ > modern Viet. nhớ.29 For Nguyễn, this meant that the Nôm of the Phật thuyết must have been produced before the general monophthongization of Vietnamese—the first among his points of evidence for a twelfth-century date. I do not disagree with the contention that the Phật thuyết Nôm is rendering a syllabically complex language; however, I do not believe that this requires a twelfth-century date of composition for the text. Nguyễn’s points of 27 28 29

Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008, 127–128. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008, 129; Shimizu 2010. Shimizu 1996, 2010; Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008.

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comparison are a High Lê poetic anthology called Collected Poems in the Kingdom’s Speech (Quốc âm thi tập 國音詩集) and the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa itself.30 But the Chỉ nam is a seventeenth-century work, and the Collected Poems, while attributed to Lê statesman Nguyễn Trãi 阮廌 (1380–1442), survives only as part of an anthology published in 1868. Thus, the fact that the Phật thuyết demonstrates more archaic forms than either of these texts does not conclusively require a twelfth-century date. There is no question that the Phật thuyết represents a primitive form of Nôm, which is also an archaic form of Vietnamese, but this only requires the Phật thuyết to have been produced no later than the fifteenth century or, conservatively, perhaps no later than the seventeenth century.31 Nguyễn also discusses an intriguing example from the Nôm text that suggests that a well-known sound change affecting the orthodox Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation system known as Hán-Việt (hereafter, HV)—upon which Nôm was based—had not yet been completed by the time the Phật thuyết vernacular text was composed.32 Middle Chinese (MC; ca. fifth–tenth centuries) syllables were classified according to “Four Divisions” 四等, and certain syllables appeared in both the Third and Fourth Divisions of this system. These were called chongniu 重紐 doublets. In orthodox HV pronunciation, Fourth Division chongniu syllables originally bearing bilabial onsets (e.g., p-, m-) become alveolars (e.g., t-, n-, z-); thus, 嚬 (“to frown”; MC *p i̤ n) becomes tən˨˩ in HV. However, Nguyễn showed that in the Phật thuyết, a Third Division syllable (閩) was used to render a vernacular word with an alveolar onset (閩閩 for dần dần; “gradually”). This is odd because in conventional HV, Third Division syllables—including 閩—keep their bilabial onsets (cf. HV mân, not dần, for 閩). Next, citing Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, Nguyễn notes that the author of a late fourteenthcentury historical chronicle called the Outline of Viet History (Việt sử lược 越史 略) intentionally departs from Chinese usage of a Fourth Division character in rendering the jurisdiction of a Tai rebel leader—precisely in order to avoid the alveolar reading.33 For Nguyễn, this meant that the chongniu sound change in 30 31 32 33

Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008, 139. This is especially so if we consider the potential role of social register in the different “vernaculars” represented by each of these texts. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008. Nguyễn Tài Cẩn 1979. The exact details of how Fourth Division chongniu initials changed from bilabials to alveolars in Vietnamese are not fully understood. However, Guillaume Jacques (2006, 12) has suggested that in Middle Chinese, Fourth Division chongniu characters probably had a slightly fricatized medial *-ʑ-, while Third Division chongniu characters demonstrated a plain (unfricatized) -j- medial. This reconstruction is straightforwardly consistent with what is observed in modern HV pronunciation.

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HV was not yet complete by the time the Phật thuyết Nôm translation was composed but was already complete by the end of the fourteenth century. As compelling as this example is, it does not definitively show that the Phật thuyết predates the Việt sử lược.34 Nguyễn has shown us a Third Division chongniu syllable used to render an alveolar onset, which is, in fact, evidence in favor of the effects of the sound change, rather than the reverse. What the case of 閩閩 dần dần actually shows is a confusion engendered by the ongoing sound change itself, and the subsequent misreading of a particular character. In other words, the use of 閩閩 for dần dần in the Phật thuyết, like the avoidance of a Fourth Division syllable for a bilabial-initial word in the Việt sử lược, really only demonstrates the positive effects of the chongniu sound change, and not its absence. Thus, while I agree with virtually all of Nguyễn’s claims about the relative timing of the Phật thuyết, I do not believe that this evidence requires a twelfth-century date of production. When, then, was the Nôm text of the Phật thuyết produced? Importantly, Shimizu demonstrated the use of two taboo characters in the Phật thuyết that were activated during the Lê dynasty, which is strong textual evidence for a fifteenth-century date. The first is a common taboo for the given name of Emperor Lê Thái Tổ 黎太祖 (r. 1428–1433), Lợi 利. The taboo character is independently attested in the ĐVSKTT and was activated in 1428. The second taboo character was activated in 1497 for the given name of Emperor Lê Hiến Tôn 黎憲宗 (r. 1498–1503), also attested in the ĐVSKTT. These taboos are not exhaustively observed, and on the basis of other evidence (from the illustrations of the sutra), Shimizu theorized that the text has two layers: one published in the fifteenth century and one published in the eighteenth century.35 The evidence provided by the taboos would place composition of the earlier layer of the Phật thuyết vernacular precisely during the High Lê—when NeoConfucians were entering their full vigor and displacing the Buddhist intellectual class. As such, rather than a product of the zenith of Buddhist power in the Lý and Trần dynasties, the Nôm of the Phật thuyết appears to be the product of the fifteenth-century Neo-Confucian dispossession of Buddhist elites. Disinherited from their roles as the mainstream intelligentsia of Đại Việt, educated bonzes had begun to cater to a sector of Đại Việt society unable to read Literary 34

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If, contrary to Nguyễn’s case, an example were found in the Phật thuyết of a Fourth Division chongniu syllable being used to render a vernacular word with a bilabial onset, then this would be strong evidence that the sound change reflected in the Việt sử lược was not yet active when the Phật thuyết Nôm glosses were composed. If such an example were found, I would reconsider my claims here. Shimizu 2010, 2–3, 5.

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Sinitic. Attending to this new, plebeian audience required the addition of Nôm vernacular glosses to texts like the Phật thuyết (possibly to facilitate proselytization), and thus a new—if subaltern—tradition of vernacularity was engendered. If so, then the second major Nôm text of the early period, the Cổ Châu, may be viewed as further advancement of the vernacular in its Buddhist exile. Like the Phật thuyết, the Cổ Châu vernacular glosses represent the work of educated bonzes attempting to cater to an audience who could not read Literary Sinitic. Unlike the Phật thuyết, the original Cổ Châu was composed natively. Although, as the genre ngữ lục 語錄 (recorded sayings) implies, the text deals with the legitimacy of a figurehead in the tradition of Buddhism associated with the temple, there is very little that is Chan (or even Buddhist) about either the figure (a woman called A Man 阿蠻) or her hagiography. The narrative is filled with magic and regional animism, and its popularization into Nôm may further indicate the new, plebeian target of Buddhist literature. Critically, Taylor has also shown that the “translation” of the Literary Sinitic core of the Cổ Châu demonstrates considerable creative agency calibrated for a non-elite audience.36 The woodblocks of the Cổ Châu text were discovered by researchers from the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies, along with those of two other related texts, in a storehouse of some hundred-odd woodblocks at Chùa Dâu (Mulberry Temple), about thirty kilometers east of present-day Hanoi.37 The extant text was produced in 1752 by a team of bonzes of whom we know little more than their religious names: the calligraphy was done by a Hải Tịch 海寂 and the carving by Tính Mộ 性慕 (1706–1755)—the latter a resident of the Chùa Dâu who was assisted by several disciples whose names (like the calligrapher Hải Tịch) bore the religious prefix Hải- 海.38 In other words, the text is a temple product—carved, printed, and preserved (and probably originally composed) in the literate (but un-Confucian) setting of Chùa Dâu. This 1752 publication claims to be the reprinting (trọng khan 重刊) of an “old edition” (cổ bản 古本), in turn supposedly based on an ancient text called the Báo cực truyện 報極傳, whose dating is unclear. Based on the progression of historical settings in the text, mention of the title Báo cực truyện in the late fourteenth-century collection of myths called the Việt Điền u linh tập 越甸幽靈集, as well as a reference to the story in the late fourteenth- to early fifteenth-century strangetales anthology entitled Lĩnh Nam trích quái 嶺南摭怪, Nguyễn Quang Hồng 36 37 38

Taylor 2002, 2005. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 1997, 8. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 1997, 10.

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concluded that the Literary Sinitic text was produced between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.39 Taylor pushes this date back even further, theorizing that the bones of the story may have formed as early as the fourth century.40 Again, the composition of the Nôm exegesis is of more interest. The Nôm text is attributed to another religious name, “Viên Thái” 圓態, of whom we know nothing. Nguyễn Quang Hồng notes that there are many characters of advanced Nôm (semantosyllabic) form; however, there are also large numbers of phonographic characters, as well as archaized vocabulary more consistent with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as cóc for modern biết (know), ghín for modern gìn (keep), and thốt for modern nói (say). The text also famously attests an archaic, disyllabic form for the word “stone”: la-đá for modern đá. Thus, Nguyễn theorizes that the Nôm exegesis was produced sometime between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, “during the initial steps of the formation of Chữ Nôm literature.”41 This dating would place the text well into the Neo-Confucian expanse of the Lê dynasty, but also (as Nguyễn noted) on the cusp of a substantial Nôm literary tradition.42 Importantly, Keith Taylor has argued that the Nôm exegesis of the Cổ Châu demonstrates a subversive current spearheaded by dispossessed Buddhist intellectuals and circulated in the vernacular mode. Taylor analyzes a range of discrepancies between the Literary Sinitic text and its vernacular exegesis to show that alongside errors in translation, the act of exegesis itself involved a conscious reorienting of the material, a reworking for a different mode that in many cases required the subversion of the original.43 Some of the mutation of the original text naturally results from syntactic or lexical negotiation.44 At other times, the cultural and aesthetic needs of the vernacular audience seem to dictate the pen of the Nôm exegete, as in the following case: Literary Sinitic: [He] customarily took the pleasure of meditation as food and the joy of dharma as happiness 39 40 41 42 43 44

Nguyễn Quang Hồng 1997, 10–13. Taylor 2005. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 1997, 15. Note that this dating still allows for the Cổ Châu to be produced well after the Phật thuyết, without requiring the latter to have been composed by the twelfth century. Taylor 2002, 2005. Taylor 2002, 355–356.

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常以禪悅為食，法喜為樂 Vietnamese (Nôm): [He] customarily took the fragrance of the joy of meditation as food and the sound of reciting sutras as happiness Hằng lấy mùi thiền duyệt làm ăn, tiếng kinh phép làm vui45 I have preserved Taylor’s translations here, although I have changed the punctuation (in Taylor’s original, the line is broken up into two sentences). The vernacular line essentially adds sensual information to its rendering: the fragrance (mùi) of the joy of meditation and the sound (tiếng) of reciting the sutras. These sensual dimensions are perhaps implicit in the Literary Sinitic, but they become explicitly described in the vernacular. As Taylor notes, “The vernacular voice seeks to unfold terse classical terms with more prosaic expressions to reveal indications of what are imagined to be their full sense.”46 The text is interpreted and then transmuted. The Literary Sinitic text is thus not merely translated but expanded, colored, infused with the tastes and demands of the vernacular. In this way, exegesis became a creative act in itself, responsive to the needs and potentials of the vernacular. The kind of “translation” Taylor describes as occurring in the Cổ Châu foreshadows the hybridizing complexion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century avant-garde Nôm poetry by such well-known writers as Hồ Xuân Hương 胡春 香 (ca. 1770s–ca. 1820s), Nguyễn Công Trứ 阮公著 (1778–1858), Huỳnh Mẫn Đạt 黃敏達 (1807–1883), and Nguyễn Đình Chiều 阮廷沼 (1822–1888). Writers of this Nôm “golden age” luxuriated in the juxtaposition of Literary Sinitic forms and themes with vernacular language and substance—a literary mode exemplified most famously by Nguyễn Du’s 阮攸 (ca. 1766–1820) epic poem the Tale of Kieu.47 However, there is an intellectual gulf separating the limit­ed, Buddhistic vernacular practices of the Cổ Châu and the Phật thuyết from the sophisticated and avant-garde vernacular poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương and Nguyễn Du. The meteoric expansion of Nôm literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests a great shift in the language ethics of the Vietnamese elite, from regarding Nôm as a rough tool for bringing religion to peasants, or perhaps a crutch for learning the classical, to deeming it a vehicle fit 45 46 47

Taylor 2005, 182. Taylor 2005, 182. For a brief discussion of this poetry, see section 7.2 of Phan 2013a: “The Flowering of Nôm Poetic Expression.”

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for the same kinds of imaginative experimentation normally reserved for Literary Sinitic. Such a “rebooting” of the vernacular probably resulted from a gradual increase in its popularity coupled with the waning of classical training. A remarkably cogent expression of this reimagining may be found in a text produced on the cusp of the Nôm golden age: the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa. Chữ Nôm Rebooted in the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa The Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa 指南玉音解義 (Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds) is a Sino-Vietnamese encyclopedic dictionary containing Vietnamese (Nôm) glosses for 3,394 Chinese entries. These are arranged in sixeight verse (the same meter used in epic poems like the Tale of Kieu) and organized according to the general architecture of a “compendium” (Viet. loại tụ, Ch. lèijù 類聚).48 It was most likely published in 1641, not long after the production of the Cổ Châu but before the advent of Nôm avant-garde poetry.49 As such, it bears some striking similarities with early Nôm texts: it is the product of someone with the religious name of Pháp Tính 法性 and appears to have been produced at a temple on the margins of the intellectual world. Nevertheless, its contents are devoid of religiosity and its prefaces assume the voice of a classical literatus discussing the nature and role of writing in human society. In fact, the two prefaces (one in Literary Sinitic, one in Vietnamese) present quite un-Buddhist arguments for the value and importance of vernacular writing, which call on both Confucian and Neo-Daoist notions of language and statecraft. The Chỉ nam appears to have been produced at a time when the vernacular world had expanded beyond the marginalized Buddhist exile of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and was colliding with a secular world ruled by Literary Sinitic. This required an active and conscious reconciling of the two scripts, languages, and intellectual modes. The effort to reconcile such disparate worlds is remarkably expressed in the two prefaces of the Chỉ nam. The dictionary opens with a versed (six-eight meter) preface composed in Vietnamese (Nôm), followed by a prose preface composed in Literary Sinitic. I will conduct

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The leìjù were encyclopedic handbooks (usually rendered as “compendia,” as distinguished from “encyclopedias,” cóngshū 叢書) arranged according to topic (e.g., “The Heavens,” “Geography,” “Man”) and were used by Chinese literati to look up appropriate or literarily sanctioned ways of using different abstruse terms. The genre can literally be translated as “collected categories.” For a full discussion of both authorship and dating, see Phan 2013a, chap. 7; 2013b.

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a reading of each in turn, followed by an analysis of the two as a single, continuous text.50 The Nôm Preface The author begins by paying his respects to an unnamed “wife of the crown prince of the imperial family,” which may be a reference to the Lê empress Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc 鄭氏玉竹 (quite likely, the compiler of the dictionary). Unlike the Literary Sinitic text (as discussed in the next section), the Nôm preface situates itself firmly in contemporary Đại Việt and even acknowledges the “orthodox” world of the imperial family. The author then provides a terse résumé of his own educational background, which encompasses both orthodox Confucian pursuits and the esoteric ambitions of Buddhism: When young, I was famed in the civil lists. [Now] old, I range the courses of the Buddha in the immortal realm. Trẻ từng vả đấng khoa danh Già lên cõi thọ tầm doành bụt tiên Thus, the author is neither a Confucian who frowns upon the vernacular nor a Buddhist with no claim to orthodox intellectuality. The author then promotes the dictionary with the same equanimity: [If you wish to] recite sutras or read the books of the Sages [or to] master the Three Teachings and participate in the exegesis of writings, Then choose this guide, Which has penetrated heaven and earth yet also understands the human heart. Tụng kinh đọc sách thánh hiền Tải thông ba giáo dự lên sách bầy Bèn chọn quyền chỉ nam này Đã thông thiên địa lại hay nhân tình51

50 51

The following discussion expands on the analysis I presented in Phan 2013b. All translations of the Chỉ nam are my own, based on manuscript AB.372, held at the Institute for Han-Nôm Research (Viện nghiên cứu Hán-Nôm) in Hanoi. Because only a small

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The author has gone out of his way to proclaim a harmonious union between Confucian and Buddhist pursuits, and he describes his book as an indispensable resource for either. Daoism is also alluded to (in the “Three Teachings” 三 教); however, it is clearly not a major player in the intellectual landscape. It is thus quite tempting to read a conflict of intellectual worlds into these kinds of statements—a sort of intellectual margin between Confucian orthodoxy and dispossessed Buddhism, along which the vernacular has begun to blossom. After this laconic salvo, the author quickly turns his attention to the nature of writing itself: When the ancient Sages established characters, [they] considered the form, Taking the side to indicate meaning, and the body to indicate sound. Thánh xưa đặt chữ xem hình Lấy bằng làm nghĩa lấy mình làm tên Here, the author establishes his core definition of orthodox writing: it must have graphemes that combine semantic and phonetic information; in other words, it is “semantosyllabic.”52 The Sages—the ultimate intellectual models—are depicted as creating explicitly semantosyllabic writing; thus, any script that deviates from this pattern is defective (or so the claim goes). This is clearly a fictionalizing of history, but it demonstrates an overt preference for semantosyllabicity, which played an important role in the development of Nôm.53 The author goes on to track the dissemination of this sagely writing system across many peoples: [This] teaching issued forth to ten thousand nations, who transmitted it over and again. Different nations [employ] different speech, but characters are printed according to one rule.

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inventory of Chữ Nôm characters have been digitized, I have transliterated all Vietnamese text into the modern alphabetic system called Quốc Ngữ. Semantosyllabic characters, traditionally called hình thanh 形聲 characters, combine a semantic classifier with a phonetic graph, thus providing both “semantic” and “syllabic” information in a single grapheme, such as 氵(meaning “water”) + 可 (Old Chinese *khâiʔ) = 河 (meaning “river,” Old Chinese *gâi) (Old Chinese forms taken from Schuessler 2007). For more on the intellectual privileging of semantosyllabic characters, see Phan 2013b. For more on the importance of semantosyllabicity, see Phan 2013b.

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Giáo ra muôn nước thừa truyền Khác nước khác tiếng chữ in một lề What is striking about this couplet is that writing is described as a subduer of linguistic differences—it unites and overcomes language barriers and, in so doing, spreads civilization. The counterproductive diversity of speech (an obstacle to civilization) is neutralized by writing, which follows the “single rule” of semantosyllabicity. This is, in effect, the superiority of writing over speech. Note also that there is no mention of China or the Chinese in this terse history; rather, the Sages are presented as the common progenitors of human civilization, with the only defining characteristic of the “civilized” being the use of a semantosyllabic writing system. This broad argument is then directly applied to the Vietnamese context. Here, the author admits that vernacular speech differs from the Sinitic mold: As for common speech, there are orthodox and unorthodox sounds, [But] its established script is in accordance with the Sages. Nói nôm tiếng thị tiếng phi Đến lập văn chữ lại y thánh hiền Thus, just as in his broader narrative of the world’s languages, the author here describes the vernacular (lit., nôm) as different from the orthodox cosmopolitan language (i.e., it bears “unorthodox sounds”); however, this is not a problem, because the script adheres to the sagely principles of writing—that is, it is semantosyllabic. There is a precision to the author’s description of the orthodoxy and unorthodoxy of vernacular sounds. This probably reflects the comparison of the vernacular with a fossilized inventory of Chinese syllables—more specifically, the Hán-Việt syllabary, as necessitated by the graphemic construction of Nôm (see above). It is a good question to pose whether or not medieval Chinese philological sources like the Rhyme Tables 韻圖 and Rhyme Books 韻 書 were also used in the conventionalization of this orthodox syllabary.54 54

The rhyme books were indices of rhymes that became handbooks for orthodox poetic composition. The rhyme tables were originally composed to help decipher the rhyme books, whose phonology had become opaque over time. The most influential rhyme book is the Qieyun 切韻 (published in 601), compiled by Lu Fayan 陸法言 (581–618) from notes he took as part of an informal workshop of philologists held after the Sui reunification. For most of history, the Qieyun was known from its eleventh-century expansion, Chen Pengnian’s 陳彭年 (961–1017) Guangyun 廣韻, whose fanqie transcriptions defined rhyming standards for the civil service examinations. The earliest known rhyme table is

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At this point, the author slows down the rhetorical flow of the preface by switching to another meter: double seven, six-eight. The insertion of a sevensyllable couplet disrupts the rhythmic singsong nature of six-eight meter, lending a more prose-like sensibility and an opportunity for emphasis. As Taylor has noted, it is a kind of metrical stress employed to tether the audience’s attention to a particular passage.55 In this case, the author is focusing our attention on the history of Nôm itself. The author begins with the reign of the beloved Han governor Sĩ Nhiếp 士燮 (137–226):56 Assuming the throne within the passes, the mantle of governance,57 [He] inherited the former work of [our] Qin and Han ancestors. Because he compiled and disseminated his book, The meanings of all categories were understood, the right names never confused. Nhập quan trung ngôi thừa tướng phủ Thu được Tần Hán tổ công tiên Vì chưng có sổ chép biên gióng nào hiểu ý thực tên chẳng lầm Although unnamed, the identity of the ruler is understood to be Sĩ Nhiếp, who assumed governance of the region just as the Han dynasty was falling—that is, he “inherited the former work of Qin and Han ancestors.”58 Note that “within the passes” 關中 here refers to the Red River Plain (northern Vietnam), not the Shaanxi and Central Plains (i.e., the traditional heartland of China). This line reflects the common but ambiguous conception of Sĩ Nhiếp as both a benevolent Han governor and an independent Vietnamese ruler. More importantly, Sĩ

55 56

57 58

the Yunjing 韻經 compiled by Zhang Linzhi 張麟之 (with two prefaces: 1161 and 1203). For a discussion of the importance of these texts to historical Chinese phonology, see Pulleyblank 1998. See also Phan 2013a, chap. 3. Taylor 2011, 185. Shi Xie was born in Cangwu Commandery, educated in He’nan, and assumed power in Jiaozhi (Giao Chỉ, the Han dynasty territory in northern Vietnam) in the 180s (Taylor 1983a, 70). More literally: “Assuming the throne within the passes and undertaking the ministerial office.” The language here implies that the “Qin and Han” ancestors were also the ancestors of the Vietnamese.

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Nhiếp is credited with bringing an intellectual clarity to Vietnam by composing a text that ordered the right sounds and meanings of things (i.e., a dictionary). He thus acts as a latter-day sage, who brings the luminosity of writing into Vietnamese lands. And yet, while casting no blame on Sĩ Nhiếp’s achievements, the author suggests that the vernacular writing of the past was primitive and cumbersome: In the past, Nôm had many doubled characters. The uneducated found [them] difficult to read or understand. Vốn xưa làm Nôm xe chữ kép Người thiếu hộc khôn biết khon xem The “doubled” characters of earlier Nôm probably refer to a kind of complex syllabo-alphabetic spelling that lacked any kind of semantic element—for example, the combination of 巴 (ba) + 賴 (lai) to render Middle Vietnamese blãi (“fruit”; modern Viet. trãi). As Nguyễn has suggested, these may be a direct reference to the kind of Nôm found in the Phật thuyết.59 These kinds of characters are problematic for the author precisely because they represent flagrant violations of the semantosyllabic principle and in fact represent the most un-Sinitic of Nôm writing. Digraphic words also violated the logo-/morphographic principle (i.e., one meaningful unit per square graph)—probably the most difficult issue to ignore from a Sinographic point of view. These primitive forms of Nôm are then compared with the allegedly refined forms of the author’s time. Indeed, at the heart of the author’s claims lies the idea that Nôm has evolved: Now, Nôm is taught with simple [or simplex] characters, So that even beginners may easily read and master [them]. The sounds of the graphs are intuitive; they require no explanation.60 [So] do not laugh, saying that lacking strokes they are rustic. Bây chừ Nôm dạy chữ đan Cho người mới học nghỉ xem nghỉ nhuận

59 60

Nguyễn Quang Hồng 2008, 139. More literally: “The sounds of the characters are close to what is learned; there is no need to teach them.”

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Âm tự gần học lọ dạy biết Mựa cười rằng mất nét thì quê Nôm is now streamlined, learnable, and straightforward. But most importantly, Nôm is “in accordance with the Sages”—it is an elegant, readable, semantosyllabic script just like Han characters. This is, of course, a relatively bold fiction. The Nôm of the Chỉ nam is neither standardized nor even very semantosyllabic; according to one count, the text is composed of 82 percent phonographic characters and a mere 18 percent semantosyllabic characters.61 Nevertheless, what is important is the conceptualization of Nôm as something sagely and on a par with Han characters, rather than something heterodox and crude. Note also that there is virtually no mention of China or the Chinese anywhere in the Nôm preface, with the slight and indirect exception of the “Qin and Han ancestors,” which are also implied as a common heritage. The Sages are presented as nationless progenitors of human civilization, which is defined principally by the use of semantosyllabic writing. The absence of the Chinese in the invention and dissemination of that writing is an important silence of the Nôm preface, whereas their presence is conspicuously voiced in the Literary Sinitic text. The Literary Sinitic Preface In contrast to the historically and geographically rooted Nôm preface, the Literary Sinitic preface opens on to a primordial stage: Lo, when the positions of the Three Fundamental Powers were established, all was a jumbled vastness, [and] men and phenomena were difficult to name. 夫，三才定位，盖混茫，人物難名。 Use of the cosmopolitan medium licenses the author to amplify his discussion to cosmological levels. The primordial past is characterized by a fundamental confusion of names and meanings. This intellectual wilderness is ordered by the Five Thearchs 五帝, who “established the foundations [of the realm] and set up provinces and districts.”62 61 62

Trần Xuân 1985, 51. The “Five Emperors” or the “Five Thearchs” are the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝), Zhuan Xu 颛顼, Di Ku 帝喾, Tang Yao 帝喾, and Yu Shun 虞舜. They were considered the founders of civilization.

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The author elaborates on the domesticative power of the Sages in a specifically metalinguistic context: Mountains and springs, grasses and trees have their form and have their designation. The numerous categories were extremely complex. With neither writing nor the proper indication of names, the multitude of ignorants found it difficult to discern [things]. 山川，草木有其形而有其號。庶類甚繁。非文字亦非指名，群 蒙難識。(my emphasis) Here, the text alludes to a long-standing tradition in Chinese metalinguistics of an underlying logic governing what in Saussurian terms would be signifiers and the signified. In this case, the author uses forms 形 and designations 號, but the essential principle is the same—except that there is an orthodoxy dictating which forms are expressed by which designations. In fact, the scrambling of such an order is thought to cause both intellectual and sociopolitical chaos. One of the oldest contributions to this notion can be found in the Analects, where the character of Confucius claims: “If names are not proper, then speech is disordered. If speech is disordered, then affairs cannot proceed” (Analects, 13:3).63 Thus, if the proper ordering of forms and designations (to use the Chỉ nam terminology) is confused, the ordering of the state itself is in danger. The hierarchy of forms and their designations was also taken up by Neo-Daoist (xuan­xue 玄學) philosopher Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249), who described a “distinguishing of names” 辨名 as a prerequisite to the accurate parsing of reality.64 63

64

The entire passage reads: “Zilu said, ‘If the Prince of Wei were waiting for you to come and administer his country for him, what would you command first?’ The Master said, ‘It would certainly be rectifying names!’ Zilu said, ‘Is it so?! You deflect! Why that policy?!’ The Master said, ‘You! How boorish you are! A gentleman, when things he does not understand are mentioned, should maintain an attitude of reserve. If names are not proper, then speech is disordered. If speech is disordered, then affairs cannot proceed. If affairs cannot proceed, then rites and music cannot flourish. If rites and music cannot flourish, then mutilations and lesser punishments will be off-center. If mutilations and lesser punishments are off-center, people will have nowhere to put hand or foot. Therefore, the gentleman names only [lit., “essentially”] that which can be [properly] spoken and speaks only that which can be implemented. In speech, a gentleman leaves nothing to chance’” (my translation, from the text in Huang 2008, 1148–1157). Wang Bi argued that one could grasp reality only if the linguistic categories used to represent it were properly ordered: “If one cannot distinguish names, then it is impossible to speak about principles with him; if one cannot speak about principles, then it is

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It is in this tradition that the preface author describes the preliterate chaos of the world. Of course, the Sages arrive to alleviate this condition of universal suffering—in this case, by the invention of writing: Thus, since ancient times, the Sages have established the side to indicate meaning, thereby rectifying the speaking of names. 夫，自古聖人立傍說義，以正言名。65 The “side” here refers to the semantic classifier (部首) that occupies the side of a character. Again, the Sages invent writing, and again the writing they invent is semantosyllabic.66 This is the only moment in the two prefaces where there is an almost word-for-word correspondence between the two texts; compare this with the analogous Nôm line already discussed: When the ancient Sages established characters, [they] considered the form, Taking the side to indicate meaning, and the body to indicate sound. Thánh xưa đặt chữ xem hình Lấy bằng làm nghĩa lấy mình làm tên As is by now amply clear, neither preface can be understood as a translation of the other. However, the close similarity between these two passages forms a rhetorical tether between them, simultaneously allowing us to read the two

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impossible to discuss truth with him” 夫不能辨名，則不可與言理。不能定名，則 不可與論實也 (Wang and Lou 1980, 1.195). There is another way to read the Literary Sinitic here that produces an even tighter parallelism with the Nôm. Instead of positing an underlying pronoun (之) after the coverb 以 and reading 正言名 as factor- (正) -object (言名), one can take 正 as the object of the coverb 以—thus giving something like “and took the main [part] to articulate the name.” In this reading, the nominal 正 (main part) would be parallel with the mình (body) of the Nôm line. However, this is not the most natural way to parse the sentence, and so I have preferred the factor-object reading in my translation. Though not named, the author clearly has in mind Cang Jie 倉頡 (Thương Hiệt), the mythical inventor of Han characters.

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prefaces as a single, continuous text and underscoring the importance of semantosyllabicity as the guiding principle of sagely writing.67 In a striking departure from the Nôm preface, the Literary Sinitic preface goes on to define the role of the Chinese in the history of writing: [Semantosyllabic writing] allowed the Middle Kingdom to understand [things] easily, [while] the outer barbarians were left in confusion. 使中國易明，外夷尤或。68 The line between civilized and wild is now explicitly drawn between the Middle Kingdom and the outer barbarians. There is no politic silence regarding the Han origins of writing, as in the Nôm preface. Rather, the superiority of the Middle Kingdom is explained—as a natural effect of its inheritance of semantosyllabic writing. The Middle Kingdom is able to order an intellectual wilderness that continues to befuddle and mire the outer barbarians, ostensibly explaining its cultural and political advantage throughout history. Han supremacy in the world, according to the author, boils down to a technological advantage—with the key technology being semantosyllabic writing. The position of the Vietnamese with regard to both the Middle Kingdom and the outer barbarians is deliberately ambiguous here. Vietnamese intellectuals with orthodox training considered themselves part of the educated elite of East Asia and did not by any means place themselves on the “barbarian” side of its intellectual geography. Nevertheless, the prefaces are discussing the nature and evolution of the vernacular mode, and the vernacular mode was most certainly viewed by Vietnamese intellectuals as a crude and untamed world. The author of the prefaces is therefore somewhat culturally delinked from the vernacular he discusses. He is implying that the vernacular world, analogous to the mired and backward barbarians, is a disorderly and uncivilized realm— but he does not include Vietnam or Vietnamese intellectuals in this characterization. Indeed, the Vietnamese elite considered themselves already civilized by their mastery of Literary Sinitic. Nevertheless, the vernacular is envisioned almost as a geographical space within the otherwise-civilized Vietnamese realm, one that has not yet been cleared or cultivated, a kind of cultural frontier that is wild, unorthodox, and unintelligible. This, of course, has now changed. 67 68

For a more explicit discussion of the joint nature of the two prefaces, especially in consideration of the domesticative power of writing, see Phan 2013b. Here, the author uses 或 for 惑.

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According to the author of the prefaces, others have attempted to domesticate the vernacular in the past. In another striking repetition of the Nôm preface, the author turns again to the reign of Sĩ Nhiếp: [We] arrive at the time of King Sĩ, who turned his chariot toward our country [and ruled] for over forty years. [He] greatly spread civilization69 and unraveled the meanings of southern customs. In order to penetrate chapter and verse, he collected the Poems and Songs in the Kingdom’s Speech; for the purpose of comprehending their designations and names, he organized their rhymes [in the] Guide to Collected Works; altogether, two fascicles. 至於士王之時，移車就國四十餘年。大行教化，解義南俗。以 通章句集成國語詩歌，以識號名韻依指南品彙，上下二卷。 The prose in this passage is rather elided and requires some unpacking. Two actions are attributed to Sĩ Nhiếp (who is referred to by name here): (1) collecting vernacular poems and songs into a kind of anthology (the Poems and Songs in the Kingdom’s Speech) and (2) reasoning out the sounds and rhymes of the vernacular to understand them, thus creating the first vernacular glossary (the Guide to Collected Works).70 Note that while King Sĩ was chiefly brought up to initiate a narrative about the history of Nôm in the last preface, here the writing system is ignored, and instead, his anthology and vernacular glossary are lauded as a kind of successful intellectual “taming” of southern culture. Yet this ancient attempt to order the vernacular was not completely successful. As in the Nôm preface, a deficiency in past vernacularity is described. However, rather than discuss the mechanics of Nôm itself, the author focuses instead on the glossary as a whole: Scholars found it difficult to comprehend. This old monk pays homage to Hương Ngọc, who has glossed its characters and unraveled its meanings, and handwritten them into a book. [This work] can be said to elucidate 69 70

More literally: “transformed [peoples] through teaching.” I have chosen to interpret “Poems and Songs in the Kingdom’s Speech” as a title here, although it is perfectly possible to read this phrase as an action (i.e., “he collected poems and songs in the kingdom’s speech”). Later references to Sĩ Nhiếp’s work focus on the Guide to Collected Works, which may suggest that he was credited with only one book and that this phrase should not be read as a title. However, the presence of the word thành 成 suggests to me that Sĩ Nhiếp’s book had two parts: the first, a collection of poems and songs, and the second, a glossary to go with them.

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the minute essence of the Sage [i.e., King Sĩ] and allows its readers to navigate rhymes and connect tones. 學者難詳。茲宿禪謹香玉，音其字，解其義，手寫帙成。可謂 明明賢詳之要，使其讀者走韻連聲。 Thus, the Literary Sinitic preface overtly claims the present dictionary to be an explication (giải nghĩa 解義) of Sĩ Nhiếp’s original work—that is, the vernacular glossary to southern songs and poems entitled Guide to Collected Works (Chỉ nam phẩm vị 指南品彙).71 Nôm was described as an evolved form of writing in the vernacular preface; in the Literary Sinitic preface, Nôm is ignored and the Chỉ nam itself is described (respectfully) as a clarification of Sĩ Nhiếp’s text. In this way, the Literary Sinitic preface avoids any overt mention or discussion of Chữ Nôm—an important silence that, as we have already seen, is fully voiced in the Nôm preface. The Literary Sinitic preface thus narrates the spread of civilization beginning with the Sages, who invent semantosyllabic writing (thereby giving the Middle Kingdom a technological edge over the outer barbarians), then moves on to the efforts of Sĩ Nhiếp, who domesticated southern culture and language by creating a glossary of poems and songs, finally arriving at the merits of the present dictionary—a clarification and modernizing of Sĩ Nhiếp’s work. The author, who speaks in the (Literary Sinitic) voice of the classical literatus, identifies the vernacular, which has hitherto suffered from a lack of proper semantosyllabic representation, as an example of the backwardness of the outer barbarians. Semantosyllabic writing (in the form of the Han script) is depicted as the supreme invention of the Middle Kingdom, responsible for its unrivaled intellectual superiority. Nôm is not mentioned at all. Augmenting the Cosmopolitan Each preface presents a contoured narrative that is complemented by the shape of the other. The Nôm preface describes the history of vernacular writing as an evolution toward sageliness, with no mention of a division between the middle and the periphery. The Literary Sinitic preface describes the spread of civilization as an effect of the Middle Kingdom’s invention of writing, with no mention of Nôm whatsoever. Both prefaces focus on Sĩ Nhiếp as a source of illumination, and both prefaces define sagely writing as semantosyllabic. 71

This is one of the most contested passages of the Chỉ nam, mostly because of what appears to be a reference to a female author. For a discussion of the identity of the Chỉ nam compiler, see Phan 2013a, section 7.33.

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If read as a single, continuous text, these disparate elements join together like a jigsaw puzzle, to articulate a rebranding of Nôm as a legitimate extension of Sinitic writing technology. As I have discussed elsewhere, this is accomplished through a kind of rhetorical transitivity.72 In brief, the Nôm preface praises Chữ Nôm as a fully formed, semantosyllabic writing system; the Literary Sinitic preface then describes the domesticative and civilizing power of the Han semantosyllabic writing system. By rhetorical transitivity, the reader cannot escape the conclusion that, just like the Han script, Nôm is also a fully civilizing, sagely writing system capable of domesticating intellectually wild and unorthodox spaces. That said, Nôm is not offered in competition with the Han script; the author’s emphasis on the shared principle of semantosyllabicity eliminates this possibility. Rather, by claiming that Nôm operates according to the same principles as Han characters, the author is attempting to recast Nôm as part and parcel of the same technological system—an extension of that technology to cover southern thought and expression. The author is effectively trying to reformat the reigning conceptualization of Nôm: to refute the idea that Nôm is different and inferior and to replace it with the idea that Nôm is nothing more than an extension or augmentation of the orthodox, classical, and cosmopolitan Han script. Finally, only the mature, bilingual literatus is capable of accessing the complete message of the two prefaces. As Taylor has noted, students were probably limited to reading the vernacular preface, due to their defective or incomplete mastery of Literary Sinitic.73 However, the mature intellectual—master of both Nôm and Han characters, and thus vernacular speech and Literary Sinitic—would read these prefaces seamlessly: as a single, continuous text. This fluid and undivided consumption of the bilingual prefaces, in turn, becomes a sort of justifying praxis for rebooting Nôm as a legitimate extension of Han writing technology. If Nôm and Han characters, vernacular speech and Literary Sinitic, could coexist within the mind of a single literatus, then surely this was proof that the gulf between the vernacular and the classical had been successfully obliterated. In other words, this last, undomesticated region of the southern civilized world was finally ready for mature, literate cultivation.

72 73

Phan 2013b. Taylor 2011, 184.

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A Crossroads in the History of Vernacularization The Chỉ nam was most likely compiled by the Lê empress Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc 鄭氏玉竹 (1619–1643) and published under her religious name of Pháp Tính 法性 at a private Buddhist temple in 1641. This places it directly between the low-level vernacularity of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the highlevel fecundity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such a dating illuminates the uniquely self-conscious defense of Chữ Nôm that we find in the text of the Chỉ nam prefaces. We can imagine a slow crescendo of vernacularity building in temples far from the orthodox Neo-Confucianism of the Lê court, to the point where it overflowed the confining margins of its Buddhist enclosure. Moreover, it is not difficult to imagine that educated women might have embraced vernacular writing in these spaces of unorthodoxy—nor would such a thing be unique in the history of East Asia. The diary tradition in Japan comes to mind immediately, as does the covert syllabary known as nüshu 女 書, used by the women of southern Hunan to represent a local variety of Southern Xiang 湘南土話. The marginalized status of the Lê Buddhist temple may have provided a natural habitat for intellectually curious women who were barred from orthodox education. Indeed, throughout the early modern period, the temple was considered a feminine space while the đình 庭, a sort of Confucian community hall, was the domain of men.74 The Chỉ nam was produced toward the end of this “Buddhist exile,” during another convulsive moment in the educational history of Vietnam. Despite the establishment of a Neo-Confucian educational system in the fifteenth century, classical literacy waned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Đại Việt plunged into factionalized civil war—first between the Mạc 莫 clan and the Trịnh 鄭 and Nguyễn 阮 clans and then between the Trịnh and Nguyễn themselves. Taylor describes a “pedagogical crisis” in the seventeenth century, in which “students were being defeated in their efforts to bridge the gap between vernacular speech and classical literacy.”75 It is not hard to imagine the rising popularity of vernacular practices during a time when classical literacy was being eroded. In fact, this decay of orthodox education may have helped to level the playing field between Confucian scholars and the Buddhist intellectuals who were engaging with the vernacular. It was exactly during this time— the middle of the seventeenth century—that the Chỉ nam was produced.

74 75

For a discussion of the social and cultural roles of the temple and community hall, see Hà 1993, 1998. Taylor 2011, 187.

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It was thus, perhaps, the felicitous coincidence of a growing (if subaltern) cultivation of Chữ Nôm with the erosion of orthodox literacy among the mainstream that spurred the author of the Chỉ nam prefaces to redefine Chữ Nôm. For the author, Nôm was now worthy of broader use because it was no longer something different from and inferior to the classical script; it was now equal to and of the same substance with Han characters and could be used for both Buddhist and Confucian purposes. Of course, this “rebranding” of Nôm did not overturn the reality that Vietnamese and Literary Sinitic were separate and mutually unintelligible languages, nor did it, with very few exceptions, lead to the adoption of the Nôm vernacular for documentary or administrative purposes. Nevertheless, the change in vernacular practices is remarkable, and from the eighteenth century onward, Nôm was rapidly adopted as a new and innovative vehicle for belletristic experimentation and expression. Whether it spurred this shift in language valorization or simply reflected it, the reconceptualization of Nôm articulated in the Chỉ nam prefaces heralded a new era of vernacular literature, in which Vietnamese writers reveled in the new possibilities for expression afforded by the hybridizing and synergistic fusion of the classical and vernacular modes. This study has described a “rebooting” of Vietnamese vernacular practices around the middle of the seventeenth century. Evidence for vernacular writing before the fifteenth century is scant and circumstantial, yet nevertheless suggests a growing practice during the Trần dynasty in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This tradition peaked with imperial endorsement, at least as a pedagogical tool, during Hồ Quý Ly’s brief reign from 1400 to 1407. However, whatever vernacular practices were cultivated until that point were severely disrupted by the Ming occupation of Vietnam from 1407 to 1427 and the subsequent establishment of a strong Neo-Confucian society by the Lê dynasty in the fifteenth century. And yet it was during this golden age of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy that the use of the vernacular began to grow in earnest, along the margins of intellectual society—specifically fostered in the temples of the dispossessed Buddhist elite. The transmogrification of the Literary Sinitic text of the Cổ Châu for non-elite needs and tastes stands out as an important example of early vernacular creativity. This nevertheless subaltern practice laid the foundations for what would ultimately become a thriving and mainstream vernacular tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, such a meteoric ascent required a paradigm shift in the conception of Nôm itself—an erasure of the idea that it was an inferior and defective replica of the Han script and the promotion in its stead of the concept that it was now a legitimate and authentic extension of Han writing technology. These are the claims that we find in the bilingual prefaces to the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa, a text that cuts

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across categories of society, religion, language, script, and even gender. It stands at a crossroads in the history of vernacular writing; but rather than attempt to break with the prevailing mode, it seeks to align, fuse, and unite. It is in this sense an uncanny prediction of the kind of avant-garde, hybridized vernacular literature that would flourish in the following two centuries. Then again, since the author of its prefaces so shrewdly refuted the intellectual biases that had hitherto proscribed the use of Nôm, perhaps this is not so surprising after all. The dictionary was recarved at least twice more after its initial production. In the claims of the prefaces to the Chỉ nam, perhaps Vietnamese intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found exactly the justification and license they needed to explore a new realm of thought, imagination, and expression—a “guide,” so to speak, to the reimagined world of the vernacular. References Birch, Cyril, and Donald Keene 1965. An Anthology of Chinese Literature. New York: Grove Press. Đào Duy Anh 1975. Chữ nôm: Nguồn gốc, cấu tạo, diễn biến [Chữ Nôm: Origins, structure, and development]. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội. –––––– 2010. Đất nước Việt Nam qua các đời [The country of Vietnam, across every era]. Hanoi: NXB Văn hoá thông tin. Hà Văn Tiến 1993. Chùa Việt Nam [Buddhist temples in Vietnam]. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội. –––––– 1998. Đình Việt Nam [Community halls in Vietnam]. Ho Chi Minh City: NXB Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh. Huang Huaisheng, ed. 2008. Lunyu huijiao jishi 論語匯校集釋 [The Analects collated with commentary]. Shanghai: Gujie chubanshe. Huỳnh Sanh Thông 1983. Introduction to D. Nguyên, The Tale of Kiều: A Bilingual Edition, translated by S.T. Huynh. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, xix–xl. –––––– 1996. An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems from the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Jacques, Guillaume 2006. Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology. Leiden: n.p. Lý Tế Xuyên 1999. Departed Spirits of the Viet Realm, translated by K. Taylor and B. Ostrowski. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Ngô Sĩ Liên, Chen Jinghe 陳荆和, and Tōkyō Daigaku 1984. Daietsu shiki zensho: Kōgōbon 大越史記全書 : 校合本 [Complete records of the historical annals of Đại Việt: Collated edition]. Tokyo: Tōkyō Daigaku Tōyō Bunka Kenkyūjo Fuzoku Tōyōgaku Bunken Sentā.

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Nguyễn Đình Hoà 1995. “On Chỉ-nam Ngọc-âm Giải-nghĩa: An Early Chinese-Vietnamese Dictionary,” in B.B. Kachru, ed., Cultures, Ideologies, and the Dictionary: Studies in Honor of Ladislav Zgusta. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 119–126. –––––– 2005. Văn minh Đại Việt [Đại Việt civilization]. Hanoi: NXB Văn hoá thông tin. Nguyễn Khắc Viện 2009. Vietnam, a Long History. Hanoi: Thế Giới Publishers. Nguyễn Quang Hồng 1997. Di văn Chùa Dâu [Literary traces of Mulberry Temple]. Hanoi: NXB Khoa học xã hội. –––––– 2008. Khái luận văn tự học Chữ Nôm [An outline of the writing system of Chữ Nôm]. Ho Chi Minh City: NXB Giáo Dục. Nguyễn Tài Cẩn 1979. Nguồn gốc và quá trình hình thành cách đọc Hán Việt [The origins and formation of the Hán Việt reading system]. Hanoi: Khoa học Xã hội. –––––– 1985. Một số vấn đề về Chữ nôm [A few issues concerning Chữ Nôm]. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Đại học và Trung học chuyên nghiệp. Nienhauser, W.H. 1986. Indiana Companion to Chinese Literature, vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Phan, John D. 2013a. “Lacquered Words: The Evolution of Vietnamese under Sinitic Influences, from the First Century BCE through the Seventeenth Century CE.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University. –––––– 2013b. “The Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8, 1: 1–33. Pollock, S. 2000. “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, 3: 591–625. –––––– 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pulleyblank, E.G. 1998. “Qieyun and Yunjing: The Essential Foundation for Chinese Historical Linguistics,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118, 2 (April 1): 200–216. Quốc Sử Quán 1998. Khâm định Việt sử thông giám cương mục [Officially mandated detailed sketch of the comprehensive mirror of Việt history], translated by Institute of Historical Studies. Hanoi: NXB Giáo dục. Schuessler, A. 2007. ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Shimizu Masaaki 清水正明 1996. 漢文=字喃文対訳『佛説大報父母恩重経』に 見る字喃について [On the Chữ Nôm characters contained in the Sino-Vietnamese text of “Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh”], 人間環境學 [Human and Environmental Studies] 5: 83–104. –––––– 2010. A Phonological Reconstruction of Fifteenth Century Vietnamese Using Chữ Nôm 字喃 Materials. International Conference on Vietnamese and Taiwanese Studies, October 16–17. Taiwan: National Cheng Kung University of Taiwan.

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Shimizu Masaaki 清水正明, Lê Thị Liên, and Momoki Shiro 桃木至朗 1998. 護城山 獘碑文に見る字喃について. 東南アジア研究 [Chữ Nôm characters contained in the inscription of Hộ Thành Mountain], Tounan ajia kenkyu 東南アジア研究 36, 2: 149–177. Taylor, K. 1983a. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––– 1983b. “The ‘Twelve Lords’ in Tenth-Century Vietnam,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14: 46–62. –––––– 1986. “Looking behind the Vietnamese Annals: Lý Phật Mã and Lý Nhật Tôn in the Việt sử lược and the Toàn thư,” Vietnam Forum 7: 47–68. –––––– 2002. “Vietnamese Confucian Narratives,” in B.A. Elman, J.B. Duncan, and H. Ooms, eds., Rethinking Confucianism: Past and Present in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 337–369. –––––– 2005. “Sino-Vietnamese Translation from Classical to Vernacular,” in E. Hung and J. Wakabayashi, eds., Asian Translation Traditions. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome, 169–194. –––––– 2011. “Literacy in Early Seventeenth-Century Northern Vietnam,” in M.A. AungThwin, ed., New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations. New York: Routledge, 183–198. Trần Trọng Kim 1964. Việt-nam sử lược [A historical outline of Vietnam]. Saigon: NXB Tân Việt. Trần Văn Giáp 1969. “Lược khảo nguồn gốc Chữ Nôm” [A summary investigation into the origins of Chữ Nôm], Nghiên cứu lịch sử 127 (October): 7–25. Trần Xuân Ngọc Lan 1985. Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩ [Explication of the guide to jeweled sounds]. Hanoi: Khoa học Xã hộ. Wang Bi and Lou Yulie 1980. Wang Bi ji jiao shi [Collected writings of Wang Bi, edited with commentary]. Beijing: Zhonghua shu ju. Whitmore, J.K. 1985. Vietnam, Hồ Quý Ly, and the Ming (1371–1421). New Haven, CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies. Woodside, A. 1971. Vietnam and the Chinese Model. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

the Literary Classics inJapan Premodern Japan 129 MediatingMediating The Literary Classics In Premodern

Mediating the Literary Classics: Commentary and Translation in Premodern Japan Haruo Shirane Introduction The English term “vernacular” cannot be translated into modern Japanese by any single term. The standard Japanese translations are zokugo (lit., “vulgar language,” used in contrast to gago, “elegant language,” or kobun, “high classical language”), nichijōgo (everyday language), and kōgo (spoken language). Each of these three terms reflects some aspect of the English term “vernacular” (its social level, its content, its usage, and its mode of transmission). Here, I use the term “vernacular” to refer to a written language that reflects (to a limited extent) the spoken language, which remains in constant flux, in contrast to classical language (kobun), which attained a certain linguistic stability and canonicity. This vernacular, however, was not necessarily “low” as the term zokugo suggests. Different types of vernacular emerged at different historical stages and often coexisted. The first to appear was hiragana, the vernacular written language of the Heian period (794–1185), exemplified by the Tale of Genji and other vernacular classics. This was followed by wakan-konkōbun (Sino-Japanese mixed style), which was often in katakana (alphabetic script) and which derived from Japanese reading conventions (kundoku) for classical Chinese. (Kundoku can also be considered a type of translation, from classical Chinese to a written form of classical Japanese.) A third stage was the transcription of spoken Japanese, particularly that of commoners (the kana found in the Tale of Genji and other Heian period vernacular literature is that of nobility), which first appeared in the kyōgen (comic) plays in the late Muromachi period (fifteenth–sixteenth centuries). This type of transcription laid the groundwork for the rise of vernacular fiction in the Edo period (1600–1864), which mixed spoken Japanese with the earlier, classical forms of the vernacular. By the eighteenth century, a significant gap had emerged between the classical Japanese of the Heian period (now referred to as kobun), which had become a “high vernacular” associated with the court and aristocratic culture, and the new “demotic vernacular” of the early modern era, associated with commoners. In the late eighteenth century, a movement related to nativist studies (Kokugaku) and the Chinese bunjin (literati) ideal developed a neoclassical

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high style of Japanese that harked back to an earlier golden age of high (Heian) vernacular Japanese (prior to the wakan-konkōbun style) and that was closely associated with Buddhist literature and writing. By this time, high (Heian) vernacular Japanese had been classicized and become as distant as classical or literary Chinese. As this essay shows, in this context, demotic vernacular translations of the Heian Japanese classics became a very important mediator between new readers and the Japanese (Heian period) classics. In short, I argue that there were two kinds of translation: between literary Chinese (Literary Sinitic) and Japanese high vernacular and between Japanese high vernacular and demotic vernacular, or what I call intervernacular translation, and that commentaries played a major role as mediators between these sociolinguistic registers. The Cosmopolitan and the Vernacular As is well known, in the first millennium CE, western Europe was culturally and linguistically unified by Latin, which was closely affiliated with the Christian church. From around the beginning of the second millennium (from roughly the year 1000 onward), various regional languages or vernaculars—such as French, German, English, and Spanish—were used for documentary purposes and then, often after a gap of several centuries, were increasingly employed for literary purposes, giving birth to various vernacular literatures. In Germany, for example, in a period of some twenty years, about 1160 to 1180, German emerged as a literary language, and by around 1230, courtly society had produced a radiant literary flowering, which centered on lyrical court poetry and the court romance. French literature began with the chansons de geste (e.g., La chanson de Roland) and then the romance (e.g., Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances, such as Lancelot, in the 1170s). The Old French word romanz originally meant “the speech of the people,” or “the vulgar tongue,” and came from a popular Latin word, romanice, meaning “written in the vernacular,” in contrast with the written form of literary Latin. Japan’s situation was similar to that of the regional vernacular cultures in medieval Europe in that literary Chinese was the transregional or cosmopolitan language (the equivalent of Latin in Europe and Sanskrit in South Asia) when a new vernacular writing system began to emerge.1 The vernacular writing system (man’yōgana) first emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries and came to full fruition (with the development of the kana alphabetic writing 1 I am indebted for the notion of cosmopolitan and vernacular cultures to Pollack 2006.

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system) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, resulting in one of the high points of early Japanese literary culture (with the appearance of the Tales of Ise and the Tale of Genji in the late tenth and eleventh centuries). The coexistence of literary Chinese and vernacular Japanese (resulting in a biliterate culture) in the tenth and eleventh centuries closely resembles Europe’s situation at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when Latin, as the transregional language with a deep literary and religious tradition, coexisted with new regional vernaculars. Though commentaries existed in Japan prior to the year 1000—for example, in the lectures on the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan)—they became more common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when there was a growing gap not only between Japanese high vernacular and literary Chinese but between the high court vernacular (of the Heian classics) and the growing demotic vernacular. I argue here that in a biliterate culture such as premodern and early modern Japan, the development of the vernacular can be fully understood only in relationship to the process of translation, commentary, and adaptation. As the development of the wakan-konkōbun reveals, the development of the Japanese vernacular was inseparable from the use of literary Chinese. As is well known, the earliest use of the vernacular in Europe in the medieval period was to translate key texts from Latin such as the Bible and the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend, a popular compilation of the lives of the saints written in Latin around 1260). As in medieval Europe, Japanese commentaries on the Chinese classics were a key means of study and education in premodern times, and one of their important functions was to translate the target text into the vernacular. The Commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū My primary example here will be the commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing). The Wakan rōeishū was compiled in 1012 by Fujiwara no Kintō, a major poet and scholar. In the Heian period, it was one of four key texts (referred to as the “four classics for elementary education”) that were the basis for elementary education in Chinese prose and poetry in China and Japan. The other three texts were the Meng qiu 蒙求 (J. Mogyū; Helpful Collection for First Education), a Tang period short encyclopedia of rhymed historical anecdotes edited by Li Han 李澣 (J. Rikan); the Qian zi wen 千字文 (J. Senjimon; Thousand-Character Essay), Chinese mnemonic poems for learning written characters; and the Li Jiao bai nian yong 李嶠百廿詠 (Li Jiao’s One Hundred and Twenty Poetic Compositions, J. Rikyō

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hyakunijū ei, commonly referred to as the Bai yong 百詠, J. Hyakuei), a topical poetry collection by the early Tang poet Li Jiao (J. Rikyō 李嶠, 664?–713?). Equally important were the Sanchū (Three Chinese Commentaries) to these three Chinese texts.2 The Wakan rōeishū is an anthology of 588 noted Chinese poems, or kanshi (more accurately, citations from kanshi), many in seven-character couplets, and 216 waka, or Japanese classical poems. The anthology categorizes the poems according to seasonal and nonseasonal topics. The Wakan rōeishū became very popular in the Heian period, appearing in the Tale of Genji and the Pillowbook (Makura no sōshi). The Wakan rōeishū’s influence was such that by the late Heian period, waka treatises such as the Dōmōshō (Collection for Children) and the Ōgishō 奥義抄 (Collection of Inner Meaning) cited extensively from it.3 The commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū first emerged in the late Heian period and continued to be produced through the Muromachi period and the Edo period. The earliest commentary, the Rōei gōchū (Wakan rōeishū Ōe Commentary), compiled around 1100 by Ōe no Masafusa (d. 1111), is written in kanbun (classical Chinese) and was intended for beginning kangaku (Chinese studies) students who aimed to become professional scholar-poets. These young Heian aristocrats belonged to hereditary Chinese studies families such as the Sugawara, the Ōe, the Tachibana, and the southern branch of the Fujiwara. Composing kanshi was an important social and political function, and educated aristocrats were anxious to know how famous kanshi had been composed. Ōe no Masafusa gathered knowledge that had been passed down to him through his family and combined that with information that he had picked up from other house lineages.4 A good example of the character of the Ōe Commentary is the following entry (no. 724) for a poem on “old people” (rōjin) in the second half of the Wakan rōeishū. 『和漢朗詠集』老人 724 再三憐汝非他事 （再三汝を憐れむは他の事に非ず） 2 Ōta 1959. On the history of the Senjimon in Japan, see Ogata 1966. For an analysis of the impact of these three commentaries in Japan, see Yamazaki 1993b. 3 Another late Heian waka treatise that cites Chinese texts extensively is the Waka iroha. Both the Waka dōmōshō (commonly known as Dōmōshō) and the Ōgishō were offered to Emperor Nijō (1143–1165), the son of Emperor GoShirakawa. See Tanaka Mikiko 2006. 4 Fujiwara no Kiyosuke’s Fukuro zōshi cites many Chinese poems, and when it does, it cites from Ōe no Masafusa’s commentary on the Wakan rōeishū.

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天宝遺民見漸稀 （天宝の遺民は見るに漸く稀なり） 白居易 『朗詠江注』再度三度之三可用去声而用平声 （再度三度の三は去声に用うべし。而るに平声に用う。） If I think about you over and over, it’s for no other reason than that the men from Tianbao now are becoming fewer and fewer.

Bo Juyi5

Ōe Commentary: The “three” in the phrase “over and over” should use the ascending tone, but instead it uses the low, level tone.6 The brief entry from the Ōe Commentary notes that, based on Chinese poetic tonal rules, in the phrase 再三 (over and over) the poet should have used a Chinese character with an ascending tone (kyosei 去声); but instead he mistakenly used a low, level tone (hyōshō 平声). The next major commentary was the Wakan rōeishū shichū (Wakan rōeishū Private Commentary), or Shichū Commentary, which was compiled in 1161 by a Buddhist priest called Shin’a 信阿, later called Shingu 信求, who worked at the Kōfukuji, a major temple in Nara.7 In contrast to the Ōe Commentary, which was aimed at young aristocrats learning to be professional kanshi poets, the Shichū Commentary was geared toward children and young students learning literary Chinese at a Buddhist temple school.8 The Shichū Commentary does not dwell on how to compose kanshi.9 Instead, it adds the pronunciation of Chinese characters in katakana (alphabet) and provides kunten (Japanese reading marks that translate the classical Chinese into Japanese using the kundoku system) to the selected Chinese poems and to the kanbun commentary.

5 Wakan rōeishū 1999, 378. The Tianbao (Tenpō) period (742–755) refers to the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (J. Gensō) and to the An Lushan Rebellion (755). 6 Itō and Kuroda 1989, 1:266. 7 The Wakan rōeishū shichū was the most authoritative commentary in the medieval period. 8 The Shichū Commentary differs in content from the Ōe Commentary to the degree that some scholars believe that Shinkyū did not consult the Ōe Commentary. The Wakan rōei chūshō 和 漢朗詠集注抄 (Wakan rōeishū Commentary Collection), which was composed in the Kama­ kura period, was intended for Fujiwara Tadamichi and other bunjin (literati) related to the powerful sekkan (regency) family. It added kunten and Japanese reading marks not found in the earlier Ōe Commentary. On the Wakan rōeichūshō, see Yamazaki 1993a. 9 Miki 1995, 221–222.

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The next major commentary, the Wakan rōeishū Eisai chū 和漢朗詠集永 済注, or Eisai Commentary, which was composed in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), took this pedagogical method one step further.10 While retaining the content of the Shichū Commentary, the Eisai Commentary translated the kanbun (literary Chinese) text into kanji (Chinese graphs) mixed with katakana, that is to say, into the wakan-konkōbun style, thus transforming the text and commentary into a form of Japanese vernacular literature. The mixture of katakana and wabun (Japanese classical prose style) in the Eisai Commentary made the text accessible to a wider audience, not only of aristocrats and Buddhist acolytes but of samurai and commoners.11 The Eisai Commentary, in turn, was made even more available in the Edo period by Kitamura Kigin, the great scholar and editor of the early Edo period, who included it in his Wakan rōeishū chū (Wakan rōeishū Commentary, 1671). Kitamura also published commentaries on the Tale of Genji (Kogetsusho) and other major literary works of the Heian period. Mediated Classics One can speak broadly of two basic types of classics. In one type, which we could call the “authoritative classic,” the text becomes the object of extensive commentary. Examples are the Kokinshū, Tale of Genji, Wakan rōeishū, and Analects. The significance of this kind of classic is transformed through commentary, recontextualization, and various paratexts, but the text itself does not change once it becomes canonized. In another type of classic, which we might call the “popular classic,” a text becomes culturally significant and well known and is repeatedly re-created and expanded over time. Examples are the Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike), Taiheiki (Record of Great Peace), and Urashima Tarō. These texts usually do not become the object of commentary and study; instead, they continue to be rewritten and retold and come to exist in widely differing variants. The first type of classic usually belongs to a high tradition 10

11

Makino Kazuo (1991), noting that the Eisai Commentary is cited in the Genpei seisuiki, dates the Eisai Commentary to the early Kamakura period and believes that its author was a Buddhist priest active at Tōnomine who was also the author of Fusō mōgyū (Japan’s Meng qiu), Fusō mōgyū chū (Japan’s Meng qiu Commentary), and Tōnomine engi (Sacred Origins of Tōnomine). Yamazaki (1993a, 91–108) dates the Eisai Commentary to the end of the Insei period (i.e., ca. 1170). The mixture of katakana and wabun in the style of the Eisai Commentary suggests an audience of elementary or beginning students of Chinese studies. For the text of the Wakan rōeishū Eisai chū, see Itō and Kuroda 1989, 3:3–364.

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and becomes the object of scholarship, education, and commentary. The second type generally belongs to a more popular tradition, which may involve oral performance, theater, or other media. One of the medieval genres that makes extensive use of Chinese sources, particularly the Chinese histories, is the gunki-mono (military narratives), such as the Tale of the Heike and the Record of Great Peace. In fact, for many Japanese, this gunki-mono genre, which reached a wide audience, was the main source of their education on Chinese culture, literature, and history. The medieval military tales make extensive reference to Chinese historical figures and events, which become the standard against which many of the military figures and events in Japan are measured. However, as we shall see, these references to China are not drawn directly from readings of the Chinese classics or the Chinese histories; instead, they usually come via intermediary texts (commentaries, anecdotal literature, and educational textbooks). The Tale of the Heike is drawn from and interweaves many different elements: the oral narration (katari) of the biwa hōshi (lute-playing minstrels), records and legends of battles and wars, clan or family tales of brave warriors, sermons at Buddhist temples, and histories of the miraculous or divine origins of shrines and temples. One source for the Buddhist sermons that appear in the Tale of the Heike was the Hōbutsushū (Collection of Treasures, ca. 1179–1183), a collection of Buddhist setsuwa (anecdotal literature) thought to have been written by the priest-scholar Taira no Yasuyori. The Hōbutsushū cites from many Japanese and Buddhist texts, particularly Genshin’s Ōjōyōshū (Tales of Rebirth in the Pure Land), as well as from Heian court tales, waka collections, and setsuwa anthologies.12 A good example of the use of Chinese history and sources in the Tale of the Heike is the story of the Chinese diplomat Su Wu 蘇武 (J. Sobu), who exemplified undying fidelity and sense of obligation. Significantly, the original Su Wu story, which appears in the Han shu (History of the Han), was modified in medieval Japan. The Su Wu story was filtered through multiple sources: the commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū and on the Kokinshū, Chinese popular encyclopedias such as the Diaoyuji 琱玉集 (J. Chōgyokushū), and Chinese setsu­wa-type collections such as the Soushenji 捜神記 (J. Sōjinki; Record of Searching for Spirits), a fourth-century (Six Dynasties) collection of tales of the 12

Taira Yasuyori was a late Heian period warrior (dates uncertain) who served the cloistered emperor GoShirakawa as a member of the Kebiishi (imperial police force). In 1177, he was exiled, with Shunkan, to Kikai-ga-shima (Iou-jima) in Satsuma (Kagoshima Prefecture). He was later pardoned and returned to Kyoto, where he is thought to have written the Hōbutsushū.

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miraculous and supernatural.13 Imanari Genshō argues that the primary transformation of the Su Wu story occurred around the twelfth century, when the Hōbutsushū was produced.14 Particularly critical in this process was the ­Diaoyuji (J. Chōgyokushū), which had been imported to Japan in the early eighth century and was popular among intelligentsia. In the medieval period, the Chōgyokushū became widely used by readers and writers, particularly the educated priesthood and those involved with oral storytelling (katari). In other words, there were two fundamental ways of utilizing well-known Chinese texts. One was direct citation, with full knowledge of the original, for audiences with a reading knowledge of literary Chinese. The other was through secondary knowledge of the Chinese texts gleaned from encyclopedias, primers, and commentaries that became the foundation for understanding Chinese stories, historical figures, and cultural values. These primers and commentaries (such as those on the Wakan rōeishū) frequently translated the source text into the vernacular, into the wakan-konkōbun style, in which it was consumed by a wider audience than the limited community of educated scholars and poets of Chinese literature, history, and philosophy. The medieval producers and editors of the setsuwa and gunki-mono were not members of the Confucian schools or families of Chinese learning such as the Kiyohara family, which had helped to edit the Nihon shoki and had become the hereditary school of Confucian learning. Instead, they were priest-scholars who preached to and often performed before semiliterate audiences at temples.15 In short, knowledge of the Confucian classics and Chinese histories was often transmitted through the filter of vernacular translation and the ear, in the form of oral storytelling. Medieval commentaries also played a major role as mediators of the Japanese (Heian) classics, particularly for late medieval and Edo period writers, playwrights, and artists, for whom Heian “high” vernacular had become increasingly remote. In the medieval and Edo periods educated elites were expected to compose classical Japanese poetry, now an authoritative genre, and poetry composition in general (waka, renga, haikai) required knowledge of canonical texts such as the Tale of Genji, Tales of Ise, and the Kokinshū. This expectation had a profound impact on a broad range of drama, painting, prose 13 14 15

Gan Bao 1996. Imanari 1970. The language of the Tale of the Heike, which is known for its wakan-konkōbun, also appears to be influenced by the zōdanshū (the Buddhist setsuwa collections, sermons, and commentaries that were produced at the temples for use in sermons and that became one of the foundations for the gunki-mono). See Makino 2005, 351–352.

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fiction, and prose narratives. For example, the Noh plays based on the Heian period Tales of Ise (such as Izutsu and The Well Curb) are drawn, not from the original Tales of Ise, but from the late medieval commentaries.16 Many Genji Noh plays and Genji paintings are likewise based, not on the Genji original, but on commentaries on the Genji and on renga yoriai (linked-verse handbooks). Ihara Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Life of an Amorous Man, late seventeenth century), the first major vernacular novella in the early modern period, is a parody of the Tales of Ise, with the protagonist cast as a modern-day Ariwara no Narihira. In the famous ending of this narrative, the narrator mentions the three thousand women that the male protagonist has slept with. To the modern reader, this appears to be a reference to the many loves of Narihira in the Tales of Ise, but the phrase is nowhere to be found in the Tales of Ise; instead, the phrase appears in Ise monogatari gukenshō (Humble Views of the Tales of Ise), one of the most important of the late medieval commentaries by Ichijō Kanera, a leading scholar-poet of his time. In other words, for Ihara Saikaku it was not the Tales of Ise so much as its medieval commentaries that were his source of inspiration. Oral Performance The word “commentary” (chūshaku) today usually refers to written commentary on an authoritative text. In the Japanese tradition, however, oral commentary was a key to both education and cultural production, and these oral commentaries evolved into major performative genres. The first type comprised the kōdan and the kōshaku. The terms kōdan (lecture conversation) and kōshaku (lecture commentary) refer to oral presentations on a scripture or authoritative text that explain and expand on the meaning of a written text.17 The second type was the fushidan sekkyō (rhythmical, gestural sermon), a narrative performance to music (katari-mono) that in turn gave birth to heikyoku (musical performance of the Tale of the Heike) and the beginnings of jōruri, the oral chanting of the puppet theater and kabuki. The foundation for fushidan sekkyō 16 17

See commentary in Itō 1983–1988. An entry in the Sanetaka kōki for 1488 refers to a kōdan on the Tales of Ise. In the Edo period, the term kōshaku referred to the oral reading of and commentary on military texts such as the Record of Great Peace, Chinese military records, and ninjō-banashi (lit., “stories about human emotions”). Kōshaku and kōdan became part of a larger cluster of performance genres called yose. Popular kōdan topics included oie sōdō (disputes over house succession), stories about politics (seidan), military tales, biographies of brave warriors (buyūden), and stories about vendettas.

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was established in large part by the Tendai priest Chōken (1126–1203) and his son Seikaku (1167–1235, also known as Shōkaku). They created the Agui school style, which was adapted by the Pure Land and the Jōdo Shin (New Pure Land) sects.18 The kōdan combined oral reading and oral commentary, while the fushidan sekkyō added music. These two approaches are reflected in the two major lineages of Heike reception. On the one hand, with the emergence of the biwa hōshi (lute-playing minstrels), the presentation of the Tale of the Heike (in the katari-bon lineage) became a musical performance (heikyoku, singing the Heike accompanied by the lute). On the other hand, the presentation of the Genpei jōsuiki (Rise and Fall of the Minamoto and Taira Clans, in the yomi-hon, or read textual variants of the Tale of the Heike, as opposed to the katari-bon, or sung variants) occurred in the Edo and modern periods in the form of the kōdan. The genre of Taiheiki-yomi, or oral commentary on the Record of Great Peace, also became popular in the eighteenth century. In Taiheiki-yomi (yomu means “recitation in a loud voice”), the narrator began by reading aloud directly from the text; he then explained the circumstances of the historical event or figure. Often the narrator added his own elements or commented on a wide range of affairs, from politics to military tactics. The word kōshaku (lecture commentary) has two primary meanings today, one is commentary and explication of a written text (particularly a Buddhist sutra), and the other is the form of oral entertainment that emerged in the Edo period. At their historical root, these two phenomena are deeply intertwined. In short, the contents of both Chinese and Japanese classics were transmitted not only through the original texts (by educated scholars) but also through a body of intermediary texts (especially commentaries, digests, and vernacular translations) and through oral performance, which became important both for the Buddhist tradition (sermons) and for secular entertainment (reciting war tales to music or oral commentary on a text for samurai and commoners). In this fashion, the Tale of the Heike and Record of Great Peace, with their stories of warriors and rulers, became part of popular culture in the Edo period.

18

Chōken was a high-ranking Buddhist priest and the son of Fujiwara Shinzei/Michinori; together with his son Seikaku, he established the Agui school at the Agui-in, at Ichijō in Kyoto.

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Early Modern Vernacular Translations By the mid-Edo period the ability to understand classical (Heian) Japanese had significantly decreased. One result was the emergence of vernacular translations and adaptations of the Heian literary classics, particularly of the Tale of Genji. In the late Heian and medieval period, it was common for Buddhist scholars and editors to “translate” texts in literary Chinese or in hentai-kanbun (a Japanese version of literary Chinese) into wakan-konkōbun, a mixed SinoJapanese vernacular style. For example, the biography of Prince Shōtoku, which is largely a cultural fabrication, first appears in the Nihon shoki and then in a number of early kanbun texts, from the eighth-century Nihon ryōiki (Miraculous Tales of Japan) to the Sanbōe kotoba (Illustrations of the Three Treasures, late tenth century) to the Nihon ōjō gokurakuki (Record of Japanese Who Passed to the Pure Land, late tenth century), before it was “translated” into the Sino-Japanese vernacular style in the Konjaku monogatari shū (Collection of Tales of Times Past and Present, early twelfth century), a major collection of setsuwa. In the Edo period, the Kokugaku scholars began to do the same thing with the Heian literary classics. The Kokugaku scholars, however, generally avoided wakan-konkōbun, which they associated with Buddhist literature, and translated into a more contemporary vernacular or neoclassical style. The Edo period also produced vernacular parodies or variants of Heian classical texts. One of the most famous examples is Ryūtei Tanehiko’s Nise murasaki inka genji (Fake Murasaki, Country Bumpkin Genji, 1829–1842), which supplanted the Tale of Genji and other canonical texts in popularity.19 By the late eighteenth century, even classical Japanese poetry (waka), written in the high vernacular, was being translated into the demotic vernacular. In 1796 Ozaki Masayoshi, a waka poet and Kokugaku scholar in Osaka, produced a vernacular translation of the Kokinshū called Kokinwakashū hinakotoba (Kokinshū in Countrified Words, 1796). By hinakotoba, Ozaki was referring to the popular language of the countryside (as opposed to the elegant language of the capital). In his afterword, Ozaki states that he has translated the Kokinshū (the most influential of the imperial waka anthologies) into “everyday language” (tsune no kotoba) for “women and children” (jijo) since they cannot follow the language of commentaries. About the same time, Motoori Norinaga, probably the most noted scholar of the Kokugaku movement, published Kokinshū tōkagami (Distant Mirror of the Kokinshū, 1797), one of only three commentaries by Motoori Norinaga to be 19

See Emmerich 2013.

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published in his lifetime. He translates all the waka and the kana preface of the Kokinshū into contemporary spoken Japanese. (The only exceptions are the main preface and the chōka, or long poems.)20 Norinaga refers to his translations as zokugo-yaku (translation into popular language). His translation into the vernacular was conceived not only as a means of making the text accessible to beginners but also as an important means of commentary and interpretation. Norinaga argues that the reader has to be able to understand the function of the particles and inflections (tenioha) and the finer nuances in order to feel the poems in the heart. For that purpose, Norinaga has translated the waka into satobigoto (hometown-esque words), which allow one to absorb into the heart the miyabi-goto (capital-esque words) in the poems. Norinaga goes on to note that he has also added phrases and words that are not in the original but that will help the reader understand the intent of the poems.21 Waka depends heavily on its overtones or careful layering of meaning and nuance to create a complex world out of a mere thirty-one syllables, and it depends heavily on rhetorical devices such as engo (associated words), kakekotoba (verbal puns), jokotoba (preface words), and makurakotoba (pillow words). All of these involve embedded lexical and cultural associations that create multiple layers of meaning. The medieval commentaries debated the various possibilities that these layers or overtones created. In the modern translations in Tōkagami, however, Norinaga selected only one layer among multiple possibilities for each poem, and he used that one meaning to create an autonomous, readable poem in modern Japanese. Norinaga’s modern translations are followed by easy-to-understand, compact commentary. He notes that earlier commentaries were too complex and too confusing, burying the text in a mountain of notes and not allowing the poems to come alive for the modern reader.22 This technique, of combining modern translation with brief, easy-to-understand commentary, became the standard for modern editions of the Japanese classics and exists as the model even today. Here the early modern commentary moves away from the medieval conception of the commentary as a compendium of affiliated texts. 20

21 22

All citations of the Kokinshū tōkagami are from Motoori Norinaga 1969. The Kokinshū tōkagami, which became very popular and very influential, went on to be printed in multiple editions by different publishers. In 1844, two supplements to Kokinshū tōkagami— Kashiragaki Kokinshū tōkagami 頭書古今集遠鏡 (Headnotes on Distant Mirror of the Kokinshū) and Kokinshū tōkagami hoshō 古今集遠鏡補正 (Supplement to Distant Mirror of the Kokinshū)—were published. Motoori Norinaga 1969, 4–6. Motoori Norinaga 1969, 4–6.

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Norinaga used the metaphor of the tōkagami, or distant mirror, to express this process. The distant mirror was a telescope, “transferring” distant objects into close view. The verb utsusu (to reflect or to transfer) here means that the modern translation allows the distant meaning to become clear. In fact, Norinaga glosses the verb yaku-sesu (to translate) with the verb utsusu.23 In 1844 the Kokugaku scholar Kurita Naomasa (1808–1891) published Genji tōkagami (Distant Mirror of the Tale of Genji), which is a full vernacular translation of the “Wakamurasaki” (Young Lavender) chapter of the Tale of Genji, in direct imitation of Norinaga’s Kokinshū tōkagami.24 The late eighteenth century also witnessed the spread of the practice called kokujikai 国字解, “explaining in Japanese words,” which explicated and translated literary Chinese texts into contemporary Japanese together with lexical glossaries and vernacular commentary. The most noted of these publications was Tōshisen kokujikai 唐詩選国字解. (Japanese Renditions of Selected Tang Poems, 1791) by Hattori Nankaku, one of the leading kanshi poets of the day. Tōshisen (Selected Tang Poems) became one of the most popular Chinese texts in Japan at this time, and Hattori Nankaku’s text made it accessible to those with little knowledge of classical Chinese. Other kokujikai were written for Santaishi (Collection of Three Styles of Chinese Poetry) and Rikuchōshisen (Anthology of Six Dynasties Chinese Poetry). The mid- to late eighteenth century was also the time when Ming fiction and works in the Chinese vernacular (baihua) were being translated into vernacular Japanese. Japanese scholar-writers like Tsuga Teishō (b. 1718) produced Chinese dictionaries, handbooks, and translations of the Water Margin and other vernacular Chinese fiction. Perhaps the most thoughtful observer and historian of translation at this time was the scholar-writer Ban Kōkei 伴蒿蹊 (1733–1806), who wrote extensively about the history and practice of translating kanbun (literary Chinese prose) into Japanese as well as the practice of translating zokubun (vernacular Japanese) into gabun (elegant Japanese neoclassical prose). Ban Kōkei’s work Kuni tsu fumi yoyo no ato 国文世々の跡 (Traces of the Style of the Country over Generations) is the first study of the history of the style of Japanese prose and reveals the astonishing degree to which the history of literary Japanese is a history of prose translation (what he calls utsushi-bumi 訳文). In his Utsushibumi warawa no satoshi (Translation: Warnings to Children), Ban Kōkei goes on to show, with specific examples, how various types of translations (from literary

23 24

Motoori Norinaga 1969, 5. Tanaka Kōji 2005, 123, 149.

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Chinese to classical Japanese, from colloquial Japanese to neoclassical Japanese, and from neoclassical Japanese to colloquial) should be done.25 In contrast to Norinaga’s translation of the Kokinshū classical poetry into contemporary Japanese, Ban Kōkei’s main concern is to work in the opposite direction: taking the low or contemporary vernacular prose (zokubun) and elevating it into elegant prose (gabun). Ban points out, for example, that in the genre of travel literature authors often mix waka (classical poetry) with contemporary vernacular prose, a combination that creates incongruity and disjunction and that lowers the literary appeal of the text. He then goes on to show the different techniques by which such colloquial “lowly” prose can be transformed into an elegant style. As practice, he urges the writer to start with the vernacular word or phrase, absorb it into his or her heart, and then transfer it to elegant diction, particularly that found in the Heian literary classics. For that purpose, the author has to study classical diction and know that such words as itaku (“extreme” in classical Japanese) meant hanahadashii (in contemporary vernacular).26 Generally speaking, the Edo Kokugaku scholars were interested in returning to the language of the texts of either the ancient or the Heian period. Kamo no Mabuchi (1697–1769) experimented in his waka and his prose with the ancient Man’yōshū style, and Norinaga developed a neo-Heian style based on the Tale of Genji. By the late eighteenth century, the Kokugaku movement as a whole was interested in developing what we would call gabun, or elegant style, which was inspired by Heian classical Japanese. In Ugetsu monogatari (Tales of Wind and Moon) and his other fiction, Ueda Akinari (1734–1809), one of Ban Kōkei’s contemporaries, developed a neoclassical style that incorporated both Chinese phrases as well as classical Japanese diction, particularly kago, or poetic diction. The late eighteenth century was also a great period for vernacular literature, and a plethora of new vernacular (mainly Edo-centered, chōnin-based) genres emerged: dangibon, sharebon, kibyōshi, kokkeibon, and so forth, which explored the new dialects and language of the city of Edo and the provinces. The common denominator in these genres was humor and extensive use of the demotic vernacular, including local dialects. This use of the vernacular had an implicitly humorous aspect, and the lower the subject matter, the more likely it was to be the object of humor. Modern scholars generally refer to this vernacular literature as gesaku, or “playful” literature. In short, the late eighteenth century witnessed the growth of both a high vernacular and a demotic 25 26

Ban 1993a, 1993b. Ban 1993b, 60.

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vernacular (zokugo). Ultimately, through his many examples of translation (a text followed by a translation that “elevates” or “lowers” the original), Ban Kōkei shows how literary Japanese thrives in and is deeply enriched not only by this constant linguistic dialectic between various intertwining aspects of wa (Japanese) and kan (Chinese) but by what I have called inter-vernacular translation. Conclusion I began this essay by drawing a comparison between Europe and Japan in the year 1000 with regard to the relationship between the cosmopolitan language (Latin and classical Chinese) and the emergence of regional vernaculars. I was particularly interested in the role of commentary and vernacular translation in the study and transmission of major classics. I showed, using the example of the Wakan rōeishū, that commentaries were critical in making a body of classical Chinese poems an integral part of the Japanese literary tradition through vernacular translation and the generation of anecdotal literature. For scholars in the late Heian and medieval period, scholarship and commentaries were one and the same. Scholars and teachers did not write articles or books separate from the target text. Instead, commentary was the main means of textual transmission, knowledge production, and literary creativity. These commentaries were frequently many times the length of the target text and included ancillary texts and multiple earlier commentaries. As Komine Kazuaki has indicated, in contrast to modern scholars who “add” or “attach” (tsukeru) commentaries to the text, medieval scholars “made” or “constructed” (tsukuru) commentaries.27 These medieval commentaries had various functions: as dictionaries to explain words, as handbooks for writing and composition or for sermons, as encyclopedias of cultural and historical knowledge, and as small collections of texts. This kind of commentary, particularly the type that drew on or generated anecdotal (setsuwa) literature, eventually fell out of favor in the Edo period. As early as the thirteenth century, Fujiwara Teika and the Mihokidari school of waka criticized the Rokujō waka school for waka commentaries that relied on or added setsuwa. In the Edo period, with the rise of Confucian and Kokugaku scholarship, a new type of commentary (referred to as shinchū, or new commentaries) based on evidential scholarship emerged. For example, Kamo no Mabuchi, one of the founders of the Kokugaku new commentary style, criticized Yotsutsuji Yoshinari’s Tale of Genji commentary—the Kakaisho 27

Komine 1997, 12.

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(Gatherings from the Rivers and Seas)—for erroneously attributing a number of passages and setsuwa to the Nihon shoki.28 The medieval commentaries, however, had provided the foundation for much of medieval popular literature such as the Tale of the Heike. Absorbing commentaries such as those on the Wakan rōeishū, the Heike expanded and re-created itself over a long period of time. So while the authoritative classics such as the Tale of Genji remained fundamentally unchanged, popular texts such as the Tale of the Heike evolved as a result of commentaries, educational textbooks, sermons, and oral storytelling. Commentaries, in short, had both the power to return to the original text and give it new life through exegesis and interpretation and the power to change, translate, or adapt the original text into something different and more accessible to new communities. Much like vernacular translation, commentary was crucial to the continuing life of the “classic,” enabling it to reach new, ever-changing audiences. The case of Motoori Norinaga’s translation of the Kokinshū shows that even the authoritative classic (written in the tenth century) could become, at a certain point (by the eighteenth century), so distant that the reader needed a “telescope”; that is, the work had to be translated into the contemporary demotic vernacular to be accessible to the Edo period reader. In modern literary studies, the focus has been on the author, who is seen as the producer of the text, or on the composition of the text or the genre, which are thought to establish the conventions for the writing and reception.29 This essay shifts the focus to show that the commentaries and translations, which until now have been thought to be peripheral, were in fact the major engines of intellectual, cultural, and literary activity and were often critical in giving new life to the so-called canonical texts as well as providing the foundation for popular texts. Commentaries and related textual apparatus (such as textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, annotated editions, and essays) are today considered nonliterature, but in fact, at least through the medieval and much of the early modern period, these kinds of texts were the central engine of cultural production, as well as key producers of philosophical, religious, and literary discourse. Very rarely did readers read the classics directly, particularly those texts that were or had become linguistically distant. Instead, as we have seen, the classics (whether authoritative or popular) were transmitted through vari28 29

See his Genji monogatari shinshaku (New commentary on The Tale of Genji). I owe the formulation of this conclusion to David Lurie, who was a discussant for an earlier version of this essay presented at the University Seminar on Japanese Culture on October 27, 2011. I would also like to acknowledge the aid of Jennifer Guest, Chi Zhang, and Michael Emmerich, who provided very thoughtful feedback.

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ous intermediaries, through various forms of translations (both Sino-Japanese and intervernacular) and adaptations, and through various media, both oral and visual. References Ban Kōkei 1993a. “Kuni tsu fumi yoho no ato” [Traces of the style of the country over generations], in Kazama Seishi, ed., Ban Kōkei shū, Sōsho Edo bunko 7. Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 7–57. –––––– 1993b. “Utsushifumi warawa no satoshi” [Translation: Warnings to children], in Kazama Seishi, Ban Kōkei shū, Sōsho Edo bunko 7. Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 60–99. Emmerich, Michael 2013. The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Gan Bao 1996. In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record, translated by Kenneth J. DeWoskin and James Irving Crump. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Imanari Genshō 1970. “Heike monogatari to Hōbutsushū no shūhen—Sobu dan o chūshin toshite” [Concerning The Tales of Heike and The Collection of Treasures, focusing on the section on Su Wu], Bungaku 18, 8: 33–45. Itō Masayoshi 1983–1988. Yōkyoku. 3 vols. Shinchō Nihon koten shūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Itō Masayoshi and Kuroda Akira, eds. 1989. Wakan rōeishū kochūshaku shūsei [Collection of old commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū], vols. 1–3. Kyoto: Daigakudō shoten. Komine Kazuaki 1997. “Chūsei no chūshaku o yomu” [Reading medieval commentaries], in Mitani Kuniaki and Komine Kazuaki, eds., Chūsei no chi to gaku: Chūshaku to yomu. Tokyo: Shinwasha, 12–44. Makino Kazuo 1991. “Wakan rōeishū shōchū” [Various commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū], in Chūsei no setsuwa to gakumon. Osaka: Izumi shoin, 44–66. –––––– 2005. “Heike monogatari kan koji no shutten kenkyūshi—tsūzoku shiki, iwayuru Chūsei shiki o jiku ni” [Research on the origins of Chinese old stories in The Tale of the Heike, focusing on the so-called “medieval Records of the Historian”], in Engyōbon Heike monogatari no setsuwa to gakumon. Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 13–33. Miki Masahiro 1995. “Inseiki no Wakan rōeishū chūshaku no tenkai—Rōei gōchū kara Wakan rōeshū shichū e” [Development of late Heian commentaries on the Wakan rōeishū, from Rōei gōchū to Wakan rōeishū shichū], in Wakan rōeishū to sono kyōju. Tokyo: Benseisha, 66–89. Motoori Norinaga 1969. Kokinshū tōkagami [Distant mirror of the Kokinshū], in Ōkubo Tadashi, ed., Motoori Norinaga zenshū, vol. 3. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 31–294. Ogata Yasuhiro 1966. Waga kuni ni okeru Senjimon no kyōikushiteki rekishi [History of the educational use of Senjimon in Japan], 2 vols. Tokyo: Azekura shobō.

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Ōta Shōjirō 1959. “Shibu no dokusho kō” [Reflections on four books for reading], Rekishi kyōiku 7, 7: 12–25. Pollack, Sheldon 2006. The Language of Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tanaka Kōji 2005. Motoori Norinaga no shikōhō [Method in the thought of Motoori Norinaga]. Tokyo: Pelikansha. Tanaka Mikiko 2006. “Inseiki kagakusho no Wakan rōeishū riyō ni tsuite, Waka dōmōshō o chūshin ni” [The use of the Wakan rōeishū as a late Heian poetic treatise, focusing on the Waka dōmōshō, The collection for children], in Wakan rōeishū to sono juyō. Osaka: Izumi shoin, 173–196. Wakan rōeishū 1999. In Sugano Hiroyuki, ed., Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, vol. 19. Tokyo: Shōgakukan. Yamazaki Makoto 1993a. “Wakan rōei chūshō kō” [Reflections on the Wakan rōei chūshō, Wakan rōeishū commentary collection], in Chusei gakumonshi no kitei to tenkai. Osaka: Izumi shoin, 61–108. –––––– 1993b. “Yōgakusho no juyō to tenkai” [Reception and development of educational books for children], in Chūsei gakumonshi no kitei to tenkai. Osaka: Izumi shoin, 2–60.

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The Languages of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan Daniel Trambaiolo Introduction The practice of learned medicine throughout early modern East Asia was dominated by vocabulary, ideas, and practices drawn from the Chinese medical tradition. Texts written in classical Chinese formed the basis for a cosmopolitan medical culture that extended across a diverse range of ecological, social, and linguistic territories beyond China itself, and the languages of medical learning in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan thus developed through a continual process of interaction between this cosmopolitan medical culture and a variety of local ways of speaking about bodies, illnesses, and therapies. The styles of written language used to convey medical ideas both carried traces of those ideas’ origins and determined the range of readers to whom those ideas would be accessible. In this chapter, I examine the relationship between the shifting linguistic practices of Tokugawa medical writers and the social transformations of medicine in Tokugawa Japan (1603–1867), considering two complementary flows of knowledge within Tokugawa society.1 The first of these flows proceeded from the elite scholars and doctors of the metropolitan centers toward lower social strata and peripheral regions and was associated with what we might call a vernacularization of classical, cosmopolitan medicine, involving the proliferation of kana texts offering knowledge of classical Sino-Japanese medical doctrines and techniques; the second flow proceeded from the lower social strata toward the elites and from the rural peripheries to the urban centers and was associated with what we might call a textualization of oral, vernacular medicine, involving the collection and publication of local medical knowledge that had previously been passed down only in oral form. Although this analysis accounts for only some of the range of linguistic phenomena present in Tokugawa medical writings, it affords us a clear view of the ways that the languages of medical literature were shaped by the interplay between intellectual and social change over the course of the Tokugawa period. 1 This analysis is inspired in part by the arguments of Tsukamoto 1993.

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Medical Writing in Kanbun and Kana Like their contemporaries elsewhere in East Asia, Tokugawa doctors relied on a number of different written genres for the recording and transmission of medical learning: treatises on the basic principles of medicine, formularies listing remedies but providing only minimal discussion of principles, comprehensive treatises that surveyed both fundamental principles and practical advice, simple healing manuals for household use, miscellaneous notes on medical topics, dictionaries of medical terminology, commentaries on Chinese medical classics, polemical attacks on other doctors’ writings, and treatises on topics such as materia medica (honzō 本草), acupuncture, and moxibustion and diagnostic techniques of pulse taking and abdominal palpation. Both kanbun and kana could be used for writing treatises in any of these genres, but certain implicit assumptions guided the choice among possible linguistic styles. As David Lurie has emphasized, kanbun was a “privileged mode” for recording technical knowledge in many fields of learning from the seventh until the twentieth century, and in this respect writing on medicine was entirely typical.2 Kanbun remained the standard language of medical writing throughout the Tokugawa period, not least because kanbun literacy enabled access to both the ancient and the more recent Chinese texts that continued to inform Japanese doctors’ ways of thinking about medicine. Writing in kanbun also allowed Japanese doctors to think of their works as contributions to the medical literature of the East Asian region as a whole, even if only a tiny minority took practical steps to win an international audience for their books by having them shipped to China or sharing them with Chinese or Korean visitors to their country.3 Since kanbun was regarded as the standard form of medical writing, the authors of kanbun medical treatises felt no need to draw attention to or explain their choice of writing style. Yet although most Tokugawa doctors agreed that the foundations of medical learning rested on a knowledge of kanbun, for many non-elite readers of the Tokugawa period kanbun presented a significant barrier to comprehension. Understanding the content of even introductory 2 Lurie 2011, 323. To avoid reproducing the Sinocentric assumptions embedded in the term “kanbun,” Lurie refers to this style of writing as “kundoku-mediated logography”; however, since “kundoku-mediated” medical writing in Tokugawa Japan adhered closely to standard classical Chinese syntax, it will be more convenient here to use the traditional term. 3 For one prominent example of a doctor who sought to have his book shipped to China, see Yamawaki 1751, 23a; 1759, 2:8a; Machi 1998. For a discussion of Japanese doctors’ attempts to share recent Japanese books with Korean doctors visiting Japan in the context of diplomatic embassies, see Trambaiolo 2014.

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Chinese medical primers could be challenging enough that eighteenth-century townspeople and doctors formed study groups for mutual help.4 In the nineteenth century, when Chinese books reprinted in Japan continued to serve as sources of information about new medical ideas and techniques, one doctor took the unusual step of translating a Chinese treatise on vaccination into kana on the grounds that “there are people for whom reading kanbun is like trying to scratch an itch through a boot.”5 Ability to write kanbun accurately was a still rarer mark of distinction, and even a prominent eighteenth-century doctor such as Yoshimasu Tōdō could make mistakes in his kanbun manuscripts that would later need to be corrected prior to publication by his more rigorously trained grandson.6 Kana medical books often carried titles that mentioned their use of Japanese script (kana 仮名, waji 倭字) or language (wago 倭語), and their authors offered justifications for their choice of this form of writing by claiming that the use of kana would make the contents of their books accessible to a wider audience. Kana medical writing almost exclusively adopted a linguistic register closely related to what Haruo Shirane in this volume describes as the “demotic vernacular” style, with diction based on kanbun kundoku and vocabulary drawing on technical terms of Chinese origin. This close relationship between the language of kana medical texts and the conventions of kanbun kundoku meant that kanbun and kana versions of a medical text could potentially be very similar in vocalization. Only a small number of medical texts departed from this convention regarding the appropriate style of kana medical writing: simple waka verse summaries of materia medica;7 dialogues mixing archaic and colloquial language;8 examination answers employing Japanese epistolary style (sōrōbun 候文);9 and attempts by several nineteenth-century doctors to appropriate older forms of the Japanese language for medical writing, such as the Man’yōshū-style verses of Morikawa Sōen’s The Soul of Language for Doctors (Kusushi no kotodama 医言霊, 1822) and the classical waka-style language of Satō Katasada’s The Wondrous Spirit (Kushi mitama 奇魂, 1831). But these were exceptional cases; the vast majority of kana medical literature was written in a neutral, technical style. 4 Yokota 1998, 2. 5 Koyama 1847, 28a. On the continuing importance and difficulty of kanbun for village doctors in the nineteenth century, see also Shibata 1985, 187. 6 Tateno 2004, 65–69. 7 Tsukamoto 1991, 206–208; Ueno and Yoshii 2007. 8 Bianchi and Machi 2010. 9 Machi and Tode 2004.

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From Kanbun to Kana: The Vernacularization of Classical Medicine During the centuries of peace and economic expansion that followed the establishment of Tokugawa rule, patterns for the dissemination of medical knowledge were transformed by the spread of literacy and the development of the Japanese commercial publishing industry. Residents of cities, towns, and villages increasingly turned to published medical books as sources of information, and the doctrines and therapies described in these books came to exert a growing influence over healing practices. The growth of medical publishing was fostered by a natural symbiosis between publishers and medical authors, at first in Kyoto, the dominant center both of medical learning and of the Japanese printing industry during the seventeenth century, and then, in a more widely diffused fashion from the eighteenth century onward, through collaborations between publishers and booksellers in Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka and through the participation of an increasing number of medical authors from these urban centers and from more remote provinces.10 Teaching lineages continued to be important for the transmission of both knowledge and authority, and the associated practices of manuscript copying remained important in Japanese medical culture until the end of the Tokugawa period, but texts that circulated in printed form played a crucial role in the novel social phenomenon of knowledge transmission independent of direct interpersonal relationships.11 During the same period, the social identities of medical practitioners were also undergoing a slow but fundamental shift. Many forms of learning were becoming dissociated from the aristocratic and religious groups that had dominated these fields in earlier periods, and it became possible for scholars, authors, playwrights, doctors, and naturalists to carve out for themselves new types of social niches.12 One aspect of these new patterns of cultural activity was the growing trend toward viewing medicine as a respectable occupation for individuals of samurai status. The regulations for samurai (buke shohatto 武 家諸法度) promulgated in 1615 had grouped medicine together with the divinatory arts (i in ryōdō 医陰両道), but the 1662 revision of these regulations grouped it instead with Confucian scholarship (ju i ryōdō 儒医両道), implying a greater respect for medical learning and practice.13 Around the same time, 10 11 12 13

Kornicki 1998, 192–207. For the broader context of Tokugawa manuscript culture, see Kornicki 2006. Bitō 2006, 28–33, 154–155; Gerstle 1999; Marcon 2007. This change was made on the suggestion of Matsudaira Tadatsugu 松平忠嗣 (1605–1665) and Hoshina Masayuki 保科正之 (1611–1673) and was carried out despite the objections

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the Military Mirrors (bukan 武鑑) began for the first time to specify that certain individual samurai were “doctors.”14 Not long afterward, the Kyoto doctor Gotō Konzan 後藤艮山 (1659–1733) broke with the traditional custom of taking the tonsure as an indication of his status, thereby distancing himself from the earlier association between medical and monastic practice.15 Both in the major cities and in the countryside, the total number of doctors was increasing, and a significant fraction of the new doctors came from nonmedical family backgrounds.16 These developments contributed to a growing competition for status among medical practitioners, as both new and established doctors sought to gain access to medical learning and to project authority by displaying their scholarly erudition, and this competition helped to drive some of the changing linguistic practices seen in the medical literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Well before the advent of large-scale commercial printing, some Japanese medical writers had already adopted kana writing styles in order to disseminate their medical learning to a broad audience. The fourteenth-century doctor and Buddhist monk Kajiwara Shōzen 梶原性全 (ca. 1265–ca. 1337) used kanbun to write his major medical treatise, Myriad Relief Formulas (Man’anpō 万安方, 1315), since he assumed that the few trusted disciples who were allowed access to the treatise would be sufficiently well educated that kanbun text would not present any problems.17 Nevertheless, Shōzen had also compiled another treatise, Notes of a Simple Physician (Ton’ishō 頓医抄, 1304), which employed kana writing in order to “make [medical knowledge] widely known and to help everybody in the realm.”18 Later in the fourteenth century, the monk-doctor Yūrin 有林 cited similar motivations for his decision to make medical learning available through his “annotated explanation in Japanese script” (waji chūkai 和字注解) of Song dynasty medical treatises.19

14 15 16 17 18 19

of Abe Tadaaki 阿部忠秋 (1602–1675). Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀 (1628–1701) also objected to the change, on the grounds that Confucian scholarship was not an occupation and thus should not be considered in the same category as medicine. Subsequent revisions to the buke shohatto did not consistently group medicine together with Confucian scholarship. See Hattori 1978, 24–25. Fujinami 1942. Hattori 1978, 26. Yokota 1998, 6. Macé 2005, 183–184. Kajiwara (1304) 1986, 177. For a more extensive translation of this passage, see Goble 2011, xviii. Yūrin (1363) 1979, 35.

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Several centuries later, Tokugawa medical authors continued to make similar claims about their choices of written language style, suggesting a degree of continuity in the relationship between the different linguistic styles and the different audiences for medical writing. However, the altered social context of the Tokugawa period, especially the growth of publishing and book distribution networks, meant that an increasing variety of medical writings had become much more widely available. Kajiwara Shōzen had been able to consult around 270 Chinese medical treatises during the compilation of his Myriad Relief Formulas by exploiting his status as a retainer of the high-ranking samurai Nagai Munehide to gain access to the finest library collections in Kamakura; by the end of the first century of Tokugawa rule, the reprinting in Japan of at least this number of Chinese medical texts—to say nothing of the growing body of literature by Japanese medical authors themselves—meant that a comparable range of medical literature would have been easily accessible to any individual of moderate financial means, regardless of status and patronage.20 When the first medical books were printed in Japan using movable type around the turn of the seventeenth century, the texts that were printed were predominantly written in kanbun. These included editions of the Song, Jin, Yuan, and Ming dynasty treatises describing the new approach to medical thought that came to dominate scholarly medical practice in the seventeenth century, as well as treatises by the Japanese masters of this new medical style, Manase Dōsan 曲直瀬道三 (1507–1594) and Manase Gensaku 曲直瀬玄朔 (1549–1631). The early printed treatises by the doctors of the Manase lineage also included kana treatises such as A Record for Saving the People (Saiminki 済 民記, 1573; printed 1617), Beneficent Virtue Formulas (Keitokuhō 恵徳方, 1597), and Concise Essentials for Extending Longevity (Enju satsuyō 延寿撮要, 1599). During the second half of the seventeenth century, the shift from movable type to woodblock printing facilitated more complex linguistic presentations of text through the incorporation of reading marks (kaeriten, okurigana) in kanbun texts and the inclusion of phonetic glosses (furigana) alongside Chinese characters in both kanbun and kana texts.21 Yet although these reading marks became an almost universal feature of printed kanbun texts, they never fully eliminated the cognitive challenge of interpreting texts that were written according to a syntax radically different from that of Japanese. 20

21

On the libraries available to Kajiwara Shōzen, see Goble 2011, 24. The comparison with the number of Chinese medical treatises reprinted in Japan during the first century of the Tokugawa period is based on the bibliographic data in Kosoto 1999. Kornicki 1998, 128–158.

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Of much greater significance for the development and diffusion of medical knowledge was the increased publication of books that made classical doctrines and therapies available to a wide audience. The motivations for writing and publishing medical books in kana rather than kanbun varied slightly depending on the nature of the book: the colophon to Manase Dōsan’s Record for Saving the People, a simplified summary of the contents of several important Ming treatises, suggested that it could be useful to “beginning students”; while the colophon to Manase Gensaku’s Concise Essentials for Extending Longevity, a popular manual on regimen (yōjō 養生), specified that the use of kana would make the contents accessible to those in “remote provinces and minor towns.”22 These assumptions about the audiences for vernacular medical treatises probably underestimated both the extent of kanbun literacy in the countryside and the desire of educated urban readers for easily comprehensible writings on medicine, but they persisted as a conventional trope in prefaces and colophons to kana medical books. The late seventeenth-century Hikone doctor Ashikawa Keishū explained that he had written his Pocket Handbook of Medicine (Shūchin iben 袖珍医便, 1690) in “lay language” (zokugo 俗語) to make it more readily comprehensible both to “quacks in country backwaters” (katainaka no yabui 片郷の野巫医) and to “laypeople intent on medical practice” (iryō ni kokorozashi aru zokka 医療に志ある俗家). This treatise thus included not only general advice on health and on medicines and other healing techniques but also information specifically relevant to practicing doctors, such as directions for packaging and labeling the compounded formulas that doctors would give to their patients.23 A century later, the Ōsaka doctor Suzuki Sadahiro similarly explained that his kana version of Zhang Zhongjing’s Discourse on Cold Damage Disorders (Ch. Shanghanlun, J. Shōkanron 傷寒論) was intended to disseminate knowledge of Zhang Zhongjing’s formulas to people in remote and humble regions who lacked doctors.24 Throughout the Tokugawa period, the use of the vernacular thus marked a treatise as suitable for beginning students or nonprofessional practitioners rather than established doctors, and for rural rather than urban audiences. Many of the new vernacular treatises made only minimal reference to their sources in the Chinese medical tradition, but in other cases these sources were prominently displayed. A notable example of the latter approach was the bakufu-sponsored Categorized Formulas for Widespread Aid (Fukyū ruihō 普救類 22 23 24

Manase Dōsan, colophon (1573) to Manase Dōsan 1617; Manase Gensaku, colophon to Manase Gensaku (1599) 1911, 44. Ashikawa (1690) 1725, hanrei, 1a; 1:5b–8a. Suzuki Sadahiro, preface (1784) to Suzuki 1788, 2b.

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方), compiled by Niwa Shōhaku 丹羽正伯 (1691–1756) and Hayashi Ryōteki 林 良適 (1695–1731) and presented to the shogun in 1729.25 This formulary incorporated more than three thousand formulas drawn from several sources, the most important among which was Li Shizhen’s Systematic Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu 本草綱目, 1596), a standard Chinese work on materia medica that had been reprinted in Japan at least seven times by the early eighteenth century. The explicit citation of Chinese sources in Categorized Formulas for Widespread Aid had no direct relevance to practical matters of healing, but these citations nevertheless constituted a crucial aspect of the book by serving as an authorizing textual presence, making the book’s contents acceptable to readers for whom the authority of Chinese sources remained axiomatic.26 While the accessibility of these kana medical treatises made them popular among less educated readers, doctors who wished to present themselves as serious scholars of medical learning could not rely on kana treatises alone. The polymathic scholar Kaibara Ekiken 貝原益軒 (1630–1714) wrote in Japanese on medical issues in texts such as his Instructions for Nourishing Life (Yōjōkun 養生訓, 1713), “softening the words of the ancients” (kojin no koto wo yawarage 古人の言をやはらげ) in order to ensure that his advice would reach as broad an audience as possible.27 However, in the same treatise Ekiken also insisted on the value of studying kanbun, arguing that exclusive reliance on kana treatises would yield only a shallow understanding of medical principles and lead to dangerous mistakes in diagnosis and therapy.28 Both practical concerns and status competition among practitioners thus generated a demand for books that would reduce the problem of understanding kanbun medical treatises by providing guidance for readers with limited educational backgrounds. The simplest form of guidance was lexicographic, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Japanese doctors published a number of medical reference works designed for what Ann Blair has called “consultation reading.”29 These lexicons served as auxiliary texts that could help their readers to comprehend the sometimes obscure terms and concepts encountered in medical writings and thus would have lessened the need for personal instruction as a means to acquire medical learning. A number of lexicographic 25 26 27 28 29

Fukui 1983, 199–201. Yokota 1998, 17. For more general comments on the role of Chinese as an authorizing presence in vernacular Japanese texts, see Kornicki 2008, 8. Kaibara 1713, kōki 後記. (This passage is not included in the text of the Yōjōkun in Ekiken zenshū but is present in a number of Tokugawa woodblock editions.) Kaibara 1911, 558–559. Blair 2010, 8.

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treatises on medicine and related topics had been produced in Japan prior to the Tokugawa period, but the spread of literacy and the rise of commercial publishing meant that the new treatises produced from the seventeenth century onward had a much wider social impact.30 The early publication of a single-volume lexicon of anonymous authorship, Lay Explanations of Discourse on Disease (Byōron zokkai shū 病論俗解集, 1639), was followed by the most important medical lexicon of the seventeenth century, Ashikawa Keishū’s 蘆 川桂洲 eight-volume Collected Explanations of Disease Names (Byōmei ikai 病 名彙解, 1686). Ashikawa wrote that he had originally intended this book to serve both as a lexical aid and as a guide to therapy, but that the inclusion of formulas alongside the disease names would have made the book too unwieldy and he had eventually decided to focus on its lexical functions alone.31 He provided detailed explanations for many of the 1,822 disease terms in the lexicon, especially for more important or more complex disease concepts. A typical entry such as that on raifū 癩風 (leprosy) covered a full double-page, listing in katakana its colloquial Japanese name sanbyō, discussing alternative Chinese characters for writing the disease name, and listing symptoms, etiological factors, and variant forms of the disease.32 This lexicon had found its way into rural book collections by the early eighteenth century, and its continuing value as a reference work prompted the printing of a new edition as late as 1793.33 Readers seeking more than merely lexicographic assistance could turn to the kana commentaries on Chinese classics produced by Okamoto Ippō 岡本 一抱 (1654–1716), a Kyoto doctor whose medical pedigree stretched back to Manase Dōsan. Ippō’s publication of kana guidebooks was a natural extension of his teaching activities, allowing him to disseminate his interpretations of Chinese medical treatises to an audience beyond his personal disciples.34 His use of kana was consistent with his view that introductory medical books did not need to provide comprehensive knowledge but instead should serve as a “gateway” to medical learning.35 The prefaces to Ippō’s books stressed their value for beginning students and for practicing doctors whose limited ability to read kanbun meant that they had been unable to establish a deep under30

31 32 33 34 35

Before the Tokugawa period, the most important lexical treatises relevant to medicine were primarily in the field of materia medica, including Honzō wamyō 本草和名 (ca. 918) and Honzō iroha shō 本草色葉抄 (1284). Ashikawa 1686, hanrei. Ashikawa 1686, 4:3a–4a. Yokota 1998, 10, 12. Okamoto 1695, preface, 1a. Okamoto 1703, preface, 1a.

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standing of their art.36 Although these commentaries tended to advertise their usefulness to beginning students rather than to rural audiences, their circulation had extended at least as far as the rural hinterland of Osaka by the early years of the eighteenth century.37 The production of these kana treatises and commentaries proved controversial. According to one account, Okamoto Ippō’s elder brother, the famous playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon 近松門左衛門 (1653–1724), persuaded him to cease producing them on the grounds that they would encourage students to dispense with serious study of the classical Chinese texts themselves.38 This story may be apocryphal, since Okamoto Ippō’s vernacular commentaries continued to be published until the final years of his life and posthumously by his disciples. Nevertheless, it expressed a very real sentiment that persisted among later elite medical writers: the bakufu medical official Mochizuki San’ei 望月三英 (1697–1769), for example, blamed books like those by Okamoto for doctors’ declining standards of scholarly learning.39 If there were already numerous books in existence that offered medical knowledge to those who could not read kanbun fluently, what was it that made Okamoto Ippō’s vernacular commentaries so objectionable? One possible explanation is that they offered readers a different sort of knowledge from that contained in formularies like Categorized Formulas for Widespread Aid or even lexicons like Collected Explanations of Disease Names. The majority of vernacular treatises aimed to provide simple, practical knowledge to people who lacked easy access to classically trained doctors, and thus, they did not threaten the distinction between the less educated practitioners who had a pragmatic knowledge of healing techniques and the scholarly physicians whose authority rested on discipleship under recognized masters and intimate familiarity with the kanbun classics. Okamoto Ippō’s printed, commercially available commentaries offered a vernacular route to more prestigious forms of medical knowledge and therefore had the potential to undermine the authority that kanbun-based knowledge had once conferred. 36

37

38 39

Okamoto 1695, hanrei; 1696, hanrei; 1698, preface, 5b; 1700a, preface, 1a–b; 1700b, hanrei, 2a. However, one doctor who wrote a preface for Ippō claimed the book would be useful not only for beginners but also for experienced doctors. See Tamura Genshin 田村玄真, preface to Okamoto 1702. Yokota 1998, 10, 12. For an explicit reference to rural readership in a work published posthumously by one of Ippō’s disciples, see Kadoma Yoshihiro 門間嘉寛, preface (1733) to Okamoto 1744, 7a. Fujikawa 1941, 292. For biographical information on Okamoto Ippō, see Yakazu 1979. Mochizuki (n.d.) 1925, 157.

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The second half of the eighteenth century saw an expansion of institutionalized medical education at the elite level, as both the bakufu and a number of domains established academies for medical training to complement the academies of Confucian learning that they established during the same period.40 The widening availability of the reference works and commentaries discussed above was itself an additional factor forcing eighteenth-century doctors to attain ever higher levels of erudition in order to present themselves as scholarly physicians. A group of doctors advocating the use of “Ancient Formulas” (kohō 古方) presented a new challenge to the styles of medicine that had been popular in the seventeenth century, arguing that the art of medicine should be learned from the oldest surviving Chinese formularies, in particular those attributed to the third-century doctor Zhang Zhongjing. There was thus a ready market in the second half of the eighteenth century for kana commentaries that promised to help their readers overcome the difficulties of Zhang Zhongjing’s writings, such as Furuno Ryōsaku’s Explanation in Japanese Characters of the “Discourse on Cold Damage Disorders” (Shōkanron kokujikai 傷寒 論国字解, 1771) and Explanation in Japanese Characters of the Concise Essentials of the Golden Casket (Kinki yōryaku kokujikai 金匱要略国字解, 1771) and Suzuki Sadahiro’s Translated Guide to Cold Damage Disorders (Shōkan yakutsū 傷寒訳通, 1788). These works were written and printed in styles similar to the medical commentaries and paraphrases of Okamoto Ippō but reflected the shifting emphases of elite medical learning. To cater to the more textually ambitious medical students of the late eighteenth century, the scholar Minagawa Kien 皆川淇園 (1734–1807) and several of his disciples collaborated to compile Classified Phrases for Medical Case Records (I’an ruigo 医安類語, 1774), a style guide to medical writing that gathered vocabulary and short excerpts from important Chinese medical treatises to serve as models for students who wished to learn how to compose medical case records in kanbun and escape the fear of being regarded as “simpletons” (bokujin 樸人).41 Yet although Minagawa Kien sought to appeal to these relatively sophisticated readers, his treatise’s numerous interlinear paraphrases of the kanbun text incorporated extensive samples of kana writing, including even quite colloquial forms of language. As an example, we can consider the way that Minagawa glossed a passage by the Yuan doctor Zhu Zhenheng: “a person was unable to eat all at once and liked to eat at frequent intervals” 一人 不能頓食喜頻食. This was not an especially difficult passage of kanbun, since the phrases “eat all at once” (tonshoku 頓食) and “eat at frequent intervals” 40 41

Nakaizumi 1951; Machi 1999. Tachibana Tō 橘陶, preface to Minagawa 1774, 2b.

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(hinshoku 頻食), although uncommon, were readily comprehensible from their components. However, they were sufficiently distant from everyday language to present potential obstacles to intuitive understanding, and Minagawa supplied interlinear katakana glosses in a more colloquial style of Japanese (ichido ni kuu; chokochoko kuu), encouraging students to draw connections between the classical kanbun of medical writing and the ordinary Japanese of everyday conversation.42 This style of direct translation into colloquial Japanese was not entirely innovative as a pedagogical strategy: more than half a century previously, Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) had already stressed the cognitive value of translating from kanbun into styles of language closer to everyday spoken Japanese than the artificial language of kanbun kundoku.43 Minagawa’s textbook on medical writing was part of a broader series of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury attempts to develop effective pedagogical methods for Japanese students of kanbun.44 Its distinctiveness lay in its specific targeting of medical students, enabling them to develop kanbun writing skills that were directly relevant to their own occupation and thus reducing the need to follow the usual laborious route through broad study of the Chinese classics. It represented a shortcut to kanbun competence designed specifically for medical students and doctors who aspired to the status of scholarly physicians. Local Medicine and Local Language While some doctors and scholars were devising new ways to enable Japanese students to access the learning of the Chinese medical classics, others were seeking to record, analyze, and investigate Japan’s indigenous traditions of medical knowledge. This was a much more heterogeneous process than the vernacularization of classical medical knowledge described above, as it involved the assimilation of ideas and techniques drawn from a wide range of sources, from oral traditions of simple folk remedies to philological research into historical texts, but they were all rooted in the knowledge and study of the Japanese language and the desire to exploit that knowledge as an extension of and complement to the traditions of kanbun medical learning. Just as some members of the ruling samurai elite sought to project an image of benevolence toward their governed populations by disseminating classical 42 43 44

Minagawa 1774, 6:2a–b. Pastreich 2001. Elman 2008, 103–104.

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medical learning in accessible vernacular forms, others sought to achieve the same goal by sponsoring the collection and dissemination of knowledge that was derived from simpler traditions of folk medicine.45 This appears to have been the motivation for the compilation of the formulary Marvelous Drugs to Aid the People (Kyūmin myōyaku 救民妙薬, 1693) by the doctor Hozumi Hoan 穂積甫安 on the orders of the Mito daimyo Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀 (1628–1701). This compilation listed around four hundred simple remedies for one hundred and thirty common illnesses, from pestilence and food poisoning to venereal diseases and parasitic worms. Many of these remedies were household cures of a type rarely mentioned in the kanbun treatises popular among scholarly doctors: they included, for example, a salve for a prolapsed rectum made from the ashes of burnt straw sandals and a decoction for the treatment of urinary blockages (rinbyō 淋病) made from the plastering fibers of an old wall.46 Surviving manuscript copies of these types of popular medical manuals also show how the villagers who copied them sometimes extended their range of therapeutic techniques by transcribing magical incantations for the cure of various minor ailments into the same volumes.47 Not only in their language but also in the origins of the therapies that they listed and in the ways that they were received and put to use at the local level, these types of vernacular treatises belonged to a medical culture quite different from the cosmopolitan traditions of medical treatises written in kanbun. At the other end of the spectrum, a number of scholars during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came to regard the philological study of early Japanese texts and the investigation of contemporary Japanese language and customs as complementary approaches to understanding the native traditions of Japan. The investigation of popular healing practices thus became juxtaposed with the philological study of transmitted texts and with the attempt to discover manuscripts of Japanese medical treatises that were widely believed to have been lost.48 Although this type of nativist medical scholarship attracted only a small number of practitioners, their ideas deserve attention here as an alternative form of scholarly medical erudition based not on kanbun learning but on texts written in the Japanese language. One particularly interesting example of the way that philological methods applied to Japanese language texts could lead doctors to draw conclusions about Japanese diseases can be found in the writings of Nasu Tsunenori 奈須 45 46 47 48

Tsukamoto 2001, 147–149. Hozumi (1693) 1911, 75, 78. Hatakama 2007, 101. Trambaiolo 2013.

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恒徳 (1774–1841). Nasu was the son of a bakufu medical official and initially studied medicine at the bakufu-sponsored Medical Academy (Igakukan 医学 館). After he left the Medical Academy following a dispute with its director, he devoted much of his energy to the study of Japanese medical history, adapting typical Medical Academy methods of philological scholarship and applying them to Japanese texts. During his period at the Medical Academy, Nasu had already shown an interest in native Japanese disease terms and had transcribed a list of those in the tenth-century lexicon Wamyō ruijushō 和名類聚抄 (ca. 934) into his notes on various aspects of Japanese medical history.49 In his later studies of Japanese texts, Nasu also came across examples of diseases that appeared to be unique to Japan. Regarding a disease referred to in Japanese texts as “summer-moon night chill” (natsuzuki nebie), Nasu stated simply that “in China, this disease does not exist; this is why there are no medical books that describe the methods for its treatment,” but he also added a note that, “if necessary, then it should be considered equivalent to the Chinese syndrome of ‘summer-heat disease acquired while resting.’” Regarding the disease “wind malady” (kaze no kokochi) mentioned in the eleventh-century story collection A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari 栄華物語), Nasu insisted that it represented an indigenous Japanese illness distinct from the familiar Sino-Japanese disease category of “wind.”50 By highlighting problems of translation between forms of Japanese and Chinese language used to describe disease, Nasu’s arguments carried an implicit challenge to the notion that Japanese diseases were best understood through assimilation into categories presented by the Chinese medical literature. A more serious challenge to the traditional centrality of Chinese language arose through the development of Japanese literature on materia medica (honzōgaku 本草学). As Federico Marcon has argued, Tokugawa honzōgaku originated as a field of study ancillary to medical learning but developed into a broader subject encompassing the classification and naming of species, the description of their characteristics, and methods of harvesting, cultivation, and processing.51 Yet despite this expansion of scope, honzōgaku retained important connections with medicine, both because doctors still needed to familiarize themselves with the characteristics of the various products that they used as drugs and because honzōgaku scholars adopted a rhetorical strategy of promoting the practical medical benefits of their activities. The belief that the 49 50 51

Nasu 1801, 15a–22a. Nasu 1822, 24a–25a. On the classical Chinese concept of wind, see Kuriyama 1999, 233– 270. Marcon 2007, 1–2. See also Yamada 1995; Fukuoka 2012; Sugimoto 2011.

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cultivation of natural historical studies would lead to practical medical and economic benefits attracted support for honzōgaku scholars from bakufu and domain governments, while the popularity of honzōgaku across a wide range of Tokugawa society facilitated the exchange of knowledge among different social groups. Japanese treatises on honzōgaku compiled between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century absorbed a diverse range of vocabulary from Chinese, Korean, Dutch, and Japanese sources. As in many parts of the world, the existence of a unique range of local fauna and flora meant that scholars relied extensively on local knowledge independent of cosmopolitan traditions of learning, and orally transmitted knowledge and kana writing thus played crucial roles in the formation of this genre of literature.52 Li Shizhen’s Systematic Materia Medica continued to serve Tokugawa doctors as a standard point of reference, but the division between elite texts written in kanbun and popular texts written in kana was much less pronounced in materia medica treatises than in other medical genres, and Japanese honzōgaku scholars from the early eighteenth century onward wrote in kana not only to make their work available to a wide audience but also to capture the variety of vocabulary needed to describe species that could not be accommodated within the range of existing Chinese terminology.53 One particularly important use of kana writing in honzōgaku literature was for the recording of regional variations in the names of different plant and animal species, and from the early eighteenth century onward there was a close relationship between honzōgaku and the study of regional Japanese dialects.54 Individual scholars often tended to possess geographically uneven knowledge of Japanese regional vocabulary, which was biased toward the areas in which they had been most active: Kaibara Ekiken, for example, recorded a preponderance of terms from Kyushu and western Honshu, while Hiraga Gennai 平賀源内 (1728–1780) recorded large numbers of terms from Edo and from his home province of Sanuki.55 Yet the progressive accumulation of these studies tended to compensate for their individual biases. When Ono Ranzan 小野蘭山 (1729–1810) completed his monumental Clarifications on Systematic Materia Medica (Honzō kōmoku keimō 本草綱目啓蒙, 1803) at the turn of the 52

53 54 55

On the significance of local languages in the formation of materia medica, see Vande Walle 2001, 13–19; Maclean 2002, 39–41; Schiebinger 2004, 194–225; Attewell 2007, 17–20; Chakrabarti 2010, 123–127. Fukuoka 2012, 86–88; Marcon 2007, 46–62, 131–142; Sugimoto 2011. Sugimoto 2011, 347–76. Sugimoto 2011, 46, 373.

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nineteenth century, he was able to provide lists of the full variety of Japanese dialect names for individual species by drawing both on historical texts and on the findings of the many scholars who had conducted field investigations over the course of the eighteenth century.56 The field of honzōgaku, with its origins in the investigation and classification of the medical properties of substances, thus gave birth to some of the Tokugawa period’s most detailed and extensive surveys of Japanese vernacular language. Many medically important drugs were imported from countries other than China, and a number of Tokugawa honzōgaku scholars sought to become familiar with relevant areas of vocabulary in languages such as Korean and Dutch. Korean scholars had begun to record local names for plants and animals in their own treatises of materia medica as early as the thirteenth century, at first through the use of idu transcriptions and later through the use of han’gŭl, and seventeenth-century honzōgaku scholars such as Hitomi Hitsudai and Kaibara Ekiken took care to record their knowledge of Korean names for various plant and animal species.57 Eighteenth-century Tokugawa doctors encountered Korean drug names written in han’gŭl in reprinted Japanese editions of the Korean doctor Hǒ Chun’s Mirror of Eastern Medicine (Tongǔi pogam 東醫寶鑑, 1613), although few of them were able to read the Korean script.58 Later in the eighteenth century, honzōgaku scholars paid increasing attention to the European terms for species and substances, including not only those imported to Japan by Dutch merchants but also those recorded in the European treatises whose contents were painstakingly translated into Japanese by early pioneers of Dutch language studies.59 The study of materia medica thus came to incorporate a knowledge of Korean and Dutch alongside the dominant vocabularies drawn from Chinese and Japanese, and it helped lay foundations for deeper investigations into the Dutch language by the Dutch Learning (rangaku) scholars of the later eighteenth century. Conclusion When Japanese doctors from the late eighteenth century onward began to translate medical treatises from Dutch, they no longer assumed that the 56 57 58 59

Sugimoto 2011, 227. Suh 2008. Tashiro 1999; Sugimoto 2011, 47–50. On the beginnings of honzōgaku studies of European materia medica treatises, see Kasaya 2001.

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foundations of medical learning were to be found in Chinese texts, and they were thus partly liberated from the need to demonstrate facility with kanbun in order to prove their competence as learned doctors. Nevertheless, Sugita Genpaku and Maeno Ryōtaku set a significant precedent through their use of kanbun in the first major Japanese translation of a European anatomical treatise, A New Book of Anatomy (Kaitai shinsho 解体新書, 1774), and Dutch Learning scholars made extensive use of existing and newly created Sino-Japanese compounds as the basis of their technical vocabulary for translating European medical concepts.60 Some later Dutch Learning scholars continued to express hopes that rendering Dutch medical treatises into kanbun would allow the benefits of their translation activities to reach beyond Japan, but there is little evidence to suggest that these Dutch Learning translations ever achieved the international reception that their authors desired.61 In a recent essay, Sheldon Pollock has noted the contrast between the rise of vernacular languages in early modern South Asian literary culture and the continuing dominance of Sanskrit as a language of “systematic discourse,” suggesting that the universalist aspirations of “scientific” writing generally tend to favor the adoption of cosmopolitan, rather than vernacular, languages; the cultural nationalization of scientific language in early modern Europe thus appears to have been no more than a “curious experiment,” now coming to an end with the global dominance of English as a language of scientific communication.62 Yet the analysis of Tokugawa medical language presented here suggests that the development of vernacular and cosmopolitan discourses should be regarded as complementary, rather than contradictory, processes. While it may be true that Tokugawa medical works in kanbun tended to aim at a more universal level of discourse than those written in kana, the social significance of medical learning resided not so much in the articulation of universal discourses for their own sake as in the way that these discourses shaped and were shaped by the quotidian processes of interaction between doctors and patients, in which spoken language and vernacular texts played important mediating roles.63 The history of medical language thus needs to take into account not only the forms of medical writing but also the social contexts in which those forms acquired their significance. From this perspective, the multiplicity 60 61 62 63

On the use of Sino-Japanese neologisms for translating the technical vocabulary of European medical texts, see Macé 1998. Ōtsuki (1816) 1922, 251. Pollock 2011, 38. For observations on the gap between the classical language of medical literature and the vernacular of the clinical encounter, see Duden 1991, 63–64.

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of forms in Tokugawa medical writing can be seen to have developed in response to tensions between the competing goals of transmitting medical learning to wider groups of readers, the incorporation of new forms of knowledge into the medical literature, and the continuing vitality of the kanbun medical tradition. These tensions persisted until the mid-nineteenth century, after which the rising popularity of Western medicine introduced a new style of cosmopolitan medicine whose adaptation to local conditions posed an entirely new set of social and linguistic problems. References Ashikawa Keishū 蘆川桂洲 1686. Byōmei ikai 病名彙解 [Collected explanations of disease names]. Kyoto: Umemura Yaemon and Uemura Fujiemon. –––––– (1690) 1725. Shūchin iben 袖珍医便 [Pocket handbook of medicine]. Attewell, Guy N.A. 2007. Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Bianchi, Alessandro, and Machi Senjurō 町泉寿郎 2010. “Nagasawa Dōju Yabui mondō no kaidai to honkoku” 長沢道寿『藪医問答』の解題と翻刻 [Nagasawa Dōju’s Catechism of a Common Physician: Bibliographic notes and transcription], Nihon ishigaku zasshi 56, 1: 136–106. Bitō Masahide 2006. The Edo Period: Early Modern and Modern in Japanese History, translated by Gaynor Sekimori. Tokyo: Tōhō Gakkai. (Originally published 1992.) Blair, Ann M. 2010. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chakrabarti, Pratik 2010. Materials and Medicine: Trade, Conquest and Therapeutics in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Duden, Barbara 1991. The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in EighteenthCentury Germany, translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Originally published 1987.) Elman, Benjamin A. 2008. “Sinophiles and Sinophobes in Tokugawa Japan: Politics, Classicism, and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 2: 93–121. Fujikawa Yū 富士川游 1941. Nihon igaku shi 日本医学史 [History of medical learning in Japan]. Tokyo: Nisshin shoin. Fujinami Kōichi 藤波剛一 1942. “Edo bakufu ikan seido” 江戸幕府医官制度 [The system of medical officials of the Edo bakufu], Nihon ishigaku zasshi 1300: 61–71. Fukui Tamotsu 福井保 1983. Edo bakufu hensanmono, kaisetsu hen 江戸幕府編纂物・ 解説編 [Publications of the Edo bakufu: Commentary]. Tokyo: Yūshōdō shuppan.

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Fukuoka, Maki 2012. The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Tokugawa Japan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gerstle, C. Andrew 1999. “Takemoto Gidayū and the Individualistic Spirit of Osaka Theater,” in James McClain and Wakita Osamu, eds., Osaka: The Merchants’ Capital of Early Modern Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 104–124. Goble, Andrew 2011. Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Hatakama Kazuhiro 幡鎌一弘 2007. “Shingakusha” 神学者 [Shinto scholars], in Yokota Fuyuhiko, ed., Chishiki to gakumon o ninau hitobito 知識と学問をになう人びと [The people who supported knowledge and learning]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 73–108. Hattori Toshirō 服部敏郎 1978. Edo jidai igakushi no kenkyū 江戸時代医学史の研究 [Research on the history of medical learning in the Edo period]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan. Hozumi Hoan 穂積甫安 (1693) 1911. Kyūmin myōyaku 救民妙薬 [Marvelous drugs to aid the people], in Nihon kyōiku bunko: Eisei oyobi yūgi hen 日本教育文庫・衛生 及び遊戯篇. Tokyo: Dōbunkan. Kaibara Ekiken 貝原益軒 1713. Yōjōkun 養生訓 [Instructions for nourishing life]. –––––– 1911. Yōjōkun 養生訓 [Instructions for nourishing life], in Ekiken zenshū 益軒 全集, vol. 3. Tokyo: Ekiken zenshū kankōbu. Kajiwara Shōzen 梶原性全 (1304) 1986. Ton’ishō 頓医抄 [Notes of a simple physician]. Tokyo: Kagaku shoin. Kasaya Kazuhiko 2001. “The Tokugawa Bakufu’s Policies for the National Production of Medicines and Dodonaeus’ Cruijdeboeck,” in W.F. Vande Walle and Kazuhiko Kasaya, eds., Dodonaeus in Japan: Translation and the Scientific Mind in the Tokugawa Period. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 167–184. Kornicki, Peter 1998. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: E.J. Brill. –––––– 2006. “Manuscript, Not Print: Scribal Culture in the Edo Period,” Journal of Japanese Studies 32, 1: 23–52. –––––– 2008. “Little Chinese, Less Manchu,” Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, March 13, University of Cambridge, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/sandars/kornicki3.pdf. Kosoto Hiroshi 小曽戶洋 1999. Nihon kanpō tenseki jiten 日本漢方典籍辞典 [Dictionary of Japanese kanpō medical books]. Tokyo: Taishūkan shoten. Koyama Shisei 小山肆成 1847. Hon’yaku intō shinpō zensho 翻訳引痘新法全書 [Translated complete book on the new method of vaccination]. Kuriyama, Shigehisa 1999. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Lurie, David 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Macé, Mieko 1998. “Le chinois classique comme moyen d’acces à la modernité: Le reception des concepts médicaux dans le Japon des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Daruma 4: 79–103. –––––– 2005. “Transmission secrète et vérité de l’enseignement dans le milieu médical de l’époque d’Edo,” Revue d’études japonaises du CEEJA—Benkyōkai, 183–184. Machi Senjurō 町泉寿郎 1998. “Yamawaki Tōyō to Sorai gakuha: Waitai miyao fang honkoku wo megutte” 山脇東洋と徂徠学派: 『外台秘要方』翻刻をめぐっ て [Yamawaki Tōyō and the Sorai school: On the reprinting of Secret and Essential Formulas from an Outer Censor], Nihon Chūgokugaku kaihō 50: 233–47. –––––– 1999. “Igakukan no gakumon keisei. 1. Igakukan seiritsu zengo” 医学館の学問 形成（一）医学館成立前後 [The scholarly development of the Medical Academy. 1. Before and after the foundation of the Medical Academy], Nihon ishigaku zasshi 45, 3: 339–372. Machi Senjurō 町泉寿郎 and Tode Ichirō 戸出一郎 2004. “Kansei kōin kōshi shorui sanshu” 寛政甲寅考試書類三種 [Three examination papers of 1794], Nihon ishi­ gaku zasshi 50, 2: 291–302; 50, 3: 428–444; 50, 4: 617–627. Maclean, Ian 2002. Logic, Signs, and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manase Dōsan 曲直瀬道三 1617. Saiminki 済民記 [A record for saving the people]. Manase Gensaku 曲直瀬玄朔 (1599) 1911. Enju satsuyō 延寿撮要 [Concise essentials for extending longevity], in Nihon kyōiku bunko: Eisei oyobi yūgi hen 日本教育文 庫・衛生及び遊戯篇. Tokyo: Dōbunkan. Marcon, Federico 2007. “The Names of Nature: The Development of Natural History in Japan, 1600–1900,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University. Minagawa Kien 皆川淇園 1774. I’an ruigo 医案類語 [Classified phrases for medical case records]. Kyoto: Tennōjiya Ichirōbē, Zeniya Shichirōbē, and Ishimura Heihachi. Mochizuki San’ei 望月三英 (n.d.) 1925. Rokumon zuihitsu 鹿門随筆 [Rokumon’s jottings], in Fujikawa Yū et al., eds., Kyōrin sōsho 杏林叢書, vol. 4. Tokyo: Tohōdō shoten. Nakaizumi Tesshun 中泉哲俊 1951. “Kinsei shohan no igaku kyōiku” 近世諸藩の医 学教育 [Medical education in the domains of the early modern period], Hirosaki Daigaku jinbun shakai 2: 59–74. Nasu Tsunenori 奈須恒徳 1801. Hyōhanroku 豹斑録 [Record of a leopard’s spots]. –––––– 1822. Honchō idan 本朝医談 [Remarks on the medicine of our country]. Okamoto Ippō 岡本一抱 1695. Byōin shinan 病因指南 [Guide to the causes of illnesses]. Kyoto: Nishimura Ichirōemon; Edo: Nishimura Kuzaemon and Nishimura Hanbē. –––––– 1696. Kakuchi yoron genkai 格致余論諺解 [Kana explanations of Further Discussions of Investigating Things and Extending Knowledge]. Kyoto: Nishimura Ichirōemon; Edo: Nishimura Kuzaemon and Nishimura Hanbē.

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–––––– 1698. Kōeki honzō taisei 広益本草大成 [Compendium of materia medica for widespread benefit]. Kyoto: Kosaji Han’emon. –––––– 1700a. Igaku kōdan hottan ben 医学講談発端辨 [Introductory lectures on the elements of medicine]. Kyoto: Yorozuya Kihē. –––––– 1700b. Igaku sanzō benkai 医学三臓辨解 [Explanations of the medical canon]. –––––– 1702. Ihō taiseiron wagoshō 医方大成論和語鈔 [Japanese notes on A Compendium of Medical Formulas and Discussions]. Kyoto: Kobeniya Kihē. –––––– 1703. Hōi bengi 方意辨義 [Explanations of the interpretation of formulas]. Kyoto: Yamamoto Saburōbē; Osaka: Yasui Kihē. –––––– 1744. Kōtei daikei somon genkai 黄帝内経素問諺解 [Japanese explanations of The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon]. Kyoto: Yoshinoya Sakujūrō and Fūgetsu Shō­zae­mon. Ōtsuki Gentaku 大槻玄沢 (1816) 1922. Ran’yaku teikō 蘭訳梯航 [A pathway to Dutch translation], in Fujikawa Yū et al., eds., Kyōrin sōsho 杏林叢書, vol. 1. Tokyo: Tohōdō shoten. Pastreich, Emanuel 2001. “Grappling with Chinese Writing as a Material Language: Ogyū Sorai’s Yakubunsentei,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61, 1: 119–170. Pollock, Sheldon 2011. “The Languages of Science in Early Modern India,” in Sheldon Pollock, ed., Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500–1800. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 19–48. Schiebinger, Londa L. 2004. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shibata Hajime 柴田一 1985. “Kinsei kōki ni okeru zaison’i no shūgaku katei: Chihara Eishun no baai” 近世後期における在村医の修学過程： 千原英舜の場合 [The educational process of rural doctors in the late early modern period: The case of Chihara Eishun], Jitsugakushi kenkyū 2: 178–202. Sugimoto Tsutomu 杉本つとむ 2011. Nihon honzōgaku no sekai: Shizen, iyaku, minzoku goi no tankyū 日本本草学の世界: 自然、医薬、民俗語彙の探究 [The world of Japanese materia medica studies: Investigations of nature, medicines, and vernacular vocabulary]. Tokyo: Yasaka shobō. Suh, Soyoung 2008. “Herbs of Our Own Kingdom: Layers of the ‘Local’ in the Materia Medica of Early Chosǒn Korea,” Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity 4: 395–422. Suzuki Sadahiro 鈴木定寛 1788. Shōkan yakutsū 傷寒訳通 [Translated guide to cold damage disorders]. Edo: Maegawa Rokuzaemon; Osaka: Yanagihara Kihē. Tashiro Kazui 田代和生 1999. Edo jidai Chōsen yakuzai chōsa no kenkyū 江戶時代朝 鮮薬材調查の研究 [Research on the investigation of Korean medical materials during the Edo period]. Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku shuppankai.

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Tateno Masami 館野正美 2004. Yoshimasu Tōdō Kosho igen no kenkyū: Sono shoshi to igaku shisō 吉益東洞『古書医言』の研究: その書誌と医学思想 [Research on Yoshimasu Tōdō’s Medical Sayings from Ancient Books: Bibliography and medical ideas]. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin. Trambaiolo, Daniel 2013. “Native and Foreign in Tokugawa Medicine,” Journal of Japanese Studies 39, 2: 299–324. –––––– 2014. “Diplomatic Journeys and Medical Brush Talks: Eighteenth-Century Dialogues between Korean and Japanese Medicine,” in Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng, eds., Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World: Orbits, Routes and Vessels. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 93–113. Tsukamoto Manabu 塚本学 1991. Tokai to inaka: Nihon bunka gaishi 都会と田舎: 日 本文化外史 [Capital and countryside: An unofficial history of Japanese culture]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. –––––– 1993. “Edo jidaijin no seimei iji no tame no jōhō” 江戸時代人の生命維持の ための情報 [Information for the preservation of life among the people of the Edo period], Rekishigaku kenkyū 651: 22–31. –––––– 2001. Ikiru koto no kinseishi: Jinmei kankyō no rekishi kara 生きることの近世 史：人命環境の歴史から [The early modern history of living: From the history of the human living environment]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Ueno Masuzō 上野益三 and Yoshii Motoko 吉井始子 2007. “Kaidai” 解題 [Bibliographic notes], in Shokumotsu honzō taisei 食物本草大成, vol. 2. Kyoto: Rinsen shoten. Vande Walle, W.F. 2001. Introduction to W.F. Vande Walle and Kazuhiko Kasaya, eds., Dodonaeus in Japan: Translation and the Scientific Mind in the Tokugawa Period. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 9–29. Yakazu Dōmei 矢数道明 1979. “Okamoto Ippō” 岡本一抱, in Kinsei kanpō igakusho shūsei 近世漢方医学書集成. Tokyo: Meicho shuppan, 7:7–17. Yamada Keiji 山田慶児, ed. 1995. Higashi Ajia no honzō to hakubutsugaku no sekai 東 アジアの本草と博物学の世界 [The worlds of East Asian materia medica and natural history]. 2 vols. Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan. Yamawaki Tōyō 山脇東洋 1751. Yōjuin isoku 養寿院医則 [Yōjuin’s medical principles]. Kyoto: Hayashi Gonbē and Hayashi Yoshibē. –––––– 1759. Zōshi 蔵志 [Record of the organs]. Kyoto. Yokota Fuyuhiko 横田冬彦 1998. “Kinsei sonraku shakai ni okeru ‘chi’ no mondai” 近 世村落社会における＜知＞の問題 [The problem of “knowledge” in early modern village society], Hisutoria 159: 1–28. Yūrin 有林 (1363) 1979. Fukudenpō 福田方 [Formulas from the Fields of Merit], in Nihon koten zenshū 日本古典全集, vol. 39. Tokyo: Gendai shichōsha.

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The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China’s Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy Mårten Söderblom Saarela

A servant of the Manchu dynasty wrote in 1911 that “the Manchu language and script are the basis of our state.” He was arguing against constitutional reformers and critics of the institutions of the Qing Empire (1644–1911), which had ruled China and gradually Inner Asia from Beijing for more than two centuries. As the “life” (shengming) of the Manchu people and the “national essence” (guocui), the Manchu language had to be preserved, he argued.1 In the very year that these words were written, an uprising began that would topple the Manchu dynasty and lead to the establishment of the Republic of China. Manchu, which during the preceding centuries had coexisted with Chinese and Mongolian as the administrative languages of the empire, was quickly passed to the scrap heap of history and forgotten, along with the textbooks and dictionaries written to facilitate its study by generations of Chinese, Mongolian, and native scholars. Yet in the Qing period, the Manchu language and script had been even more than a vehicle of government administration.2 Studied by officials, clerks, soldiers,3 and the linguistically curious, the Manchu script had been integrated into the lives of literates in the capital and the northeast, contributing to the rise of a vibrant multilingual culture of manuscript and print that extended from the palace printshop and commercial booksellers of Beijing to the classrooms and offices of the garrison towns.4 One of the products of that culture was an alphabetical order based on the Manchu script. Developed on the basis of syllabaries used to teach literacy to Manchu children and second-language 1 Second afterword of Zhikuan and Peikuan 1911, 12:2a–b: 清文爲我國之根本 . . . 清人之生 命 . . . 國粹. 2 A general survey of Manchu in the Qing period is found in Crossley and Rawski 1993. 3 The extent of the study of the Manchu language and of the education of Manchus in the capital is studied in Crossley 1994. The study of Manchu by Chinese scholar-officials is described by Chase (1979, 17–26, 187–189), who stresses the inadequacies of the system in reference to the seventeenth century. 4 In reference to the situation in the capital, the multilingual print culture of the Qing has been studied, e.g., in Rawski 2005.

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learners alike, Manchu alphabetical order was one of the most notable products of late imperial China’s encounter with Inner Asian alphabetical literacy. As such, it is the focus of this chapter. Since the early modern period, alphabetical order, or alphabetization, has been one of the most important technologies of information management available to the Western world. In 1972, a reviewer, who called alphabetization “as indispensable to twentieth-century life as the wheel,” wrote: “Today, libraries, telephone communications, much of commerce and industry, even the lower levels of government, would be paralyzed if the art of alphabetization, and the tools which it has produced, were suddenly lost.”5 The advantages of the technology of alphabetization were not missed by Chinese observers of the West in the twentieth century. Expressing an anxious desire to reform Chinese education and written culture and an idealization of certain elements of Western civilization common to the Republican period, one commentator wrote that “foreign dictionaries rely on the order of the alphabet, which makes word retrieval extremely convenient,” enabling foreign children to use a dictionary and conduct independent research after only a few months of study.6 The commentator argued that China needed to develop an equally efficient kind of serial arrangement of lexical material to catch up in the field of education. But the lack of an equivalent to alphabetical order affected not only young students. “Dictionaries, indexes, and bibliographies,” it was noted, “are the key tools of the researcher, but any difficulties stemming from searching them are a waste of energy and time and an impediment to research.”7 The article also recognized that efficient serial arrangement would facilitate, as it did in Europe, the management of “all the government agencies; the cases, accounts, and forms of businesses; as well as telephone and telegraph numbers and printing type.”8 A latter-day admirer of Western linguistic technology, John DeFrancis (1911– 2009) similarly wrote at the end of the past century of the “inefficiency inherent in a character system of writing,” which he saw represented in the makeup of Chinese dictionaries. Like other twentieth-century commentators, he considered the problem of dictionary arrangement to be but the most obvious instance of a greater problem of information management, citing phone books, 5 6 7 8

Kuhn 1972, 300. Wan 1933, 1: 外國字典,依字母 ABCD . . . 等的順序排列,檢查極便,所以外國兒童,讀 了幾個月的 書,便能利用字典,自動研究. Wan 1933, 1: 字典,辭書,索引,書目等,為研究學問的利器,但若檢查困難,於學者的 精神光陰,都 有極大的防礙. Wan 1933, 1–2: 各機關,商店的案件,賬目,表冊,及電話薄,電報號碼,印刷廠排字等.

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library catalogs, indexes to publication series, and the maintenance of office files as examples of elements of modern life that Chinese print culture in its then-current state was unable to handle satisfactorily. DeFrancis believed that twentieth-century attempts at lexicographic reform in China had led to a “babelization of dictionary arrangement,” and he remarked with regret that “the Chinese have not produced a single dictionary in which the entries are arranged in simple alphabetic order.”9 Many of the applications of alphabetization pointed out by twentieth-century writers, such as the phone book, appeared only in the Republican period, but others had been known to China since long before the Qing. These included, notably, dictionaries facilitating the study or translation of literary or foreign languages; encyclopedias providing factual information about society and the natural world; and the organization of archival holdings. Throughout Chinese history, several systems had been developed to perform the task commonly entrusted to alphabetical order in post-Renaissance Europe, including those based on the structure of the Chinese script.10 As Republican intellectuals and their Western followers rejected—ridiculed, almost—the most well-known examples of older Chinese systems of information management, which were generally based on segmentation of Chinese characters, they chose ignorance over investigation of earlier attempts at alphabetization. Yet in reality, by the time unflattering comparisons of Chinese print culture with its Western counterparts appeared in the writings of Republican intellectuals and Western Sinologists, Qing scholars had wrestled with the problem of alphabetization for centuries. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the introduction of the Manchu script to China had notably given rise to the development of an entirely new form of serial arrangement much closer to Western alphabetical order than anything previously produced there. Just as Western alphabetical order, the Manchu system had the notable advantage of being used to organize a great variety of corpora. Although originally applied to Manchu-language material, the system developed to handle texts written in Mongolian and, eventually, Chinese. In the end, the Manchu system did not develop in the same way as alphabetical order did in Europe, and by the time the dynasty fell, the incentive to study the now politically suspect Manchu script largely disappeared. Yet numerous printed dictionaries and many manuscripts featuring Manchu alphabetical order remain, inviting 9 10

DeFrancis 1996, 13, 18–19, 25. The practical applications of the most common such system has been described in Kennedy 1941.

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the study of what we with good reason might call one of the most radically new developments in information management to take place in China during the past several centuries. In the following, I will examine the Manchu system and evaluate the applications to which it was put in the Qing period. I will argue that although the Manchu system offered distinct advantages over extant Chinese systems and was widely used, its application might ultimately have been held back by certain unarticulated structural problems. The Western Concept and History of Alphabetical Order As a concept, alphabetical order is intimately tied to the alphabet, a hallmark of Western civilization. Talking about an alphabetical order for Manchu, an Inner Asian language written using a modified version of the Mongol script, might thus seem forced at best, if not outright impossible. Indeed, both the terms “alphabet” and “alphabetical order” have historically been used in ways difficult to disentangle from their original European context. What we are talking about when we refer to alphabetical order is the conventional order in which the Latin script was organized by its community of users.11 Although such a concept is applicable to some writing systems only with great difficulty—such as the more or less open-ended Chinese writing system—it can serve to describe the organization of the Manchu script in the Qing period. In Europe, alphabetization began in ancient Greece, where its application eventually extended to materia medica, literary collections, and business and tax records. The Romans were less interested in the technology, and not until the second millennium CE did alphabetical order start to be applied with greater consistency in an increasing number of fields. In Renaissance France, alphabetization was applied to government records,12 from where its use was generalized to encompass the organization of a wide variety of corpora. As Karin Miethaner-Vent has shown, medieval European lexicographers developed a lexicographic order that reinterpreted the Latin alphabet as a “syllabic alphabet” (Silbenalphabet).13 This alphabet organized words, not according to the initial letter of the word, but according to the initial syllable.

11 12 13

In reference to the ancient Near East, one writer chooses to use the word “acrographic”: Boulanger 2003, 82. Daly 1967. Miethaner-Vent 1986.

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Complete alphabetization of an orthographically well-defined corpus did not appear until the early sixteenth century.14 The reading public did not immediately internalize the mechanics of alphabetization. As late as 1604, the pioneering English lexicographer Robert Cawdrey explained: “If thou”—that is, the user of his English dictionary—“be desirous . . . rightly and readily to vnderstand, and to profit by this Table [viz., the dictionary], and such like, then thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfecty [sic] without booke.”15 We might take alphabetical order for granted today, but its development in Europe was a tortuous process. We should keep this in mind when we examine the development of Manchu alphabetical order in China. The Manchu Syllabary Manchu alphabetical order was based on the script used to encode the Manchu language. The latter developed and was first committed to writing in what is now northeast China and has structural properties familiar from Japanese: verbs follow their objects, and case is indicated by means of enclitic particles. The Manchu language has been considered part of a larger Altaic family of languages, including, among others, Mongolian.16 It is structurally very different from Chinese, to which it has no relation. Manchu became a written language as part of the state-building efforts of the early Manchu rulers. Until the last years of the sixteenth century, the Manchu administration, to the extent it used writing, had relied on other languages. Mongolian was written using a notation that had been borrowed from the Uighurs centuries earlier but ultimately had Near Eastern roots. Like several other Near Eastern scripts, Mongol characters, or glyphs, have different shapes depending on whether they are written in isolation or in the beginning, middle, or end of words. Qing users of Manchu did not use the concept of the letter. Yet it is important to note that, from a structural point of view, Manchu characters, which were derived from Mongol characters and could be composed of one or several glyphs, have little in common with Chinese characters (hanzi 漢字) except their denotation of one spoken syllable. Structurally, the Manchu script was not unlike the Greek or Roman alphabets used in Europe. 14 15 16

A uniform and standardized orthography was obtained by completely restoring the spelling used in Roman antiquity: Miethaner-Vent 1986, 102. Cawdrey 1604, no pagination, last page of section “To the Reader.” Norman 2007.

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The Manchus understood the basic units of their written languages as individual syllables. They arranged the syllables according to their finals—codas—into twelve groups. These groups were called the “twelve heads” (juwan juwe uju) in Manchu and the “twelve character heads” (shier zitou 十二字頭) in Chinese. The Qing syllabary consisted of two linear sequences of graphemes. One sequence was formed by the twelve codas—the “heads”—which I call the syllabary’s “outer sequence.” I call it “outer” because the sequence of “heads” gave the syllabary its structure of an ordered collection of twelve lists of syllables. This sequence was a Manchu invention and contained vowels or consonants acting as syllabic codas, as well as a zero coda. The other, “inner” sequence of the syllabary was found within the syllable lists that made up each of the twelve “heads.” The inner sequence was borrowed from the Mongols along with their version of the old Uighur script and was subsequently modified by the Manchus in the preconquest period by the addition of new graphemes. The inner sequence contained open syllables consisting of monophthongs with or without consonantal onsets. Every “head” consisted of the inner sequence paired with a coda from the outer sequence. The total number of syllables included in a syllabary generally hovered around 1,400.17 A total count of about 1,400 syllables at first glance seems like a lot to memorize, especially compared with the few dozen graphs used by contemporary Western linguists to describe the Manchu script. However, since the syllabary consisted of the pairing of an inner and an outer sequence, what students had to memorize was not 1,400 syllables but the two sequences of 12 and 131 syllables, respectively. Although the Manchu syllabary most likely developed before the conquest of China in 1644, we possess no copy of it from that period. By contrast, countless copies of syllabaries in both print and manuscript remain from the postconquest period, testifying to a sustained interest in learning the Manchu language and script by people in the Qing Empire. One of the oldest syllabaries that we know of to appear in print is found in a collection by Shen Qiliang (fl. 1645–1693), titled Qingshu zhinan 清書指南 (Guide to Qing Writing).18 The syllabary itself, however, is anonymous and not Shen’s original work. Although 17

18

This is the number given in Ligeti 1952, 240–241. The fact that the pairing of the inner and outer sequences did not produce all the syllables possible in Manchu compelled some compilers of syllabaries to expand on this structure, causing further fluctuation of the total syllable count. Studied in Fuchs 1936, 10–11; Zhongguo Kexueyuan Tushuguan 1996, 6:154; Kanda 1969, 131–132; Crossley and Rawski 1993, 85–86; Imanishi 1956.

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this syllabary does not represent the earliest known printing of the “twelve heads,” it is arguably the most archaic version of the syllabary, in terms of both structure and presentation. It contains no prefatory material and no commentary, and I believe that it very likely reflects an early stage in the development of the syllabary, dating from before Manchu language learning became influenced by the Chinese tradition.19 Grouping one “head” per page, Qingshu zhinan is a simple, economical publication. It does not explain how Manchu was pronounced, nor does it give any instruction on the structure of the characters. Therefore, it is unlikely that the syllabary was meant to be used by adult Chinese autodidacts. Rather, the syllabary in Qingshu zhinan was probably intended as a mnemonic to be used by teachers, who would have complemented its crude listing of the syllables of Manchu with oral explanations. The syllabary in Qingshu zhinan presented the Manchu script without Chinese pronunciation glosses. Most often, however, the Manchu syllabary in the Qing period appeared as a bilingual publication, in which every piece of Manchu text had a Chinese counterpart either in the form of a gloss explaining the pronunciation of the Manchu or in the form of a translation. In all likelihood, these syllabaries initially served adult Chinese learners of Manchu, including certain officials in the central government and scholars with an interest in language. However, after proficiency in Manchu declined among the Manchus living in China proper in the eighteenth century, teachers and learners from inside the Manchu military establishment might also have found use for bilingual syllabaries. The advent of bilingual syllabaries in the second half of the seventeenth century indicated that Manchu education had reached a new phase. In addition to monolingual syllabaries serving essentially as mnemonic devices for teachers instructing a group of students orally, the new bilingual syllabaries were constructed so as to also serve literate Chinese speakers desirous of learning Manchu even without a teacher. In the history of linguistic thought, the Manchu-Chinese syllabaries represent a first step on a path that would soon lead to an analysis of the Manchu script into subsyllabic units. Bilingual syllabaries would have encouraged reflection on the structure of the script, since a student relying on them to learn Manchu would from the very beginning of her studies have been exposed to Manchu graphs. Learning from a bilingual syllabary, unlike learning from the explanations of a teacher, was learning first by sight, not by ear.

19

The syllabary compiled by Shen is organized somewhat differently from the conventional order of the “twelve heads.”

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The “twelve heads” with Chinese glosses enabled self-study and thus the memorization of the Manchu script in complete silence. In the words of one pedagogue, the bilingual syllabary could be “understood by both Manchu and Chinese students at a glance, without recourse to a teacher.”20 Yet the bilingual syllabaries continued to stress recitation and memorization of the Manchu sounds represented on the printed page. Although a subgenre of syllabaries soon began to feature extensive instructions on how to write Manchu, we see a marked focus on the pronunciation of Manchu graphs into the nineteenth century. The earliest extant presentation we have of the twelve-headed syllabary—bilingual or otherwise—dates from 1670. The syllabary was written by Liao Lunji (n.d.) and published in Jiangxi in 1671. Liao’s syllabary is bilingual, in that each written Manchu syllable—with some exceptions—is accompanied by a Chinese character specifying its pronunciation. Liao Lunji’s audience would have to have been literate in Chinese and proficient in the northern vernacular to be able to make use of the sound glosses. Although this circumstance further indicates that the text was intended for adults, the method of study that it implies prioritized the aural-oral21 component over the visual. Liao’s Manchu syllabary was firmly anchored in an educational paradigm that emphasized recitation and memorization by the students—with or without the aid of a teacher. Liao did not provide any explanation of the Manchu script, beyond comparing it in very general terms to Chinese writing and noting that it was both written and read from left to right. If Liao’s syllabary taught Manchu writing at all, it left it to the student to discern the structure of Manchu characters. The syllabary did not provide a structural analysis of the script, which is a prerequisite for a systematic serial arrangement of words in dictionaries on graphological principles. Following the publication in 1670 of Liao Lunji’s syllabary, several similar works appeared. They include both high-end prints targeted at literati22 and unpublished manuscripts.23 In addition to syllabaries derived from Liao’s publication, a series of bilingual syllabaries derived in part from an early textbook appeared from the turn of the eighteenth century to the latter half of the nineteenth.24 These syllabaries all carry the signs of commercial publications, indicating that elementary Manchu education was a profitable business.25 The 20 21 22 23 24 25

Juntu 2001, “Fanli,” 1b: 無論滿漢之人,不必師承皆可一目了然. I borrow this term from Yu 2012, 8. Notably, the syllabary in Ling and Chen 1699, vol. 1. Cover and first page of a manuscript reproduced in Gugong 2009, 68–69. The textbook is Shen 1686. Shen 1701; Hi Hiya 1733; Man-Han shier zitou 1861.

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existence of multiple editions over an extend period of time suggests that the bilingual syllabary that stressed pronunciation and recitation of the written Manchu syllables circulated widely among learners of Manchu well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The syllabary was the inroad to Manchu proficiency for most, if not all, second-language learners, who did not benefit from immersion in a community where Manchu was the privileged vehicle of social intercourse. As for the teaching of Manchu literacy, the use of the syllabary was probably even more widespread, extending to learners for whom Manchu was a native language. Because of its great popularity as an educational text, the syllabary was repeatedly printed and edited. In addition to the prints, many manuscript copies of the syllabary also remain in libraries and collections. Sometimes layered with annotations and emendations, these manuscripts show the syllabary in action, as a tool for instruction or self-study. Although the syllabary’s early history can only be inferred from relatively late extant copies, it seems to have originated as simple lists entirely in Manchu and then to have developed into full-fledged bilingual textbooks in the Kāngxī period (1662–1722). Originally, the audience for the bilingual syllabaries seems to have been Chinese individuals who had already undergone basic education in Chinese. In time, however, they were probably also studied by Manchus, as native proficiency declined and the language’s pronunciation had to be studied along with its script. Although a pedagogical tradition focused on writing soon developed out of the bilingual syllabaries, down through the nineteenth century people evidently continued to study Manchu primarily by reciting and memorizing the syllable lists. Originating in a context of oral instruction with minimal recourse to written material, the aural-oral paradigm was partially reproduced in the instructions and glosses added to bilingual syllabaries from the late seventeenth century onward. Universal reliance on the twelve-headed syllabary for learning basic Manchu literacy and a widespread focus on recitation and memorization thus meant that the educational experience was similar for Manchus and Chinese throughout the Qing period. The Manchu Syllabary and the Understanding of the Script The strong aural-oral component of Manchu pedagogy seen in mono- and bilingual syllabaries notwithstanding, the “twelve heads” inspired reflection on the nature and structure of the Manchu script among both teachers and students. Beginning in the Kāngxī period, Chinese scholars already familiar with both the Chinese writing system and the attendant disciplines of philology

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and phonology took an interest in the Manchu script. Around the same time, pedagogues started to introduce descriptions of the structure and functioning of Manchu writing into their textbooks, motivated by a desire to teach students not only how to pronounce and read Manchu but also how to reproduce it in writing. Although the Manchu script could arguably be understood as an alphabet, Qing writers consistently treated it as consisting of syllabic blocks that, like Chinese characters, subdivided into a finite number of brush strokes, not letters. The existence of the twelve-headed syllabary, the form of organization that the Manchu script had been given by the time it entered China in the midseventeenth century, facilitated the script’s integration into a grammatological26 paradigm centered on the Chinese writing system. As syllabic characters, Manchu writing was made commensurable with the Chinese script despite its Inner Asian origins. Rather than revolutionizing Chinese ideas of what writing was and how it worked, the fate of the Manchu script in the Qing period shows that Chinese literary culture could make sense of a foreign writing system without adopting a view of writing based on the notions of phonemes and letters. In Europe, letters were considered the main building blocks of writing, consistent with the structure of the Greco-Roman alphabets. In China things were understandably very different. Discussions of the Manchu script in the Qing period were carried out not just in the Chinese language but also within a tradition where the Chinese script was the basis for thought about writing in general. Throughout Chinese history, several terms had developed to describe writing with reference to the morphosyllabic blocks usually referred to in English as Chinese characters. In the seventeenth century, when Manchu writing was developed and taken to China by the banner armies, the general term for a Chinese character was zi 字, which would also be used in reference to the Manchu script at various levels of analysis. At the time of their encounter with the Manchu script, scholars in China were used to theorizing writing, describing the building blocks of the Chinese script—the characters—and their relationship to speech and meaning. Most importantly, Chinese intellectuals in the seventeenth century were familiar with the analysis of Chinese characters that subdivided them into a limited number of strokes. Qing scholars writing about the Manchu script in Chinese had been schooled in this context, and the late Ming Chinese model for understanding language and writing remained relevant for them as they tried to come to grips with Manchu. To some extent, the Manchu script was theorized 26

I borrow the term “grammatology” from Gelb 1963, v.

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in treatises of Chinese phonology,27 treatises intended for translators,28 and government publications focused on the institutions of the dynasty,29 but most expositions of the elements of Manchu characters were found in textbooks. In the sixty-year period that followed the definitive establishment of Manchu power with the defeat of the Rebellion of the Three Feudatories (1673– 1681), several works appeared from the commercial publishers in the Qing capital that advanced Manchu language pedagogy. Some of them went beyond the aural-oral paradigm reigning in much of Manchu and Chinese education and introduced into the curriculum instructions on not just how to read but how to write Manchu characters. Analyses of the script were implicit in these instructions. By exploring the structure of Manchu characters, the pedagogues laid bare the discrepancies that existed between how Manchu was presented in the twelve-headed syllabary and the way it was actually used in documents. Although it was not the stated intention of the pedagogues, through their works students of Manchu were trained to see written words as subdividing into segments, which could in turn be ordered to arrange the words in dictionaries. Yet the main objective of pedagogues remained the resolution of certain perceived problems in Manchu education to enable the quick acquisition of Manchu writing ability, and not a comprehensive and theoretically coherent description of the structure of the script. Thus, they were often content to explain in an ad hoc manner the instances in which the functioning of the script could not be easily construed on the basis of the twelve-headed syllabary. None of them questioned the “twelve heads” as a paradigm to organize the Manchu writing system.30 Discussions of the Manchu script were also carried out in manuscripts in the Qing period. Most extant texts probably date from the last century of Manchu rule. Although simple bilingual syllabaries persisted as basic teaching material into the nineteenth century, the attention paid to the Manchu script in commercial textbooks from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly affected Manchu pedagogy more broadly in the late Qing. In the nineteenth century, manuscripts intended as teaching material in family or other nongovernmental schools incorporated detailed expositions on the structure of the Manchu script, sometimes expressed in theories of sound, speech, and 27 28 29 30

Notably, Xiong 1997, 9: “Yue Qingshu zitou” 閱清書字頭 (Reading the Character Heads of Qing Writing). Chu and Chu 1727, vol. 1, “Zimu bian” 字母辨 (Distinguishing Characters). Qinding huangchao tongzhi 1882, chap. 11. Shen 1686; Šeo ping 1730; Juntu 2001.

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language in general.31 Reflecting the educational experience of people living in a time of several original developments in Manchu-Chinese lexicography and phonology, the new pedagogical texts can help us understand the context in which the last few generations of Manchu scholars carried out their work and studies. Regardless of date or medium, common to all analyses of the Manchu script was the characterization of the Manchu script as consisting of “characters”: zi in Chinese and hergen in Manchu. The precise meaning of the term “character” varied, but not so much between scholars as within one system. In the texts I have studied, a Manchu “character” referred most often to the written syllables, which numbered around 1,400 and together constituted the syllabary. Occasionally, however, “character” could refer to parts of the syllable. Only in this last did the meaning of “character” coincide with that of “letter,” denoting a distinct graphic unit associated with a distinct speech sound. The notion of letters nevertheless remained alien to all the scholars I studied. For them, Manchu writing did not consist of letters, which together would have formed an alphabet. Instead it consisted of characters, which referred primarily to the onsets and nuclei of the inner sequence on the one hand, and the codas of  the outer sequence on the other. Although the word “character” was used indiscriminately, there was the notion that some of the entities referred to using this term were more fundamental than others. Qing scholars recognized that the same character came in different shapes depending on its position in a word, and those shapes were understood as variants of the same character. They also recognized that many of the characters could be further subdivided into smaller units. There was a certain degree of overlap in the terminology used by different authors. Although some Chinese terms appear to be idiosyncratic inventions, most were either calques of preexisting Manchu or Mongolian terms or borrowings from descriptions of the strokes that composed Chinese characters. Yet judging from the nineteenthcentury manuscript syllabaries, the terminology never became completely standardized, and several terms are attested in one text only. Nevertheless, the idea that the Manchu writing system equaled the twelve-headed syllabary, consisting of mostly syllabic “characters,” was generally shared. This was consistent with the conception of writing prevalent in China when the Manchus took power, which on the basis of Chinese characters saw writing as consisting

31

E.g., Qingwen houxue jinfa, n.d.; Man-Han ziyin lianzhu shiwen, n.d.; Chuxue Manwen zhimeng ge 1862–1911; Juwan juwe uju bithe, n.d.; Algitai 1902; Manwen zitou, n.d.; Chuxue bianshi Qingzi xuzhi, n.d.

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of syllabic blocks subdividing into a limited number of standardized brushstrokes. The segmentation of Manchu words into characters, and the arrangement of these segments in a fixed order through the twelve heads, which was propagated both by pedagogical texts and by scholarly treatises, helped create a shared understanding of what the Manchu script was and how it functioned. This was consequential for the development of first Manchu and ultimately also Chinese lexicography. Through exposure to the syllabary and the analysis of the script that came to accompany it, readers of Manchu, I am tempted to infer, might have developed an increased predilection for graphologically organized Manchu dictionaries, which also developed in the same period. Manchu Alphabetical Order Manchu alphabetical order seems to emerge fully formed with the first Manchu-Chinese dictionary. To what extent this is a distortion caused by the loss of earlier glossaries or lexica is difficult to ascertain. It is nevertheless clear that when Shen Qiliang published the Manchu-Chinese dictionary Da-Qing quan­ shu 大清全書 (Complete Book of the Great Qing) in 1683, he felt the need to explain its arrangement to his readers.32 Although alphabetically organized word lists were probably already in circulation by the time Shen published his dictionary, it is very likely that Da-Qing quanshu represents the first attempt to explain the serial arrangement of words on the basis of the Manchu script in Chinese. The first thing that users of European alphabetical dictionaries need to understand regarding the arrangement of Da-Qing quanshu is the fact that the basic unit in the system is not the letter but the syllable. The notion of the letter was unknown to Qing grammatology, and Shen seems to have construed the Manchu script as consisting primarily of syllabic blocks. Shen’s dictionary arranged words by segmenting them into syllables and organizing them according to their positions in the two linear sequences that made up the Manchu twelve heads. Shen’s system hinged on the invocation of these two linear sequences in a fixed order of priority. The arrangement of Shen’s dictionary accounted for both of the sequences that made up the Manchu syllabary, weaving them together in order to deal 32

Shen 2008. The dictionary is studied or mentioned in Kanda 1969, 133; Crossley and Rawski 1993, 86; Rawski 2005, 314–315; Sŏng 1999; Tong 2009, 67–70; Ji 1990; Chunhua 2008b, 293–297; Zhongguo Kexueyuan Tushuguan 1996, 6:55; Hayata and Teramura 2004.

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with both the initials and finals of syllables in the listed headwords. However, the arrangement was unable to account for a few syllable types, which were dealt with in an unexplained, ad hoc manner. More importantly, Shen declined to apply his braided alphabetical order with complete consistency, leaving many headwords out of position and sometimes forcing the reader to browse the relevant section of the dictionary at random in order to find a word. Worse, the order of the sequence changes somewhat throughout the dictionary; it is unclear whether Shen was even aware of this circumstance.33 In the introduction to his dictionary, Shen effectively describes a system in which words are arranged, syllable by syllable, first according to the inner sequence and then by the outer sequence, down through all the syllables in a word. Theoretically, his system allowed for the arrangement to work its way through the whole word in a way similar to the complete alphabetization of early modern and modern European dictionaries. Yet in practice, Shen applied his method of ordering according to both sequences to only the first syllable. The remaining syllables of headwords were only approximately ordered, leading to an arrangement very similar to the “syllabic alphabet” seen in medieval European dictionaries. The partially unpredictable arrangement that resulted from the incomplete application of the principles outlined at the beginning of Da-Qing quanshu was detrimental to the dictionary’s efficacy as an information management tool; the imprecision with which the words were arranged forced the reader to scan a larger section than necessary in order to locate a word or determine its absence from the dictionary. It is possible that Shen himself did not fully realize that he was not using the system to its full potential. If that is the case, the very fact that Shen did not fully understand the potential of his system would be revelatory of Qing grammatology, which in the late seventeenth century might not have been capable of clearly theorizing the functioning of the Manchu script or forms of serial arrangement derived from it. If, by contrast, we assume that Shen realized that his system was open ended, and thus that it did not have to stop functioning after the first syllable, but nevertheless chose not to apply it with complete consistency, then solving the problem of Manchu alphabetical order would simply have required lexicographers to invest the amount of time needed to arrange all the words satisfactorily. An examination of the continued development of Shen’s system in later Manchu dictionaries will help us clarify this point.

33

Hayata and Teramura 2004, 1:18.

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It was primarily in private and commercial publishing that Shen Qiliang’s lexicographic arrangement would develop.34 By 1780, almost a century after the initial publication of Shen’s dictionary, five major alphabetically arranged Manchu-Chinese dictionaries had been published, including Da-Qing quan­ shu. The other four were the anonymous Man-Han tongwen quanshu 滿漢同 文全書 (Complete Book in Standardized Manchu and Chinese Writing; 1690),35 Daigu’s (n.d.) Qingwen beikao 清文備考 (Ready Examinations of Qing Writing; 1722),36 Li Yanji’s (n.d.) Qingwen huishu 清文彙書 (Manchu Collected; 1724),37 and Fügiyün’s (fl. 1748–1792) Sanhe bianlan 三合便覽 (Book Made from a Combination Including Three Languages; 1780).38 Comparing the arrangements of the entries in these five dictionaries reveals the level of success achieved by Manchu lexicographers in the development of alphabetical order. Although the basic structure of the dictionaries was similar to that in DaQing quanshu, it was not identical, because Shen Qiliang had based his arrangement on an idiosyncratic order of the syllabary’s outer sequence. And, unlike Shen Qiliang, the authors of later Manchu dictionaries did not explain the lexicographical arrangement to their readers. Likely, they took it for granted that their readers knew that “organized according to the twelve heads” meant organized in the manner of Da-Qing quanshu. It is also possible that their lexicographic work consisted more of collecting, verifying, and translating words than arranging them. The absence of a discourse on alphabetical order might very well have hidden a general disinterest in the perfection of lexicographic arrangement. Was Shen Qiliang’s system convenient enough as it was? If we compare the arrangements in these five dictionaries, while taking into account that some words are present in some dictionaries but not in others, we find that the placement of around one-fourth of the entries differs. In other words, a reader in 1780 who had familiarized herself with the order of one of the five dictionaries and attempted to use any of the others according to the same principles might often not find the desired word at the expected place. 34

35 36 37 38

The standard reference for Manchu lexicography in the Qing period is Chunhua 2008b. More specifically, an account of the development of Manchu alphabetization (that does not describe the technical development of the system itself) is found in Chunhua 2008a. Man-Han tongwen quanshu 1690 is studied in Fuchs 1936, 11–12; Sŏng 1999; Chunhua 2008b, 297; Zhongguo Kexueyuan Tushuguan 1996, 5:682. Daigu 1722 is mentioned in Chunhua 2008b, 298–300. Li Yanji 2001 is studied or mentioned in Chunhua 2008b, 300–303; Gugong 2009, 36; Rawski 2005, 316; Crossley and Rawski 1993, 83, 86–87; Fuchs 1936, 7. Fügiyün 1792 is studied or mentioned in Gugong 2009, 82; Chunhua 2008b, 307–311; Zhongguo Kexueyuan Tushuguan 1996, 6:69, 71.

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For instance, if the reader was used to looking up the Chinese translation of Manchu words in Shen’s Da-Qing quanshu and now wanted to look up the Mongolian translation in the trilingual Sanhe bianlan, in one case out of four she would not find the word where she would have expected it. If we evaluate alphabetically arranged Manchu dictionaries in aggregate, as a genre, according to such numbers, we cannot but conclude that alphabetical order as an information management tool had largely failed to reach its full potential by the mid-Qing period. Did no one care? Unlike in early modern Europe, where dictionaries stirred up heated debates among intellectuals, Qing scholars of Manchu do not seem to have written critically on the dictionaries they were using. The information we have on the reception of Manchu lexicography comes from the dictionaries themselves. In print, the clearest criticism of alphabetical arrangement as carried out in eighteenth-century dictionaries comes from Yi-xing’s (1747–1809) 1786 sequel to a major commercial dictionary. Inspired by the index to a thesaurus printed by the imperial government, Yi-xing attempted to improve Shen’s alphabetical order by placing words whose arrangement could not be predicted by the study of the twelve-headed syllabary apart in a separate section at the end.39 Rarely can marginalia give us some information on the reception of Manchu alphabetization. In their present state, many Manchu dictionaries include notes and corrections left behind by their users, including the addition of new words. Yet when readers added new words to their dictionaries, they were often content to simply append them to the end of the relevant section, where there were a few empty columns. These readers thus engaged with the alphabetical order only on a very general level.40 A final comment on the state of Manchu alphabetization at the end of the High Qing period is a tattered manuscript that is held at Minzu University in Beijing and that, in its present state, can be described as a Mongol­-ChineseManchu dictionary at the draft stage. Written by Sayišangγ-a (1797–1875),41 it is a Mongolian dictionary based in part on earlier Manchu dictionaries and 39 40

41

Yi-xing 1802, “Fanli,” 5b. That is the case with the additions in Yi-xing 1802, passim. The copy of the 1780 edition of Sanhe bianlan held at Capital Library with the call number 乙・一 121 has additions that sometimes follow alphabetical order, but only when it does not conflict with what the annotator seems to have considered semantic or etymological order. We also see this in the marginalia in Fügiyün 1792, 4:2b, 4:13a, 6:109b. Although lacking the explanations for the editorial license exercised that we see in the Harvard-Yenching copy, a former reader of a copy now found at Capital Library in Beijing (call number 乙・一 123) has similarly moved a few of these words (6:96b). On Sayišangγ-a, see Chunhua 2008b, 323–325.

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survives in several manuscript copies, the exact relationships between which have yet to be established.42 The dictionary, finished in 1851, was originally written to translate Mongolian communications to the Court of Colonial Affairs. The original compiler made little mention of alphabetical order, writing simply that he “arranged and wrote out the heads of the characters according to Qingwen huishu, collecting and compiling” them.43 Arranging the Mongolian vocabulary in this manner following the order of Li Yanji’s dictionary was made possible by first transcribing the words using the Manchu script.44 Sayišangγ-a might not have found perfection of the alphabetical order very important, but the reader and annotator of the manuscript held at Minzu University certainly did. Indeed, many of the changes made to that copy of the dictionary in the form of marginalia involve its alphabetical order. Whoever wrote these notes considered Sayišangγ-a’s original alphabetical arrangement to have been insufficient and added notes throughout the volumes rearranging the lemmata. These notes, consisting of numbers added beneath the Mongolian words, are very interesting, as they are more specific than most other comments on alphabetical order that we possess. Rearranging the words according to the numbers added by the anonymous annotator would have regularized the arrangement substantially. This could have happened, as Sayišangγ-a’s compilation was well received, forming the basis for Mengwen zonghui 蒙文總 彙 (Comprehensive Collection of Mongolian; 1891) and Qinding Mengwen huishu 欽定蒙文彚書 (Imperially Authorized Collection of Mongolian; 1892), both major Mongolian dictionaries printed in the late Qing period. It remains un42

43

44

In the manuscript at Minzu University of China Sayišangγ-a’s trilingual preface is dated “the 10th month of the 1st month of Xianfeng [November 23–December 21, 1851]” (gubci elgiyengge-i sucungga aniya juwan biyade; no pagination). In her essay on the dictionary, based on a comparison of several manuscripts but not including the one at Minzu University, Chunhua uses the Chinese title Mengwen huishu 蒙文彙書 (Mongolian Collected) instead of Menggu wenhui (Chunhua 2008b, 332–336). It is unclear which—if any—of the manuscripts constitutes Sayišangγ-a’s holograph. As the Manchu collections at two of the libraries reportedly holding copies of the book (National Library of China; Liaoning Provincial Library) are currently (2014) not accessible to the public, a philological study of the manuscripts will likely not be possible for some time. Sayišangγ-a 1851, vol. 1 (no pagination): Ma. hergen-i uju be faidame arafi, manju hergen-i isabuha bithe songkoi, . . . isamjame banjibuha; Mo. üsüg-ün toloγai-yi ǰiγsaγan bičiged, manǰu üsüg-ün quriyaγsan bičig-un yosoγar, . . . quriyan ǰokiyabai; Ch. 排列字頭,依《清 文彙書》格式編成. The dictionary lists Mongolian words in Manchu script, the same words in native Mongolian orthography, their translation into Chinese, and their translation into Manchu, in that order.

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clear whether the Minzu University manuscript formed the basis of any of these dictionaries.45 Had the lemmata of the dictionaries by Shen Qiliang and his successors been reorganized similarly to those in the Minzu University manuscript of Sayišangγ-a’s dictionary, the differences in arrangement between them might have been very considerably reduced. However, the late Qing attempts at reviving Manchu lexicography developed differently from their Mongolian counterpart. Whereas Sayišangγ-a’s Mongolian dictionary was a creative work based on several Manchu-Mongol dictionaries, the order of which was further rearranged by a later hand, the Manchu dictionary of the late Qing, Qingwen zonghui 清文總彙 (Comprehensive Collection of Qing Writing; 1891), was little more than the sum of Li Yanji’s and Yi-xing’s dictionaries from the eighteenth century.46 The alphabetical order in Qingwen zonghui thus suffered from the very problems that we saw already in Shen Qiliang’s dictionary from 1683, and no real attempt had been made to apply an arrangement according to the inner sequence beyond even the first syllable. Qingwen zonghui nevertheless enjoyed considerable popularity, related perhaps to the increased scarcity of Manchu reference works as the great age of Manchu lexicography sunk deeper into the past. In 1911, the xinhai year of “Xinhai Revolution” fame, it was reprinted without any changes to the main text.47 After that, there was no dynasty or dynastic language, and the Qing tradition of Manchu lexicography came to an end with its full potential largely unrealized.

45

46 47

It seems clear, however, that they were based on different manuscripts of Sayišangγ-a’s work. Not only were Mengwen zonghui and Qinding Mengwen huishu produced at the same time, the manuscript that formed the basis of the latter was found in an office of what we can infer must have been the Court of Colonial Affairs, where Qinding Mengwen huishu’s head compiler worked. The manuscript was specified as “Mongolian Collected in our office, by the late former official Sayišangγ-a” (Sungsen 1892, yuanzou, 2b–3a [actually 17b–18a; the pagination starts from 1 on what should be folio no. 16]: man-u ǰurγan-dur nigente önggereksen tüsimel sayišangγ-a-yin bičigsen mongγol üsüg-ün quriyaγsan bičig . . . ; Ma. . . . meni jurgan de emgeri akûha amban saišangga-i araha monggo hergen-i isabuha bithe . . . ; Ch. 臣院存有故臣賽尚阿《蒙文彙書》). Chunhua 2008b, 348–351; Zhikuan and Peikuan 1911, vol. 12, ba: 2a (“we copied out the two books as one”; er bu he chao 二部合鈔). Zhikuan and Peikuan 1911.

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Manchu Alphabetical Order and Chinese Dictionaries Although Manchu lexicography proper stagnated in the nineteenth century, the Manchu script as an organizing device flourished. As we saw, the application of the Manchu script to first transcribe and then arrange Mongolian words made important strides with the dictionaries by Sayišangγ-a and his successors, eventually finding its way to print in the 1890s. Yet the application of Manchu alphabetical order in Mongolian dictionaries was not the century’s most important development. After all, Manchu characters were based on the Mongolian script, which itself had a history of reform.48 Using Manchu alphabetical order to organize Chinese dictionaries was a much more radical development. Given the dominant position of Chinese in terms of the number of literate speakers and texts produced, and the experiments with alphabetic scripts that would characterize the language reform movements of the Republic and early People’s Republic, the use of alphabetical order on Chinese corpora in hindsight seems to have been of the potentially greatest historical consequence. As the lamentations over the lack of alphabetization in Chinese dictionaries quoted in the beginning of this chapter indicate, by the time of the Republic the experiments with Manchu alphabetical order in Chinese dictionaries had been completely forgotten. The very existence of Chinese dictionaries with Manchu alphabetization nevertheless remains as a testament to the fact that Qing lexicographers perceived clear advantages in the use of alphabetical order and were willing to adopt it for the sake of improved Chinese information management. Application of Manchu alphabetical order on Chinese lemmata necessitated their transcription into Manchu. This had antecedents in transcription manuals printed in the early days of Manchu publishing.49 Standardization of transcriptions was also the main aim of Qinding Qing-Han duiyin zishi 欽定清 漢對音字式 (Imperially Authorized Manchu and Chinese Characters Presented in Corresponding Sounds) from 1772,50 which would be frequently reprinted in the nineteenth century and exerted some influence on lexicographers. The High Qing work on Manchu-Chinese transcription formed the background of alphabetical Chinese lexicography in the nineteenth century. Constituting a genre existing exclusively in manuscript, Chinese dictionaries organized in the Manchu script are often of unclear date and authorship. 48 49 50

For one seventeenth-century reform, see Kara 1996, 548. See, e.g., the list of Manchu transcriptions in Ling and Chen 1699, vol. 2. Another early example of a series of transcriptions is Wentong 1830. Qinding Qing-Han duiyin zishi 1836.

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I have consulted seven different titles in various libraries, five of which can properly be called dictionaries.51 Most of them are bilingual dictionaries, providing Manchu translations of Chinese words. One, however, is monolingual, giving explanations in Chinese for headwords written in Chinese.52 In that work, the Manchu script has been completely divorced from the Manchu language, functioning only as a notational system for Chinese in the way pinyin transcriptions are used in some monolingual Chinese dictionaries and indexes today. We see in the alphabetized Chinese dictionaries that by the nineteenth century, the Manchu script had been completely assimilated by Chinese written culture and turned into a tool for Chinese information management. Of the five manuscript dictionaries, only one contains a signed and dated preface. Written by Quan-xi under the title Fan Qing yuemu bianlan 翻清閱目 便覽 (Listed Items for Convenient Browsing, Turned into Manchu) in 1865, it is the most substantial Chinese dictionary arranged according to the Manchu script that we possess. Quan-xi pointed out that the Manchu and Chinese reference works previously available to translators of official documents were “inconvenient to search” when looking for words. He had thus compiled a dictionary that made “word retrieval convenient.” Quan-xi “arranged single Chinese words according to Manchu [transcriptions] of single Chinese characters, in order to save time when looking for words to translate from Chinese to Manchu.”53 In the seventy-eight slim and small volumes that constitute the dictionary, Quan-xi thus arranged Chinese characters according to the place of their Manchu transcriptions in an order derived from the twelve-headed syllabary. Following Qinding Qing-Han duiyin zishi, Quan-xi listed first Chinese characters that could be transcribed using regular Manchu syllables and then those necessitating the use of nonnative syllable constructions. The latter follow an order that can generally be anticipated from knowledge of Shen Qiliang’s system, but some regular features of Quan-xi’s order are contrary to the arrangement of alphabetical dictionaries of Manchu. The deviations conform to the principle that graphically simpler syllables should precede those that are graphically more complex.54 In the alphabetized dictionaries, the usability of Manchu transcriptions as a tool to manage information written in Chinese suffered from the weakly en51 52 53 54

Quan-xi 1865; Xi, n.d.; Leiyin zihui, n.d.; Li Dannian, n.d.; Tongyin zihui, n.d. Xi, n.d. Quan-xi 1865, vol. 1, preface (no pagination): 查閱不易 . . . 查字了然 . . . 按漢字有單話 者,則歸入滿洲漢單 字,以備漢文繙清查對時,可以省目耳. This is evident from Quan-xi 1865, vol. 63.

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forced and unclearly defined standard of spoken Chinese of the Qing period. This led to slightly different sound systems being represented in the dictionaries. Yet if we disregard variance stemming from differences in pronunciation, we find that the alphabetical order across dictionaries is more similar than it is different. Four of the five dictionaries feature an arrangement that appears to be variations on a theme, whereas the arrangement of the fifth dictionary differs radically from the rest.55 It appears that compilers of Chinese dictionaries who organized according to the Manchu script were aware that they were working in the same tradition, although some writers clearly felt that there was room for innovation. The ability of the Manchu alphabetical order to organize material for quick retrieval seems to have been the system’s main attraction. Yet the differences in order manifested across dictionaries show that a completely standardized order also failed to materialize in the organization of Chinese corpora. The medium of the manuscript, furthermore, in itself indicates that Manchu alphabetical order for Chinese information management failed to reach the greater audience offered by print. Manchu Alphabetical Order and the Mechanics of Word Retrieval More than two centuries of Manchu lexicography did not radically alter a genre that from the beginning had been characterized by largely unstated, structurally deficient, and inconsistently applied organizing principles. Generations of scholars willing to invest many years on the task while also fulfilling other responsibilities had not taken Manchu alphabetical order beyond the syllabic alphabet used in Da-Qing quanshu in the late seventeenth century. It was not because they were unaware of the benefits of alphabetization. On the contrary, Li Yanji rearranged the words culled from thesauri in alphabetical order precisely because that made the words easier to look up, and alphabetically arranged indexes to lexical repositories otherwise organized on semantic grounds were turned into complete dictionaries by the addition of manuscript translations of the lemmata in the index volumes, which then apparently circulated as independent works.56 55

56

Li Dannian, n.d., is the outlier. It did not use Manchu alphabetical order as realized in Qinding Qing-Han duiyin zishi but first grouped the Chinese lemmata according to their core vowel (Chunhua 2008a, 77). The copy of the index to the original imperial thesaurus now held at Peking University Library (Han-i araha manju gisun-i buleku bithe: Uheri hešen 1708), for example, appears without the thesaurus for which it was originally intended and has been made into a

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Marginalia in surviving prints and manuscripts also show that readers were concerned with the order of words. Yet the nature and extent of their concern also show that pushing the arrangement as far as structurally possible was rarely a priority; most often, organization down through the second—or even just the first—syllable seemed sufficient to readers and compilers. How can we explain this manifest but restricted interest in alphabetization? The answer might be found in the materiality of the dictionary and the mechanics of word retrieval, measured against the work needed to compile or revise a dictionary. A closer look at the nature of the differences observed in the arrangements of Manchu dictionaries provides the first clue. We saw that a reader used to the arrangement of one dictionary would often not find a word in its expected place when shifting to a different dictionary. However, the mechanics of dictionary consulting generally involves homing in on a word by flipping the pages back and forth in the general area where a word is expected to be found. This aspect of using a reference work might have offset the confusion stemming from differing arrangements across dictionaries. By looking closer at both the nature of the differences and the makeup of Manchu dictionaries, we can gauge the impact on the user. Although it is true that the order of entries indeed differed between Manchu dictionaries, more or less consistent application of alphabetization in the first syllable of words meant that the reader could still be confident of which section to go to when looking for a word. A comparison of any given pair of dictionaries shows that even though the order of entries is not identical, the headwords still tend to be found close to where they would be expected. Considering that most dictionary pages contained several entries, and that a reader could always view two pages of the dictionary at once as it lies open on the table, when a word was not in its expected place, there would still be a fair chance that it would be found either somewhere on the open pair of pages or on one of the neighboring pages. From the point of view of the user, who would have to browse a few pages even in the case of an arrangement in perfect agreement with expectations, the differences observed between Manchu dictionaries might not have been as harshly felt as originally suggested.

dictionary in its own right by the addition of translations next to all the lemmata listed in the index.

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Manchu Alphabetical Order and Information Management Considering its proliferation, it seems that Manchu alphabetical order did a decent job as an information management tool in mono-, bi-, and trilingual dictionaries, despite being undertheorized and suffering from inherent structural ambiguities. At the end of the day, only the practicality of alphabetical order as a form of lexicographic arrangement can explain its proliferation in linguistic reference works like those reviewed in this chapter. However, the practical consequences of an inconsistently applied and inherently ambiguous form of arrangement on corpora other than dictionaries might have been very different, although we have little possibility to investigate these owing to a lack of relevant sources. The main reason that the braided syllabic form of alphabetical arrangement seen in Manchu dictionaries from 1683 onward was never perfected might have been the sheer amount of work needed. Qing lexicographers often remarked that they had spent years on compiling their dictionaries.57 If the impact on the user experience was considered negligible, lexicographers might have felt that the extra work needed to advance the alphabetical arrangement of a dictionary, which had already taken many years to put together, was inordinately prohibitive. Perfection of alphabetical arrangement might have been perceived as governed by a law of diminishing returns. If readers would be able to find a word with relative ease anyway, why put in the extra work? Yet a precise and consistent arrangement might have been essential for the export of Manchu alphabetical order to other areas of application, such as the organization of archives. Conversely, a deficient arrangement would have discouraged further adoption of the Manchu order in areas other than dictionaries. We know that alphabetical order has played a prominent role in the organization of European archives since the Renaissance and that Manchu alphabetical order was used in the archives of the Qing imperial government. When Mark Elliott inspected the holdings of Manchu documents in the First Historical Archives of China, he noted a collection of more than twenty thousand Manchu memorials organized in alphabetical order.58 However, as far as I am aware, any traces of an alphabetical arrangement that might have existed have been erased in the collections of facsimiles of archival documents published in China today. As long as we lack access to alphabetically organized Qing archives in their original state, we will remain unable to evaluate its success as an information management tool. 57 58

Li Yanji 2001, xu, 2b; Quan-xi 1865, xu, 2a; Sayišangγ-a 1851, vol. 1 (no pagination). Elliott 2001, 39.

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We can only surmise that in the case of a corpus composed of very voluminous batches of documents—an archive—a degree of difference that in a pair of dictionaries merely forced the reader to browse a few extra pages in either direction might have had more strenuous consequences; instead of flipping a few extra pages, the extra work entailed by an inconsistent order might have involved a lot of going back and forth between archival shelves or boxes, resulting in a time-consuming waste of energy. It cannot be denied that the inconsistencies of Manchu alphabetical order as realized in the dictionaries might therefore have limited its application in government administration. In the end, we are left with a form of arrangement whose full potential seems to have been left untapped. When the Manchu regime fell in 1911, the Manchu script and the uses to which it had been put were quickly forgotten, and China entered a phase in which the linguistic point of reference was Western, especially English. For decades, linguists and officials struggled to develop systems of transcription and lexical organization to solve problems perceived to be endemic to a written culture based on Chinese characters. Often inspired by the Roman alphabet, twentieth-century reformers were blind to China’s rich and recent history of interaction with alphabetic literacy and the potentially very useful books it had produced. References Algitai 1902. Juwan juwe uju. Chirograph held at the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, Beijing (call no. 滿 92–218 4), under the retrospective title Manwen shier zitou 滿文 十二字頭 [The twelve character heads of Manchu]. Boulanger, Jean-Claude 2003. Les inventeurs de dictionnaires: De l’eduba des scribes mésopotamiens au scriptorium des moines médiévaux. Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Cawdrey, Robert 1604. A table alphabeticall. London: Edmund Weauer. Chase, Hanson 1979. “The Status of the Manchu Language in the Early Ch’ing.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington. Chu Qishu 初齊曙 and Chu Jingfu 初敬敷 1727. Fanyi fawei 翻譯發微 [Explanations of the subtleties of translation]. 2 vols. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–161B). Chunhua 春花 2008a. “Lun Qingdai Man-Mengwen ‘yinxu cidian’ de fazhan yanbian” 论清代满蒙文‘音序词典’的发展演变 [On the Manchu and Mongolian “phonetically organized dictionaries” of the Qing period], Gugong Bowuyuan yuankan 4: 75–88.

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–––––– 2008b. Qingdai Man-Mengwen cidian yanjiu 清代满蒙文词典研究 [Research on Manchu- and Mongol-language dictionaries of the Qing period]. Shenyang: Liaoning Minzu chubanshe. Chuxue bianshi Qingzi xuzhi 初學辨識清字須知 [What the beginner needs to know to decipher Qing characters] n.d. Chirograph likely written after 1830, held at the Institute for Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (call no. 经 91612527 2323474). Chuxue Manwen zhimeng ge 初學滿文指蒙歌 [Educational jingles for the beginning student of Manchu] 1862–1911. Chirograph held at Minzu University of China Library (call no. 41.5511/7). Crossley, Pamela Kyle 1994. “Manchu Education,” in Alexander Woodside and Benjamin A. Elman, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 340–378. Crossley, Pamela Kyle, and Evelyn S. Rawski 1993. “A Profile of the Manchu Language in Ch’ing History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, 1: 63–102. Daigu 戴榖 1722. Qingwen beikao 清文備考 Manju gisun-i yonggiyame toktobuha bithe (Ready examinations of Qing writing). Xylograph. With an afterword by Šen Kiyan. Microfilm made from the copy held at Tenri University Library. Daly, Lloyd W. 1967. Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Brussels: Latomus, Revue d’études latines. DeFrancis, John 1996. “How Efficient Is the Chinese Writing System?,” Visible Language 30, 1: 7–44. Elliott, Mark C. 2001. “The Manchu-Language Archives of the Qing Dynasty and the Origins of the Palace Memorial System,” Late Imperial China 22, 1: 1–70. Fuchs, Walter 1936. Beiträge zur mandjurischen Bibliographie und Literatur. Tokyo: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Natur- und Volkerkunde ostasiens. Fügiyün 富俊 [Fugiyûn] 1792. Sanhe bianlan 三合便覽 Ilan hacin-i gisun kamcibuha tuwara de ja obuha bithe / Ɣurban ǰüil-ün üge qadamal üǰehüi-dür kilbar bulγaγsan bičig [Book made from a combination including three languages]. Xylograph originally published in 1780. Copy held at Harvard-Yenching Library (call no. Mo5805. 01/3624). Beijing: Minggui Tang. Gelb, Ignace J. 1963. A Study of Writing, 2nd ed., rev. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gugong Bowuyuan 故宫博物院, ed. 2009. Tongwen zhi sheng: Qinggong cang minzu yuwen cidian 同文之盛: 清宫藏民族语文辞典 [Standardizing the written language: Dictionaries of different ethnic languages from the Qing palace]. Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe. Han-i araha manju gisun-i buleku bithe: Uheri hešen [Imperially commissioned mirror of the Manchu language: Index] 1708. 5 vols. Xylograph with manuscript additions held at Peking University Library (call no. 5975/3408).

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Hayata Teruhiro 早田輝洋 and Teramura Masao 寺村政男, eds. 2004. Daishin zensho: Zōho kaitei, tsuketari Manshūgo, Kango sakuin 大清全書:増補改訂・附満洲語漢 語索引 [Expanded and emended edition of Da-Qing quanshu, with appended Manchu and Chinese indices]. 3 vols. Fuchū: Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku Ajia Afurika Gengo Bunka Kenkyūjo. Hi Hiya 谿霞, annot. 1733. Man-Han quanzi shier tou 滿漢全字十二頭 Man Han ciyun dze si el teo [The twelve heads in complete Manchu and Chinese characters]. Xylograph. Beijing: Hongwen Ge. Imanishi Shunjū 今西春秋 1956. “Shinsho shinan no koto nado” 清書指南のことな と [On Qingshu zhinan and other texts], Biburia 7, 10: 8–11. Ji Yonghai 季永海 1990. “Da Qing quanshu yanjiu” 《大清全书》研究 [Research on Complete Book of the Great Qing], Manyu yanjiu 2: 42–50. Juntu 屯圖 2001. Yi xue san guan Qingwen jian 一學三貫清文鑑 [Mirror of the Manchu language, which will direct you to three things when you consult only one]. Facsimile of xylograph originally published in 1746. Gugong zhenben congkan 723. Haikou: Hainan chubanshe. Juwan juwe uju bithe [The book of the twelve heads] n.d. Chirograph held at the HarvardYenching Library (call no. Ma5806.02 4130). Kanda Nobuo 神田信夫 1969. “Shen Ch’i-liang and His Works on the Manchu Language,” in Ch’en Chieh-hsien and Sechin Jagchid, eds., Proceedings of the Third East Asian Altaistic Conference. Taibei: Third East Asian Altaistic Conference, 129–143. Kara, György 1996. “Aramaic Scripts for Altaic Languages,” in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 536–558. Kennedy, George A. 1941. Serial Arrangement of Chinese Characters. New Haven, CT: Department of Oriental Studies, Yale University. Kuhn, Sherman M. 1972. Review of Contributions to a History of Alphabetization in Antiquity and the Middle Ages by Lloyd W. Daly, Medieval Academy of America 47, 2: 300–303. Leiyin zihui 類音字彙 [The collected characters classified according to sound] n.d. 4 vols. Chirograph held at Harvard-Yenching Library (call no. TMA 5806.05 6690). Li Dannian 李丹年 n.d. Peiyin yupu 珮音玉圃 [Jade garden of strung sounds]. 6 vols. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–135). Li Yanji 李延基 2001. Qingwen huishu 清文彙書 Manju isabuha bithe [Manchu collected]. Facsimile of xylograph originally published in 1724. Gugong zhenben congkan 719. Haikou: Hainan chubanshe. Ligeti, Louis [Lajos] 1952. “À propos de l’écriture mandchoue,” Acta Orientalia Academiæ Scientarum Hungaricæ 2: 235–302. Ling Shaowen 凌紹雯 and Chen Kechen 陳可臣, eds. 1699. Xinke Qingshu quanji 新刻 清書全集 Ice foloho manju-i geren bithe [Complete collection of Manchu writing, newly cut]. Xylograph. Nanjing: Tingsong Lou.

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Man-Han shier zitou 滿漢十二字頭 [The twelve heads in Manchu and Chinese] 1861. Xylograph held at Peking University Library (call no. X/419.1/0033). Beijing: Wenxing Tang. Man-Han tongwen quanshu 滿漢同文全書 Manju nikan šu adali yooni bithe [Complete book in standardized Manchu and Chinese writing] 1690. Xylograph. Beijing: Mishu Ge. Man-Han ziyin lianzhu shiwen 滿漢字音聯註釋文 [Character pronunciations, linked annotations, and textual explanations in Manchu and Chinese] n.d. 2 vols. Chirograph likely finished in 1861–1875 and held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–149). Manwen zitou 滿文字頭 Manju juwan juwe uju bithe [The twelve heads of Manchu] n.d. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call number M22–140). Miethaner-Vent, Karin 1986. “Das Alphabet in der mittelalterlichen Lexikographie: Verwendungsweisen, Formen und Entwicklung des alphabetischen Anordnungs­ prinzips,” in C. Buridant, ed., La lexicographie au Moyen  ge. Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 83–112. Norman, Jerry 2007. “Is Manchu an Altaic Language?,” in Stephen Wadley, Carsten Naeher, and Keith Dede, eds., Proceedings of the First North American Conference on Manchu Studies (Portland, OR, May 9–10, 2003), vol. 2, Studies in Manchu Linguistics. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 9–20. Qinding huangchao tongzhi 欽定皇朝通志 [Complete treatises of our august dynasty, imperially authorized] 1882. 2nd ed. of text originally produced in 1782–1787. Xylograph. Zhejiang Shuju. Qinding Qing-Han duiyin zishi 欽定清漢對音字式 [Imperially authorized Manchu and Chinese characters presented in corresponding sounds] 1836. New ed. of text originally published in 1772. Xylograph. Jinggu Tang. Qingwen houxue jinfa 清文後學津筏 Manju gisun-i amaga tacire ursebe ibebure tasan-i bithe [Manual for the advancement of the beginning student of Manchu] n.d. 2 vols. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–121). Quan-xi 全禧 1865. Fan Qing yuemu bianlan 翻清閱目便覽 Fan cing iowei mu biyan lan bithe [Listed items for convenient browsing, turned into Manchu]. 78 vols. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–153). Rawski, Evelyn S. 2005. “Qing Publishing in Non-Han Languages,” in Cynthia Joanne Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 304–331. Sayišangγ-a 賽尚阿 [Saišangga] 1851. Menggu wenhui 蒙古文彙 Monggo hergen-i isabuha bithe / Mongγol üsüg-ün qariyaγsan bičig [Mongolian collected]. 16 vols. Chirograph held at Minzu University of China Library (call no. 蒙 552.24 1). Šeo ping 壽平 1730. Qingwen qimeng 清文啟蒙 Cing wen ki meng bithe [Qing language primer]. Xylograph. Beijing: Sanhuai Tang.

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Shen Qiliang 沈啟亮 1686. Shier zitou jizhu 十二字頭集註 [Collected notes on the twelve heads]. Xylograph held at the library of the National Museum of China. Chongli Tang. –––––– 1701. Jianzhu shier zitou 箋註十二字頭 Giyan ju si el dz teo [The twelve heads annotated]. Xylograph. Incomplete copy held at the Vatican Apostolic Library (call no. BORG. CINESE 351.7). Beijing: Fukui Zhai. –––––– 2008. Da-Qing quanshu 大清全書 Daicing gurun-i yooni bithe [Complete book of the Great Qing]. Facsimile of xylograph originally published in 1683. Shenyang: Liaoning Minzu chubanshe. Sŏng Paegin 成百仁 [성백인]. 1999. “Ch’ogi Manjuŏ sajŏn dŭr e taehayŏ” 初期 滿洲 語 辭典들에 대하여 [On the early Manchu dictionaries], in Manjuŏ wa Alt’aiŏhak yŏn’gu. Seoul: T’aehaksa, 191–238. Sungsen 松森, ed. 1892. Qinding Mengwen huishu 欽定蒙文彚書 Mongγol-un üsüg-ün quriyaγsan bičig [Imperially authorized collection of Mongolian]. 17 vols. Xylograph held at Peking University Library (call no. SB 419.2 3097). Tong Yonggong 佟永功 2009. Manyuwen yu Manwen dang’an yanjiu 满语文与满文档 案研究 [Research on Manchu language, script, and archives]. Shenyang: Liaoning Minzu chubanshe. Tongyin zihui 同音字彙 Ubaliyambure mudan adanangge be isabuha bithe [Collection of arranged translated expressions] n.d. 8 vols. Chirograph copied by Songyue Shanfang 松月山房 in 1895, held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–137). Wan Ruming 萬汝明 1933. “Zhongguo zishu de bianzhi” 中國字書的編制 [The organization of dictionaries in China], Wenshi chunqiu 1: 1–18. Wentong 文通, ed. 1830. Yuanyin zheng kao 圓音正考 [Rectification and examination of round sounds]. Xylograph of a work written in 1743. Beijing: Sanhuai Tang. Xi Lin 錫麟 n.d. Jiangyin quanzhu 講音全註 [Expounded sounds comprehensively annotated]. 4 vols. Chirograph held at Dalian Library (call no. M22–128). Xiong Shibo 熊士伯 1997. Dengqie yuansheng 等切元聲 [The fundamental sounds cut in grades]. Facsimile of xylograph originally published in 1703. Partially illegible. Siku quanshu cunmu congshu, jingbu 219. Jinan: Qi-Lu Shushe. Yi-xing 宜興 1802. Qingwen buhui 清文補彙 Manju gisun be niyeceme isabuha bithe [Manchu collected, supplemented]. Xylograph with manuscript additions, originally published in 1786, held at Capital Library, Beijing (call no. 乙・一 46). Yu, Li 2012. “Character Recognition: A New Method of Learning to Read in Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 33, 2: 1–39. Zhikuan 志寬 and Peikuan 培寬 1911. Qingwen zonghui 清文總彙 [Comprehensive collection of Qing writing], 2nd ed., rev. With an afterword by Fengshan 鳳山. Xylograph originally published in 1897, held at Capital Library, Beijing (call no. 乙・ 一 63). Jingzhou: Jingzhou Zhufang Fanyi Zongxue.

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Zhongguo Kexueyuan Tushuguan 中國科學院圖書館, ed. 1996. Xuxiu Si ku quanshu zongmu tiyao (gaoben) 續修四庫全書總目提要 (稿本) [Bibliographical summary of the sequel to the complete books of the four repositories (draft edition)]. 38 vols. Facsimiles of manuscripts by multiple authors, written from 1931 to 1942. Jinan: Qi-Lu Shushe.

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Unintended Consequences of Classical Literacies for the Early Modern Chinese Civil Examinations Benjamin A. Elman Introduction Since the classical era (600–250 BCE), China has placed a higher value on education than other civilizations have. Influential Chinese thinkers, from the moralists Confucius (551–479) and Mencius (372–289) to the pragmatists Mozi (ca. 470–ca. 391) and Xunzi (ca. 298–238), advanced the unprecedented notion that merit and ability measured by training should take precedence over race or birth in state appointments. Since the early empire (Qin to Han, 200 BCE– 200 CE), clans and families have mobilized their resources to provide young boys (and in some cases girls) with the tools of classical literacy. For the most part, however, a society based on merit remained an unattained ideal, and for much of the early empire an education remained the privilege of landed aristocrats and, to a lesser degree, prosperous merchants.1 Beginning in the middle empire (Sui to Tang, 600–900), the Chinese state dramatically increased its expenditures on education and created the world’s first large-scale examination system for selecting civil officials. Such developments, which challenged the medieval educational monopoly held by northwestern aristocratic clans, climaxed during the Northern and Southern Song dynasties (960–1280), when the government erected an empire-wide school system at the county level to mainstream bright young men from commoner families into public service. In addition, Buddhist monasteries in medieval China created new local institutions of learning, educating many commoners—male and female. Thereafter, state and society, except for the occasional Daoist eccentric, agreed that education, particularly a classical education, was one of the foundations of public order and civilized life. Beginning in the Song dynasties, large-scale examination compounds, an odd sort of “cultural prison,” dotted the landscape, while actual prisons for lawbreakers were scarce. Small-scale jails in the county yamens sufficed for criminals. The official language of social order and moral rehabilitation was largely cultural.2

1 Elman 2000. 2 Des Rotours 1932; Herbert 1988; Kracke 1968. Cf. Dikotter 2000.

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These pioneering educational achievements gathered momentum during the Song dynasties, when various strands of classical statecraft and moral thought were reinvigorated, particularly the metaphysical strands that Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200) derived in part from classical responses to Buddhist challenges. These literati views later were synthesized under the name of “Way Learning” (Daoxue), which others mistranslate as “Neo-Confucianism.” Way Learning became orthodox—in name more than in practice— when the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1206/1280–1368) belatedly renewed the civil service curriculum at a controlled level in 1313. Only eleven hundred high degrees were conferred under the Mongols, whereas there were over twenty-five thousand palace graduates under the following Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But the Mongol co-option of Way Learning served as an important model for both the Ming and Manchu Qing dynasties (1644–1911), which made Way Learning the cornerstone of classical orthodoxy.3 After the restrictions of the Mongol era, Ming China tried to reinvent a meritocracy in which social prestige and political appointment depended on written classical examinations to establish legitimate public credentials. Elite political status and social prerogatives were corroborated through more extensive trials by examination, which in turn produced new literati social groups that endured from 1400 to the twentieth century. Classical learning became the empire-wide examination curriculum, which reached into 1,350 counties and tens of thousands of villages for the first time. Somewhat-diluted forms of classical learning also extended outward geographically and downward socially into local culture, riding on the heels of failed examination candidates, who increasingly participated in the huge production of so-called “vulgar writing” (suwen xue 俗文學) during the Ming–Qing transition. The explosion of popular literature led to the huge extension of the regional popular printing industry under the Qing dynasty, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4 The Song and Yuan Way Learning orthodoxy was mastered by millions of civil service examination candidates from 1400 until 1900. In the first Ming provincial and metropolitan examinations of 1370 and 1371, the medieval emphasis on poetry was ended. The new curriculum still required classical essays on the Four Books and Five Classics. The complete removal of poetry by the examination bureaucracy lasted from 1370 to 1756, when the examination curriculum pendulum swung decisively back to balance the essay with a poetry question again. But examination policy never hindered the popularity of po3 De Bary and Chaffee 1989; Elman 1991. 4 Roddy 1998, 85–108; Brokaw 2007, passim.

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etry and literary flair among literati groups, which decisively demonstrates the cultural limits of the classical curriculum in influencing intellectual life.5 In Ming times, the Song dynasty Way Learning tradition became an empirewide orthodoxy both geographically and demographically among upper- and middle-level literati. Later followers created an imperial curriculum of learning from local counties to the capital that could be linked to the elitist civil examination system. Although the classically educated were marked by a characteristic set of moralistic predispositions favored in the civil examinations, alternative and dissenting views proliferated.6 Natural studies, particularly medical learning, became a legitimate focus of private study when literati sought alternatives to official careers under a Mongol rule that disdained sweeping civil examinations. The wider scope of policy questions on the civil examinations administered during the early fifteenth century often reflected the dynasty’s and public’s interest in astrology, calendrical precision, mathematical harmonics, and natural anomalies. The “first” Western learning that entered Ming China via the Jesuits after 1600 enhanced the focus on these technical fields of natural studies.7 These occupational alternatives remained available when the odds of success for the many on the Ming examinations became prohibitive after 1500. The number who failed in Ming provincial examinations empire-wide, for example, rose from 850 per examination in 1441, to 3,200 in 1495, and then to 4,200 in 1573, a fourfold increase in 132 years. The levels of competition in provincial civil examinations during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increased so much that a late Ming popular song in the Yangzi delta declared that in Nanjing provincial examinations “gold went to the provincial graduate (juren), and [only] silver to the palace graduate (jinshi),” because the competition was much keener in the provinces. By 1630, about 49,200 candidates empire-wide, 45 percent less than in the “High Qing,” triennially competed for 1,278 provincial degrees. Only 2.6 percent would succeed. Residualism, that is, repeated failures, became an even more typical feature of “examination life” during the Qing.8 Most Chinese agreed that learning was guided by examples of past worthies and sages and encouraged by good companions and teachers. In traditional schools, learning led to far more regimentation than many literati might have wished, but this was always tempered by the numerous local traditions of 5 6 7 8

Zi 1894. See also Yu 1997; Elman and Woodside 1994. Cf. Woodside 2006. Tillman 1992. Elman 2005, chaps. 2 and 6. Elman 2013, 95–125.

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learning outside the control of the bureaucratically limited state. Many members of literary schools held that because literature and governing were not separate, writers should avoid Buddhist and Daoist vocabulary, rustic and colloquial phrases, and the stylistic anarchy of popular novels. Subsequently, famous writers who failed the examinations, such as Pu Songling (1640–1715) and Wu Jingzi (1701–1754), in their more popular vernacular and literary writings mocked the examiners and scholars for such pretensions. By the mid-sixteenth century, knowledge of numbers in tax-related economic transactions, debates about “hot” and “cold” medical therapies to deal with smallpox and measles epidemics, and discussion of reforms of the official calendar were also common among those who turned to medicine for careers. Li Shizhen’s (1518–1593) biographers have noted that the pharmacologist-physician had at the age of fourteen sui (Chinese added one year to a newborn’s age after the first new year’s day that occurred after the birth) passed the preliminary county civil examinations held in his home province of Hubei. Assuming approximately 1,000 candidates per county for local qualifying examinations, Li was one of some 1.2 million local candidates. After he failed three times in the provincial examinations, like 95 percent of the candidates empire-wide, Li never advanced further. Because he came from a family whose patriarchs had been medical practitioners and had studied pharmacognosy for several generations, Li Shizhen turned to medicine for a livelihood.9 The Ming scholar-merchant and Hangzhou bookseller Hu Wenhuan (fl. ca. 1596) had a typical career. Hu was a Nanjing imperial school student who purchased his licentiate status to enable him to compete in local qualifying examinations. Like many others, Hu attained a high level of classical literacy and literary ability, but he never received a higher provincial or metropolitan degree. By the late Ming, of the fifty thousand candidates empire-wide competing triennially for some 1,200 provincial degrees, fewer than 3 percent would succeed. The rolls of local official schools increasingly were filled with candidates who had repeatedly failed higher examinations and had nowhere else to go.10 As the southern capital of the Ming, Nanjing was an important publishing center, along with Hangzhou and Suzhou. Hu Wenhuan relied on the Nanjing book market for selling many of his editions, although they were mainly published in Hangzhou. The financial benefits from his printing enterprise, based on selling many different series of his printed works or individual volumes, enabled Hu to maintain the lifestyle of a literati scholar with wide cultural 9 10

Elman 2005, 29–34. Elman 2005, 35–37.

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interests even though he had failed to gain an official appointment. Hu finally received an appointment in 1613 and served as a low-level county official in Hunan Province, first as a magistrate’s aide and then as an administrative clerk. While Hu was away, his publishing enterprise diminished.11 Europeans first marveled at the educational achievements of the Chinese in the sixteenth century, when Catholic missionaries, especially the Jesuits, wrote approvingly of the civil examinations then regularly held under Ming government auspices. Such admiration carried over into the accounts of China prepared by eighteenth-century philosophes, who praised the “Mightie Kingdome” for its enlightened education. In the absence of alternative careers of comparable social status and political prestige, the goal of becoming an official took priority. The civil service recruitment system achieved for education in imperial China a degree of standardization and local importance unprecedented in the early modern world.12 This ethos carried over into the domains of medicine, law, fiscal policy, and military affairs. Imperial rulers and Chinese elites believed that ancient wisdom, properly inculcated, tempered men as leaders and prepared them for wielding political power. Both the Ming and Qing dynasties encouraged the widespread publication and circulation of approved materials dealing with the Four Books, Five Classics, and Dynastic Histories because the latter were the basis of the civil service curriculum and literati learning throughout the empire. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, more classically literate Chinese read or had access to the literati canon than literate Europeans had access to the Bible’s Old and New Testaments.13 Imperial support of elite cultural symbols, which were defined in terms of classical learning, painting, literature, and calligraphy, enabled the civil service hierarchy to reproduce acceptable social hierarchies by redirecting wealth and power derived from commerce or military success into a classical education to prepare for civil and military service. Teaching in late imperial times generally meant the reproduction of classically literate elites and the socialization, by means of exhortations and rituals, of the far less literate, or even illiterate, common people. The civilizing goal of “teaching and transforming” (jiaohua) never hardened into a tidy formula, however, given the dissatisfactions with the educational status quo that characterized Chinese history. Wang Yangming (1472–1528) and his late Ming followers, for example, opened schools and academies for commoners on a wider scale than ever before. On the other hand, the 11 12 13

Elman 2005, 35–37. Lach 1965; Elman 2005. Cf. Ozment 1980, 202; Elman 2001, 140–169.

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line between elites and commoners could be blurred by political turmoil. When emperors feared that heterodox popular religions were spreading because of the excessive numbers of unlearned people in the empire, they often conflated learning with indoctrination from above. Consequently, many literati accused Wang Yangming and his more radical followers of heterodoxy and deceiving the people.14 Separate from official studies, “schools” of learning among literati included poetry societies, private academies, or lineages of teachings associated with classical, medical, or statecraft traditions peculiar to a particular region. Medical and statecraft traditions, in particular, were usually tied to a specific master, who bequeathed his teachings to his disciples. There were no “public” schools, and a classical education began in private lineage schools, charity and temple schools, or at home, not in the official county, township, provincial, or capital schools that licentiates tested into after they had been classically trained. Large numbers of teachers, often examination failures, transmitted the classical or technical training needed by young men to pass local civil or military examinations or to practice their trades in counties, townships, or prefectures. Early Modern China in Motion Chinese were on the move between 1400 and 1900. They regularly traveled along the myriad imperial waterways and roads, moving from villages to county, township, prefectural, and provincial centers and the capital to take civil service examinations. During the predominantly Han Chinese Ming dynasty, China was internally the most mobile empire in the early modern world. China was already a massive society of at least 150 million by 1500, and 10 percent of them gathered biennially in one of 1,350 Ming counties for the privilege of being locked up inside testing grounds to take civil examinations. Those who passed, some seventy-five thousand, registered in one of twelve provincial capitals and two capital regions (Beijing and Nanjing) to take the heavily policed triennial provincial examinations. The six thousand who survived that cut then traveled to the capital in Beijing for the metropolitan and palace examinations, which were administered every three years, and the right to become jinshi (palace graduates entering officialdom). Under the multiethnic Qing Empire, the number of Chinese moving through these regional and hierarchical gates had, by 1850, tripled to 4.5 million at the local level. From these millions, 150 thousand survived to take one of the by 14

Kuhn 1990; Rowe 2001.

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now seventeen provincial examinations or the one capital-region (Beijing) examination. Civil examinations in late imperial China thus marked one of the most traveled—and policed—intersections between politics, society, economy, and Chinese intellectual life. Study of the classical language and statecraft motivated millions of Chinese to try to enter officialdom, serving far from home and family. Only 5 percent would see their hopes realized during the Ming, even less for the Qing, however (see the table below). Success was at a premium. A more important part of the story of civil examinations concerns the 95 percent who failed to become officials. The authority of the classical language empowered the civil examinations to gain traction as a cultural gyroscope even in the minds of the millions who failed. Along with the thousands of classically literate officials, the orthodox knowledge system produced millions of classical literates who, after repeated failures at the examinations, became doctors, Buddhist or Daoist priests, pettifoggers, teachers, notaries, merchants, and lineage managers, not to mention astronomers, mathematicians, printers, and publishers (Table 1). In the early Qing, it became considerably more difficult than in Ming times for scholars in the Lower Yangzi region to obtain higher degrees, because of restricted regional quotas designed to control the phenomenal success of southern literati on the examinations. Without a degree, advancement in the official hierarchy was generally precluded. As the population rapidly expanded, quotas for officials did not keep pace. The total number of licentiates remained at roughly half a million in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, a substantial number of official positions were taken by Manchus and descendants of Chinese bannermen who had served the Manchus before 1644. While the number of gentry was expanding, not enough new positions in the bureaucracy were created to accommodate the surplus of qualified candidates. An official career was effectively ruled out for most of those who succeeded in the examinations.15 Literati who passed the lower examinations were forced into a host of new occupations. Scholars began to seek employment as secretaries to officials, tutors in wealthy families, academy teachers, and the like in order to make a living. By the early nineteenth century, local gentry had moved into other fields as well. These included mediation of legal disputes, supervision of waterworks, recruiting and training local militia, printing classical and vernacular literature, and collection and remittance of local taxes to yamen clerks. Although the scarcity of imperial bureaucratic positions explains the pressure to choose other careers, it does not account for the internal factors that drove seven15

Elman 2001, 124–175.

Consequences Of Literacies For Chinese Civil Examinations Table 1

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Ming and Qing Ratios of Civil Examination Graduates to Candidates in Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Beijing

Nanjing Year

Candidates

Graduates

Percent

1393 1453 1492 1549 1630 1684 1747 1864

800 1,900 2,300 4,500 7,500 10,000 9,800 16,000

88 205 133 135 130 73 114 114

11.0 10.8 5.9 3.0 2.0 0.7 1.2 0.7

Year

Candidates

Graduates

Percent

1468 1528 1582 1607 1863 1870

1,800 2,800 2,700 3,800 10,000 11,000

90 90 90 90 94 112

5.0 3.2 3.3 2.4 0.9 1.0

Year

Candidates

Graduates

Percent

1531 1558 1609 1654 1660 1748 1874

1,900 3,500 4,600 6,000 4,000 10,000 13,000

135 135 140 276 105 229 229

7.1 3.9 3.0 4.6 2.6 2.3 1.8

Hangzhou

Beijing (at Shuntian)

Note: See Elman 2000, 661–665 (for the sources), 666–668 (for career patterns).

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teenth-century literati toward these particular occupations. Teaching in particular became a welcome alternative career.16 We have numerous examples of scholars who during the eighteenth century spent major portions of their lives, despite even high degree status, teaching in official academies, in lower level philanthropic charity schools, and in private schools in the educational hierarchy. During the eighteenth century, teaching was a source of both income and prestige, and it allowed time for research and writing. Chungli Chang has indicated that the upper gentry (all gentry above licentiates and holders of purchased degrees) monopolized teaching positions in official and private academies. Through most of the nineteenth century, according to Chang, “a sizable proportion of gentry were deriving an income from their work in the teaching profession.” What Chang is describing is the continuation of an earlier phenomenon. In Chang’s calculations, about one third of the gentry whose biographies contain relevant data were teachers. Although Chang’s sources are somewhat biased, his count has value as an indication of the changing activities of the upper gentry.17 Unfortunately, the general tendency to focus on social mobility since the Song dynasty by researching the social status of graduates of the civil examinations has meant that scholars have misunderstood how the monopolization of “cultural resources” by literati and merchant elites actually worked. The process was premised on a system of inclusion and exclusion based on tests of classical literacy that restricted the access of those partially or classically illiterate. For those whose levels of literacy were too vernacular to master the classical frames of language and writing required in the local licensing examinations, the civil examinations concealed the process of social selection that resulted. By requiring mastery of nonvernacular classical texts, imperial examinations created a written barrier between those allowed into the empire’s examination compounds and those who were classically illiterate and kept out. When we consider that thousands of examination candidates congregated biennially in counties, townships, and prefectures, and triennially in provincial and imperial capitals, we realize that such goings-on took on local significance simultaneously as social, economic, cultural, and political events. Brushes and ink stones served as required cultural paraphernalia at home, while books of examination essays, good-luck charms from temples, soothsayers with otherworldly powers of intercession, parades of examiners, and policing checkpoints for candidates were all part of the market-fair atmosphere that 16 17

Elman 2001, 167–175. Chang 1955, 217; 1962, 92–93.

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accompanied the examinations. Because it was virtually compulsory to participate in the civil examinations to remain a member of the local elite, the examination hall was a way station to success for a small minority of graduates. The circulation of elites began via periodic examination tournaments, when candidates marched into and out of the prison-like examination compounds for each session of testing. Candidates were locked inside examination cells for several days biennially or triennially until they were well into their thirties or forties. Particularly in the provincial examinations of the south, where five to ten thousand and, by the nineteenth century, over fifteen thousand candidates would gather every three years in the local capitals of Nanking or Hangzhou, with the likelihood that only one in a hundred would pass, the intersections of commerce, political status, and social prestige yielded an atmosphere of expectation and dread matched only by crowds at famous temples and shrines. Examination protests and riots were not uncommon when candidates were given their only legal opportunity by the government to gather in large groups. Fires, heavy rains, and corruption were periodic additions to the already terrible pressure on candidates, who ranged typically from under twenty to over sixty years of age. Not trusted by the dynasty, which created and maintained the architecture of surveillance that housed many guards alongside the candidates and their examiners in each compound, the candidates themselves were a hodgepodge of high and low, young sons of the famous and old men on their last try, savvy urban southerners and country bumpkins from northern small towns and villages. What they shared was years of classical study to compete for only a few places in officialdom. Success was alluring; failure was humiliating. Cheating became a cottage industry. “Male anxiety” manifested itself in the candidates’ dreams, visions, and mental breakdowns and was a by-product of this unrelenting cycle of tests and competitions. The testing was so much a part of Chinese society after centuries of implementation that the bureaucracy and the rest of society—elites and commoners—viewed the entire spectacle as a “natural” state of affairs whose inequities were refracted through the lens of fate as much as corruption. One could finish first in the difficult southern provincial examinations and plummet to the bottom in less competitive metropolitan examinations in Beijing. Most failed several times at each level before achieving success. Civil examinations reflected the larger literati culture because state institutions were already penetrated by that culture through a political and social partnership between imperial interests and local elites. Together they had formed and promulgated a classical curriculum of unprecedented scope and

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magnitude for the selection of officials and the production of classically literate failures. Both local elites and the imperial court continually called for adjustments in the classical curriculum and improvements in the institutional system for selecting civil officials. As a result, civil examinations, as a test of educational merit, tied the dynasty and its elites together bureaucratically via elite culture. In the realm of culture a broader secret lay hidden. The ruler and his ministers were dimly aware that Chinese elites encompassed not only those who passed the final palace examination and became high officials (about fifty thousand during the Ming and Qing dynasties) but also millions of failures, the “lesser lights” in the classically educated strata of the society. The emperors and their courts worried that, instead of finding suitable social niches for their lives, which a classical education both enabled and encouraged, those who failed their examinations would become rebels and outlaws and challenge the legitimacy of their rulers. Emperors also worried when the numbers of old men taking local examinations went up precipitously. Was it really an honor for a grandfather or a father, who had failed for decades, to accompany his grandson or son into the local examination hall to take the same licensing examination? Meritocracy and Examinations After the mid-seventeenth-century fall of the Ming to Manchu armies, civil service examinations were continued by the succeeding Qing dynasty and its savvier Manchu rulers without skipping a beat. Unlike the Mongol Yuan government, the Manchu state regularly held Ming-style classical examinations in 140 prefectures and about 1,350 counties. The much less policed medieval era examinations were held only in the capital, while from the years 1000 to 1360 examinations, when held, took place in both provincial and imperial capitals. Fearing repetition of the Mongol failure to remain in power for very long, Manchu emperors favored civil service examinations to cope with ruling an empire of extraordinary economic strength that was undergoing demographic change. Qing emperors put in place an empire-wide examination system of Ming origins that occupied a central educational position in Chinese government and society until 1905, when the examinations were abolished. What was unique about this effort to develop institutions for classical consensus and political efficacy was its remarkable success in accomplishing the goals for which it was designed. Education effectively restructured the complex relations between social status, political power, and cultural prestige. A

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classical education based on nontechnical moral and statecraft theory was as suitable for selection of elites in China to serve the imperial state at its highest echelons of power as humanism and a classical education were for selection of elites to serve in the nation-states of early modern Europe. The examination life, like death and taxes, became one of the fixtures of elite education and popular culture. Examinations represented the focal point through which imperial interests, family strategies, and individual hopes and aspirations were directed. Moreover, the education ethos carried over into the domains of medicine, law, fiscal policy, and military affairs. The examinations engendered an empire-wide school system that extended down to the county level. Several centuries before Europe, the Chinese imperial state committed itself financially to supporting a county-level school network. Despite their initial success, dynastic schools, one per county or township, were eventually absorbed into the examination system and remained schools in name only. Because the classical curriculum was routinized, little actual teaching took place in such schools, and they became “testing centers” for students preparing for the civil service examinations. Imagine if American students seeking to enter medical school only needed to pass the Medical Boards prepared by the Princeton Educational Testing Service and were not required to attend college before entering medical school! The dynastic schools also served as “holding stations” for those who had not passed the highest examinations. Training in vernacular and classical literacy was left to the private domain. Dynastic schools in China never entertained the goal of mass education. A classical education became the sine qua non for social and political prestige in imperial and local affairs. Emperors recognized that testing their elites on their mastery of a classical education was an essential task of government, and Chinese elites perceived a classical education as the correct measure of their moral and social worth.18 The autonomy of education from political and social control occasionally became a bone of contention in the Ming and Qing Empires, testing the limits of imperial power. But both rulers and elites generally equated social and political order with moral and political indoctrination through a civilizing education. High-minded officials often appealed to the relative autonomy of education in private academies as an antidote to the warping of classical educational goals by the cutthroat examination process. Such private academies frequently became centers for dissenting political views, but they often paid a political price for such activism (e.g., the Donglin Academy during the late 18

Ho 1964.

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Ming dynasty). Such academies also served as important educational venues for literati who preferred teaching and lecturing to instructing students on how to pass the civil examinations. There were about five hundred private academies during the Song dynasty and about four hundred during the Yuan. By the end of the Ming dynasty, there were from one to two thousand such academies. The Qing had more than four thousand, a small number considering that the population had reached 300–350 million by 1800, but in aggregate an influential force.19 Literacy and Social Dimensions There were at least 5 million classically educated male literati in early Qing times in a population of 150 million, and perhaps by 1750 as many as 15 million in a population of 300 million. Such rates were lower during Ming times, when there were fewer private schools.20 The Ming and Qing civil service selection process permitted some circulation of elites in and out of the total pool, but the educational curriculum and its formidable linguistic requirements effectively eliminated the lower classes from the selection process. In addition, an unstated gender ideology forbade all women from entry into the examination compounds.21 The failures regularly turned to religion and the mantic arts in their efforts to understand and rationalize their emotional responses to the competitive local, provincial, and metropolitan examinations. Examination dreams and popular lore spawned a remarkable literature about the temples that candidates visited, the dreams that they or members of their families had, and the magical events in their early lives that were premonitions of their later success. Both elites and the “lesser lights” tempered their own understanding of the forces of “fate” that operated in the examination marketplace by encoding them in cultural glosses with unconscious ties to a common culture and religion. The anxiety produced by examinations was experienced most personally and deeply by boys and men. Family members shared in the experience and offered solace and encouragement, but the direct, personal experience of examination success or failure belonged to the millions of male examination candidates who competed with each other against increasingly difficult odds.22 The civil service competition created a dynastic curriculum that consolidated gentry, military, and merchant families into a culturally defined status 19 20 21 22

Bai 1995. Johnson 1985, 59. Elman 1990. Cf. Bourdieu and Passeron 1977. Elman 2000, 299–326.

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group of degree-holders that shared (1) a common classical language, (2) memorization of a shared canon of Classics, and (3) a literary style of writing known as the eight-legged essay. Internalization of elite literary culture was in part defined by the civil examination curriculum, but that curriculum also showed the impact of literati opinion on imperial interests. The moral cultivation of the literatus was a perennial concern of the imperial court, as it sought to ensure that the officials it chose in the examination market would loyally serve the ruling family. The internalization of a literary culture that was in part defined by the civil examination curriculum also influenced the public and private definition of moral character and social conscience. A view of government, society, and the individual’s role as an elite servant of the dynasty was continually reinforced in the memorization process leading up to the examinations. For literati, it was important that the dynasty conformed to classical ideals and upheld the classical orthodoxy that literati themselves formulated. Otherwise, the ruling family was illegitimate. To institutionalize this high-minded moral regime, the bureaucracy made a substantial financial commitment in aggregate to staffing and operating the empire-wide examination regime. Ironically, the chief consequence was that examiners eventually could not take the time to read each individual essay carefully. The final rankings, even for the eight-legged essay, were very haphazard. While acknowledging the educational impact of the curriculum in force, we must guard against overinterpreting the classical standards of weary examiners inside examination halls as a consistent or coherent attempt to impose mindless orthodoxy from above. An interpretive community, canonical standards, and institutional control of formal knowledge were key features of the civil examination system throughout the empire. Scrutiny of the continuities and changes in linguistic structures and syllogistic chains of moral argument in the examination system reveals an explicit logic for the formulation of questions and answers and an implicit logic for building semantic and thematic categories of learning. These enabled examiners and students to mark and divide their cognitive world according to the moral attitudes, social dispositions, and political compulsions of their day.23 Fields of Classical Learning Literati fields of learning such as natural studies and history were also re­ presented in late imperial civil examinations. For political reasons the court 23

Johnson 1985. Cf. Kermode 1979.

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widened or limited the scope of policy questions on examinations, and the assigned examiners, whose classical knowledge echoed the intellectual trends of their time, also influenced what was included. In the mid-eighteenth century, new guidelines were applied to the civil examination curriculum. As a result, the Song rejection of medieval belles lettres in civil examinations was reversed. In the late eighteenth century, the examination curriculum started to conform to the philological and evidential research currents popular among southern literati. The scope and content of the policy questions increasingly reflected the academic inroads of newer classical scholarship among examiners. Beginning in the 1740s, high officials debated new initiatives that challenged the classical curriculum in place. They restored earlier aspects of the civil examinations that had been eliminated in the Yuan and Ming dynasties, such as classical poetry. In 1787, the Qing dynasty initiated “ancient learning” curricular reforms to make the examinations more difficult for the increasing numbers of candidates by requiring knowledge of all Five Classics. The formalistic requirements of the poetry question gave examiners an additional tool, along with the eightlegged essay “grid,” to grade papers more efficiently. The Qianlong emperor in particular recognized that an important characteristic of the civil examinations was the periodic assessment of the system from within to suit the times.24 Economic and Cultural Reproduction Well-organized local lineages translated their social and economic advantages into educational success, which correlated with their control of local cultural resources. Such lineages were usually built around corporate estates, which required classically literate and highly placed leaders who moved easily in elite circles and could mediate on behalf of the kin group. Economic surpluses produced by wealthy lineages, particularly in prosperous areas, enabled members of rich segments to have better access to a classical education and success on state examinations, which in turn led to new sources of political and economic power outside the lineage. Here, economic reproduction lent its traction to social and political forms for the accumulation of power and stature. If one “followed the money” and “did the numbers,” economic resources translated into cultural resources for classical learning.25 Nouveau riche families maintained their high local status through the lineage schools, medical traditions, and merchant academies that they funded. Elite education stressed classical erudition, historical knowledge, medical 24 25

Elman 2000, chaps. 9–10. Elman 1990.

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expertise, literary style, and poetry. The strict enforcement of requirements for civil examination essays further cemented literary culture. The well-publicized rituals for properly writing classical Chinese included cultural paraphernalia long associated with literati culture: the writing brush, ink stick, ink slab, stone monuments, fine silk for writing and wearing, and special paper. Because the education of elites entailed long-term internalization of orthodox thought, perception, appreciation, and action, the simultaneous processes of social and political reproduction in Ming China yielded both “literati culture” and the literatus as a “man of culture.” Classical literacy—that is, the ability to write elegant essays and poetry—was the crowning achievement for educated men and increasingly for elite women in the seventeenth century. This learning process began with rote memorization during childhood, continued with youthful reading, and concluded with mature writing. Literati believed that the memory was strongest at an early age, while mature understanding was a gradual achievement that derived from mastering the literary language and its moral and historical content. Educated men, and some women, became a “writing elite” whose essays marked them as classically trained. The educated man was able to write his way to fame, fortune, and power, and even if unsuccessful in his quest for an official career, he could still publish essays, poetry, novels, medical handbooks, and other works. The limitation, control, and selection of the “writing elite,” not the enlargement of the “reading public,” were the dynasty’s goals in using civil examinations to select officials. By enticing too many candidates, however, the civil examination market also yielded a broader pool of literate writers who, upon failing, turned their talents to producing other texts, such as novellas (pornography included) and medical tracts.26 They also compiled genealogies, prepared deeds, provided medical expertise, and wrote contracts for adoptions and mortgages. Merchants in late imperial China also became known as cultured patrons of scholarship and publishing. A merging of literati and merchant social strategies and interests ensued, especially in print culture. Classical scholarship flourished due to merchant patronage; books were printed and collected in larger numbers than ever before.27 Literati prestige, however, more than met its match inside the actual testing sites, which operated as de facto “cultural prisons.” Despite the role of police surveillance in the selection process, millions of men (women were excluded), including elites and commoners at all levels of society, voluntarily entered

26 27

Shang 2003. Elman 2001.

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such “prisons.” Think of such cultural prisons as educational havens that elites sought to break into, so that they could eventually break out of them. Political and social reproduction through public and private institutions of teaching required the transference of economic resources into education and entailed a degree of cultural and linguistic uniformity among elites that only a classical education could provide. Such uniformity was significantly muted in practice when the new teachings of Wang Yangming in the sixteenth century and the rise of evidential learning in the eighteenth gainsaid the Song-Ming consensus. The classical curriculum represented a cultural repertoire of linguistic signs and conceptual categories that reinforced elite political power and social status. Education in dynastic schools and private academies was a fundamental factor in determining cultural consensus and conditioned the forms of reasoning and rhetoric prevailing in elite literary life of the period.28 Social Reproduction Education was also premised on social distinctions between literati, peasants, artisans, and merchants in descending order of rank and prestige. Under the Ming, sons of merchants for the first time were legally permitted to take the civil examinations. Occupational prohibitions, which extended from so-called “mean peoples” (i.e., those engaged in “unclean” occupations) to all Daoist and Buddhist clergy, however, kept many others out of the civil service competition, not to mention the gender bias against all women. Civil examination success required substantial investments of time, effort, and training. Because the dynastic school system was limited to candidates who were already literate in classical Chinese, the initial stages of training and preparing a son for the civil service were the private responsibility of “commoner” families seeking to attain or simply to maintain elite status as “official” or “military” families. Careerism usually won out over idealism among talented young men, who occasionally were forced to choose between their social obligations to their parents and relatives and their personal aspirations. Failures, however, because of their classical literacy, could choose among alternative careers, such as teaching, medicine, or pettifoggery. Once legally enfranchised to compete, merchant families saw in the civil service the route to greater wealth and orthodox success and power. Unlike in contemporary Europe and Japan, where absolute social barriers between nobility and commoners prevented the translation of commercial wealth into elite status, landed affluence and commercial wealth during the Ming dynasty were intertwined with high educational status. But because of the literary re28

Elman 2000, chap. 7.

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quirements, artisans, peasants, and clerks were poorly equipped to take advantage of the hypothetical openness of the civil service. Frequently the rites of passage from child to young adult in wealthy families were measured by the number of ancient texts that were mastered at a particular age. The capping of a young boy between the ages of sixteen and twentyone, for example, implied that he had mastered all of the Four Books and one of the Five Classics, the minimum requirement for any aspirant to compete in the civil service examinations up to 1756. Clear boundaries were also erected to demarcate male education from female upbringing, which remained intact until the seventeenth century, when the education of women in elite families became more common. Unlike the fatalistic ideologies common among Buddhist and Hindu peasants in South and Southeast Asia, for example, the Chinese ideology of teaching and learning cultivated belief in the usefulness of education and created a climate of rising expectations—although those who dreamed of glory at times rebelled when their hopes were dashed. Moreover, given the level of examination failures, there was no shortage of schoolteachers.29 Looking beyond the official meritocracy of the graduates, we see the larger place of the civil examinations in Chinese society and not just for elite families. One of the unintended consequences of the civil examinations was the creation of legions of classically literate men (and women) who used their linguistic talents for a variety of nonofficial purposes. There was only very limited social mobility through the examinations themselves (i.e., the opportunity for members of the lower classes to rise in the social hierarchy). Moreover, the archives indicate that peasants, traders, and artisans, who made up 90 percent of the population, were not among the highest graduates. Nor were they a significant part of about 1.4 (late Ming) to 2.6 (mid-Qing) million local candidates who failed at lower levels every two years. Occupational fluidity among merchants, military families, and gentry, however, translated into a substantial “circulation” of lower and upper elites outside the examination market. Overall, licentiates were not peasants, traders, artisans, clergy, or women. They were gentry, merchants (who were all classified as “commoners” by the bureaucracy), or military men. To reach this level, peasants, traders, and artisans had to begin an economic climb that eventually allowed them to earn enough to provide classical educations for their sons.

29

Dardess 1991; Ko 1994; Gardner 1989.

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Political Reproduction The Ming dynasty saw education as one of several tools in its repertoire to maintain public order and political efficacy. Imperial support of education and examinations was contingent on the examination process supplying talented and loyal officials, some twenty to twenty-five thousand officials empire-wide, for the bureaucracy to employ. The dynasty’s minimum requirement that the educational system reinforce and inculcate political, social, and moral values, which would maintain the dynasty in its present form, was inseparable from classical rhetoric exalting learning and prioritizing civic values. Political legitimacy was a worthy by-product of preparation for the civil and military service. Outside the realm of gentry-elites and the examinations, however, a different form of social and political reproduction operated: the legions of local clerks who worked in 1,350 county and 140 prefectural yamens were banned from the civil service, although they passed on their local political sinecures to their sons or close relations.30 Over the long term, the Ming and Qing civil service system built on and elaborated earlier Tang and Song civil examination models. Through the unprecedented impact of commercialization and demographic growth, however, the reach of the imperial state expanded from metropolitan and provincial capitals to all 1,350 counties. The upsurge in the number of lower-level candidates, however, was inversely proportional to the dominant power of palace graduate degree-holders in high office starting in the late sixteenth century— so much so that once-powerful provincial graduates were downclassed. Officialdom increasingly was the prerogative of a very slim minority. A by-product of the examinations was that the number of classically literate elites able to produce essays, poetry, stories, novels, medical treatises, and scholarly works also increased dramatically. They fed the woodblock printing industry and the rapid growth of a dynamic print culture in South China with classical and vernacular texts that were read widely in the late Ming. The classical texts and primers tailored toward those preparing for the civil examinations were a major part of the book market since the Song dynasty.31 Imperial support of literati-inspired cultural symbols, which were defined in terms of classical learning, painting, literature, and calligraphy, enabled the dynasty, in concert with its elites, to reproduce the institutional conditions necessary for their survival. The examination hierarchy reproduced acceptable social hierarchies by redirecting wealth derived from commerce or military success into a classical education. In a tightly woven ideological canvas of loyalties, 30 31

Zi 1894; Miyazaki 1981. Cf. Foucault 1977, 170–228. Brokaw and Chow 2005.

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even emperors became educated in the orthodox rationale for their imperial legitimacy by special tutors selected by the civil service examinations! Moreover, novelists who failed examinations usually interwove in their story lines the tried and true sub-plot of the “talented son and beautiful maiden” (caizi jia­ren 才子佳人). Unlike Europe, the classically literate young scholar in Ming-Qing China always got the girl, usually after passing the highest examinations. References Bai Xinliang 白新良 1995. Zhongguo gudai shuyuan fazhan shi 中国古代书院发展史 [A history of academy development in ancient China]. Tianjin: Tianjin daxue chubanshe. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, translated by Richard Nice. London: Sage Publications. Brokaw, Cynthia 2007. Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Brokaw, Cynthia, and Kai-wing Chow, eds. 2005. Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chang, Chungli 1955. The Chinese Gentry: Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press. –––––– 1962. The Income of the Chinese Gentry. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dardess, John 1991. “Childhood in Premodern China,” in Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray, eds., Children in Historical and Comparative Perspective: An International Handbook and Research Guide. New York: Greenwood Press, 71–94. de Bary, W.T., and John Chaffee, eds. 1989. Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage. Berkeley: University of California Press. des Rotours, Robert 1932. Le traité des examens traduit de la nouvelle histoire des T’ang. Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux. Dikotter, Frank 2000. “Crime and Punishment in Early Republican China: Beijing’s First Model Prison, 1912–1922,” Late Imperial China 21, 2 (December): 140–162. Elman, Benjamin 1990. Classicism, Politics, and Kinship: The Ch’ang-chou School of New Text Confucianism in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––– 1991. “Education in Sung China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111, 1 (January–March): 83–93. –––––– 2000. A Cultural History of Civil Service Examinations in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. –––––– 2001. From Philosophy to Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd, rev. ed. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series.

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–––––– 2005. On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550–1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. –––––– 2013. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Elman, Benjamin, and Alexander Woodside, eds. 1994. Education and Society in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Foucault, Michel 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Gardner, Daniel 1989. “Transmitting the Way: Chu Hsi and His Program of Learning,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, 1 (June): 141–172. Herbert, P.A. 1988. Examine the Honest, Appraise the Able: Contemporary Assessments of Civil Service Selection in Early T’ang China. Canberra: Faculty of Asian Studies, Australian National University. Ho, P’ing-ti 1964. The Ladder of Success in Late Imperial China. New York: Science Editions. Johnson, David 1985. “Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China,” in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 34–72. Kermode Frank 1979. “Institutional Control of Interpretation,” Salmagundi 43: 72–86. Ko, Dorothy 1994. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kracke, E.A., Jr. 1968. Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kuhn, Philip A. 1990. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lach, Donald 1965. Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, A Century of Discovery, book 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miyazaki, Ichisada 1981. China’s Examination Hell, translated by Conrad Shirokauer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ozment, Stephen 1980. The Age of Reform, 1250–1550. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Roddy, Stephen 1998. Literati Identity and Its Fictional Representations in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rowe, William T. 2001. Saving the World: Cheng Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Shang, Wei 2003. “Jin Ping Mei Cihua and Late Ming Print Culture,” in Judith Zeitlin and Lydia Liu, eds., Writing and Materiality in China: Essays in Honor of Patrick Hanan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 187–231. Tillman, Hoyt 1992. Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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Woodside, Alexander 2006. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yu, Pauline 1997. “Canon Formation in Late Imperial China,” in Theodore Huters et al., eds., Culture and State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 83–104. Zi, Etienne 1894. Pratiques des examens littéraires en Chine. Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission catholique.

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Competing “Languages”: “Sound” in the Orthographic Reforms of Early Meiji Japan Atsuko Ueda Introduction Recent scholarship on the language reform movements of Meiji Japan (1867– 1912) has focused critical attention on the intertwined issues of nationalism, the de-Asianization (i.e., de-Sinification) of language, and the colonialist/imperialist agenda that attended Japan’s rise as a modern world power.1 Such work has served as an important critique of the once-dominant view of modern Japanese language development as a forward march along the road of social “progress,”2 with the achievement of vernacularization (known as genbun’itchi) as its telos. At the same time, however, it has contributed to the entrenchment of another teleological narrative: the story that all efforts at linguistic reform in the Meiji era contributed to the production of an ideologically charged “national language” (kokugo) in Japan, one that forcefully excluded or assimilated other languages. To posit nationalism as a driving force behind the many and diverse proposals for language reform in the early Meiji era runs the risk of inverting cause and effect, by projecting an anachronistic and reified view of the “Japanese” language onto a heterogeneous linguistic space in which many different views of language coexisted, competed, and influenced each other.3 Studies that interrogate what many refer to as “linguistic nationalism” (gengo nashonarizumu) tend to focus on the national language scholar Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937) and the post–Sino-Japanese War era (mid-1890s and beyond). Typically, the years that precede this era are treated as a preparatory phase that eventually led to the emergence of Ueda and his national language reforms. Accordingly, it becomes a foregone conclusion that the preceding era represented an “imperfect” embodiment of the “nation.”4 1 See Lee 1996; Osa 1998; Komori 2000; Yasuda 1997, 1999, 2006. 2 Such a view is represented by Yamamoto Masahide’s monumental works on genbun’itchi. See, e.g., Yamamoto 1965, 1971. This is also the basic narrative followed in Twine 1991, one of the few monographs written in English on the topic. 3 This tendency is, I believe, stronger in Osa’s and Yasuda’s works than in Lee’s and Komori’s. 4 Such a master narrative of preceding scholarship by nature does violence to many of their brilliant analyses, to which I am deeply indebted. There are also notable exceptions. Nakayama

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This chapter focuses on the calls for orthographic reform that shaped the 1870s, and it attempts to expose the many “languages” concealed in the national language narrative. A cursory look at early Meiji discourse shows that there was a general tendency to argue for script reform in order to unify the “spoken” and “written” languages and to reject kanji (and by extension kanbun and kangaku).5 The writings of the four reformers that I address in this chapter exemplify this discourse. Maejima Hisoka (1835–1919) sought to abolish kanji and called for the adoption of kana scripts (phonetic alphabets indigenous to Japan) in an effort to produce “a language that, once uttered, becomes spoken language (danwa) and, once written, becomes written language (bunshō).”6 Mori Arinori (1847–1889), arguing against “useless Chinese” (referring to kanji and kanbun), “contemplated” the use of “Roman letters” in turning “the spoken language of Japan” into a written form “based on pure phonetic principles.”7 Nanbu Yoshikazu (1840–1917), too, sought to adopt the Roman alphabet instead of “inconvenient kanji” to reform “grammar” so that the new language could be understood whether it was “heard” or “seen.”8 Nishi Amane (1829–1897) similarly argued for the use of the Roman alphabet in his effort to

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Akihiko (e.g., 2001, 2006), for example, deliberately refuses to succumb to such ideological critiques. See also Kamei 2000. Kanji, kanbun, and kangaku are typically translated as “Chinese characters,” “Chinese writing,” and “Chinese learning” respectively. However, in discussing the linguistic reform movements of the Meiji period, the use of the categories “Chinese” and “Japanese,” terms that in our vocabulary designate “national” languages, is quite problematic. Given that we are dealing with a time when the “national” had yet to take form, these categories appear anachronistic. This is especially true when we translate. The use of “Chinese” characters, “Chinese” writing, and “Chinese” classics can only evoke regionally and culturally specific designations, which seem to indicate that kanji, kanbun, and kangaku all belong to this entity called “China” and are hence “foreign” (indicating that they are merely “borrowed”). The designation “Japanese” for such words as kokubun (“Japanese” writing), kokugo (the “Japanese” language), and kundoku (the reading of kanbun in “Japanese” syntax and with “Japanese” suffixes) must also be used with caution, as it, too, assumes an “untainted” realm of “Japanese,” a rhetoric that many Meiji intellectuals used when they suddenly discovered that their language was “tainted” by “Chinese.” As painful as this may be for readers, I will retain the original terms without translating them to avoid the anachronism and will qualify every translation of “Chinese” and “Japanese” when I need to revert to them. Maejima 1969, 18. All translations from the Japanese, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Mori 1972, 309. As we shall see shortly, the main gist of his idea was to adopt the English language. Nanbu 1969, 21.

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“establish rules for spelling and pronunciation” so that “writing and speaking would follow the same rules.”9 On the surface, therefore, their calls for reform all sought to unify the spoken and the written languages. However, the solutions they proposed varied greatly. This was inevitable since there was no agreement on what constituted “spoken” and “written” languages.10 This, too, was inevitable, given that the reformers favored (and mobilized) different “languages” in positing their spoken and written languages. Their reforms included the system of language inscribed in Western linguistic theories, the system of language latent in kangaku learning, or the system of language linked to the “fifty-sound syllabary grid” (gojū-on zu), traceable to nativist thought. These “languages” do not constitute additives from which a totality can be presupposed, nor are they ontologically equal to one another; they are very much in tension with one another. Concealed in a narrative that lumps together the first two decades of the Meiji period as a preparatory stage for kokugo is precisely this complex intersection of “languages” that I seek to show in this chapter. I will examine the varying arguments for a new orthography to make manifest these languages. Key to this is the focus on the varying notions of “sound” with which the reforms engaged. Whether the reformers were arguing for the abolition of kanji, the use of the Roman alphabet or kana, or even the adoption of English, they all sought to privilege some kind of sound, most often defined against kanji and kanbun.11 In what follows, I first examine Mori’s call for the 9

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Nishi 1999, 37. For the translation of “Writing Japanese with the Western Alphabet,” I used William Reynolds Braisted’s translation and made minor alterations to clarify my arguments; see Nishi 1976. See Lee 1996; Sakai 1991; Kamei 2000; Saitō Mareshi 2007a. Moreover, it is worth noting here that actual spoken language did not become an object of much inquiry until the 1880s; for example, although a multitude of dialects divided Japan in early Meiji times, it was only in 1885 that a group was assigned to record and study the different dialects (in order to determine how best to standardize them). Moreover, the surge in kōgo bunten (grammar books of spoken language) did not begin until the mid- to late 1890s. See Nakayama Akihiko 1997, 2006. This should not be taken to mean that I will trace the history of phonocentrism in early Meiji Japan. Such an enterprise could only retrace—and thus fall short of—what Karatani Kōjin’s brilliant study has shown by appropriating this Derridean notion in his Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen (1980). This work significantly altered the study of language in Meiji Japan by arguing that phonocentrism—manifested in the suppression of figurality—was integral to the production of a new écriture that led to new epistemic discoveries such as “interiority” and “landscape.” Instead, I seek to identify the presence of other “sounds” that are privileged in the arguments for reform, ones that are not necessarily integral to the production of “phonocentric” discourse.

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adoption of the English language and identify how Mori engaged with Western linguistics, focusing on what he referred to as “phonetic principles,” which had a large impact upon language reform in general. I then move on to Maejima’s call for the abolition of kanji and show that an orality latent in the study of kangaku governs his proposal to adopt kana phonetic scripts. In this section, I accordingly extend my discussion to the manner in which literati studied kangaku in the late Edo period, since it is particularly pertinent to how the early Meiji intelligentsia, all invariably educated in kangaku, viewed “language.” I then turn to works written by Nanbu, who, despite his advocacy of the Roman alphabet, in fact sought to systematize grammar by engaging with the fifty-sound syllabary grid of kana scripts, a syllabic representation of existing sounds. Finally, I address essays written by Nishi, who also advocated use of the Roman alphabet. We find many different “languages” inscribed in his argument, as he sought to produce a system of agreement between pronunciation and spelling. Such an inquiry into the proposed reforms will show that what we typically assume to be manifestations of Westernization and de-Asianization (datsu-a nyūō) need further scrutiny. We shall see how the many efforts to adopt phonetic letters, too often considered as efforts at Westernization, in fact engaged not only with Western linguistic theories but also with the fifty-sound syllabary grid and the study of kangaku. Despite the reformers’ rejection of kanji, the system of language integral to kangaku learning looms strong in the arguments for reform. This does not mean that I seek to undervalue the forces of Westernization present in early Meiji Japan; thus, I begin my inquiry with the discourse of Western linguistic theories that shaped Mori’s call for reform and later examine how they intersected with the study of kangaku. Such an inquiry will show that it is essential to go beyond the surface layer of orthography and decipher the underlying languages that compete and collide in these reforms. The “Phonetic Principles” of Western Linguistic Theories: Mori Arinori’s Proposal for Adopting the English Language It goes without saying that the encounter with the West and the Roman alphabet made a huge impact on language reform movements in Japan. Even before the Meiji period, Japanese scholars of Dutch learning had often referred to the superiority of the Roman alphabet to kanji.12 In the Meiji period, Western linguistic theories, which had only recently joined the ranks of “science,” further 12

See Tsuchiya 2005, esp. 22–33.

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reinforced such views.13 Although it was not until the second decade of the Meiji period that Western linguistic theories became dominant in the language reform movements in Japan, we can already see their nascent presence in, for example, Mori Arinori’s essays and speeches advocating the use of the English language (Using italics, I have highlighted salient passages in the translation below.): The spoken language of Japan being inadequate to the growing necessities of the people of that Empire, and too poor to be made, by a phonetic alphabet, sufficiently useful as a written language, the idea prevails among us that, if we would keep pace with the age, we must adopt a copious and expanding European language. The necessity for this arises mainly out of the fact that Japan is a commercial nation; and also that, if we do not adopt a language like that of the English, which is quite predominant in Asia, as well as elsewhere in the commercial world, the progress of Japanese civilization is evidently impossible. Indeed a new language is demanded by the whole Empire. . . . All the schools the Empire has had, for many centuries, have been Chinese; and, strange to state, we have had no schools nor books, in our own language for educational purposes. These Chinese schools, being now regarded not only as useless, but as a great drawback to our progress, are in the steady progress of extinction. . . . The only course to be taken, to secure the desired end, is to start anew, by first turning the spoken language into a properly written form, based on a pure phonetic principle. It is contemplated that a Roman letters should be adopted. . . . It may be well to add, in this connection, that the written language now in use in Japan, has little or no relation to the spoken language, but is mainly hieroglyphie—a deranged Chinese, blended in Japanese, all the letters of which are themselves of Chinese origin.14 This passage, originally written in English, is from a letter that Mori wrote to William D. Whitney, an American linguist at Yale, in 1872.15 It engages with the highly ideological view of language that dominated Western linguistics in the nineteenth century. Such an ideological view is most clearly apparent in the 13

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For a survey of nineteenth-century developments in linguistics, see Robins 1997; Formigari 2004. In Japanese, see Kazama 1978. Also, I should add that by “Western linguistic theories,” I am referring to those that found their way to Japan, shaping the arguments for reform, and certainly not the entire theoretical development of Western linguistics. Mori 1972, 309–310 (my italics). Also, for general reactions to Mori’s proposal, see Hall 1973, 189–195. Though composed as a letter to Whitney, the letter was published to reach a wider audience.

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theory put forth by Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829): Indo-European languages, according to Schlegel, were “inflectional languages,” which, he noted, could express “complex ideas through a single word: the root contains the main idea, the syllables that serve to form derived words express accessory modifications, and the inflections express variable relations.” For Schlegel, Indo-European languages, as the most advanced, were the only medium that could bring about “any improvement of the human spirit.”16 In contrast, the “isolating languages,” among which he classified “Chinese,” showed no inflection and were “made up of monosyllables that we cannot even call roots” and could only be “lifeless,” hence the least advanced and an impediment to progress.17 Schlegel may not have been the major influence behind Mori’s proposal, but such an ideological view was present in Mori’s argument when, for example, Mori noted that “Chinese schools” in Japan were “now regarded not only as useless, but as a great drawback to our progress.”18 Mori was certainly not the only one to adopt such a view. When establishing the Department of Linguistics (Hakugengaku) at Tokyo University in 1880, the university’s president, Katō Hiroyuki, attempted to define “our language” (hōgo) as being as different from Chinese (Shinago) as possible: “According to the theories of linguists, our language is completely different from Shinago in type and instead shares a root with Manchurian, Mongolian, and Korean.”19 Predictably, Schlegel’s ideological view of languages extended to scripts, as Roman alphabets were considered the most advanced, and ideographic characters like kanji less so. To sever itself from classical philology, Western linguistics took as its object of study the phonetics of currently spoken languages as opposed to “dead” texts. Therefore, the criteria by which Indo-European languages were considered the most superior were drawn from many studies on “sound.” In such a paradigm, the Roman alphabets, given their phonetic nature, as well as their ability to express “complex ideas” with a mere 16 17 18

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Quoted in Formigari 2004, 136–137. Quoted in Formigari 2004, 137. I do not mean to suggest here that the encounter with the West is the sole reason behind Mori’s criticism of “Chinese schools,” since the criticism of kangaku’s lack of utility (e.g., a criticism of its textual study) had already appeared internally within kangaku. But the idea that “Chinese language”—by which Mori refers not only to kanji and kanbun but also to kanbun kundokutai—was a hindrance to progress clearly aligned with an ideological view inscribed in comparative linguistics. Katō 1964, 63. In accordance with comparative linguistics, Katō here emphasizes syntax and inflections (or lack thereof) in order to differentiate “Shinago” from “our language.” “Shinago” therefore is the equivalent of “Chinese” in Western linguistic theories.

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twenty-six or so letters, were deemed the most civilized.20 In contrast, kanji characters were seen as not representing a phonetic aspect and were hence equated with “hieroglyphie,” a view that Mori clearly adopted.21 Mori, however, did not blindly accept such ideas. To determine what he ultimately advocated, we need to understand specifically what he meant by “phonetic principle.” We need to look at how he appropriated the dichotomy between “phonetic” and “hieroglyphie” scripts in his argument. Perhaps surprisingly, Mori deployed the criticism of being hieroglyphic not only against Chinese but also against the English language. Such a claim was not unique to Mori. As Seth Jacobowitz shows in his “Scene of Writing in Meiji Japan,” Mori was also engaging with arguments of Anglophone reformers like Noah Webster, who sought a “national tongue based on an American rather than British vernacular that would be vouchsafed by a simplified spelling system” and would jettison “unnecessary silent letters and multiple letter combinations representing the same phonetic values.”22 Similarly, Mori proposed that, for adoption in Japan, the English language be changed to what he referred to as “simplified English”; in addition to substituting “seed” for “saw” and “seen,” and “speaked” for “spoke” and “spoken,” to regularize the irregular verbs, Mori also suggested systematizing irregular spelling, such as “though” to “tho” and “bough” to “bow.” He claimed that this “re-cast[ing] of English orthography” would make “the language actually what it claims to be—phonetic—instead of hieroglyphic on a phonetic basis, which is what it now really is.”23 Two things ought to be highlighted here. First, what this criticism shows is that by “hieroglyphie,” he was not simply referring to kanji-like figures or characters. In his understanding, phonetic letters did not necessarily reflect phonetic language, and the use of hieroglyphs was not limited to the “non-West.” Mori was thus not blindly advocating the ideological view, as his argument here questions the Social Darwinist paradigm that situates Chinese (or Asia and its nonphonetic letters) as backward and English (or the West and its phonetic letters) as the most civilized. He of course did nothing to defend Chinese (which, for Mori, encompassed kanji and kanbun, including the kundoku style), as he assumed that its infiltration into what he called Japanese had caused the deterioration of “language in Japan,”24 but he certainly did not uncritically accept the di20 21 22 23 24

Tanaka 1985. See also Osa 1998, 29; Komori 2000, 106. I am here referring to “linguistic Orientalism,” in which scripts from ancient Egypt to contemporary Japan were lumped together. Jacobowitz 2006, 135. Mori 1972, 306–307. See Lee 1996, 10–13. She brilliantly argues that Mori’s references to “Japanese” and “language in Japan” did not mean the same thing.

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chotomy of a phonetic West versus a nonphonetic Asia put forth by linguistic theories and those around him. Second, his idea of a phonetic language privileged pronunciation over spelling. He sought to change “though” to “tho” to achieve commensurability between speech and writing; he did not attempt to change the pronunciation to match the spelling “though.” This is precisely why adopting English as currently written would not have constituted reform for Mori. He sought a writing system in which the spelling would perfectly adhere to pronunciation; adopting phonetic letters would be insufficient to implement such a reform if spelling was not modified. This privileging of pronunciation reflects theories of Western linguistics, which had discovered itself as a discipline through the study of phonetics by severing the study of language from classical philology.25 The focus on phonetics, therefore, was its raison d’être. What Mori thus sought was a simplified and “perfected” English as the language of Japan. This, at least, was his explicit goal. This does not mean that he did not also seek reform to the spoken language of Japan. Although his arguments to do so appear only implicitly in his arguments for simplified English, he gives us a hint as to how he would have carried out the reform if he had implemented it.26 The analysis of his ideas for the reform of the spoken language further clarifies how he conceptualized the “phonetic principles” by which he sought to bring about reform. Recall that Mori lamented the current state of language in Japan in the following manner: “the only course to be taken . . . is to start anew, by first turning the spoken language into a properly written form, based on a pure phonetic principle.” Here he is discussing, not the adoption of “simplified English,” but how he would reform the spoken language of Japan if he were to “start anew.” In his introduction to “Education in Japan,” he suggests that the language itself needs to be reconfigured: “There are some efforts being made to do away with the use of Chinese characters by reducing them to simple phonetics, but the words familiar through the organ of the eye are so many that to change them into those of the ear would cause too great an inconvenience and be quite impracticable.”27 The new language, by virtue of being defined by “a pure 25 26

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See Robins 1997; Formigari 2004. This is important precisely because Mori, as Lee Yeounsuk (1996) persuasively argues, did not argue for the abolition of “the language used in Japan,” a fact often overlooked by those who criticized Mori for being a deranged antinationalist. It must be added, however, that his criticism of what he refers to as “Japanese” gets harsher in his “Education in Japan” and also in “Remarks of Mr. Mori,” a speech he gave at the meeting of the National Educational Association in 1872. See Mori 1999, 1872. Mori 1999, 185–186.

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phonetic principle,” would thus be endowed with a system by which “words familiar through the organ of the eye” would be replaced by “those of the ear.” Mori does not discuss how he would go about implementing this, but it is not too hard to imagine that he was, for example, thinking about increasing the variety of syllable structure in the spoken language to reduce homonyms or introducing some kind of a phonetic system to mark the variety of existing homonyms in the written language, thereby defining the new language via “a pure phonetic principle.” It was, in effect, a way to introduce a new phonetic structure to the “spoken language of Japan.” Without such reform, he deemed the spoken language of Japan to be “too poor to be made, by a phonetic alphabet, sufficiently useful as a written language.” In other words, merely adopting a phonetic alphabet and transcribing the spoken language without bringing reform to the language itself was not going to be enough.28 Mori sought to alter and rearrange the sound system as a way to establish a new écriture, to completely alter what he called “deranged Chinese, blended in Japanese.”29 What this unattempted reform shows is that Mori’s use of a “phonetic principle” was prescriptive. This interestingly reformulates what is at the core of Western linguistics. The central focus of linguistics was a descriptive study of multiple aspects of “sound”; it devised a phonetic system by which to describe languages, focusing on, for example, phonological change, articulatory phonetics, and so forth. Mori, instead, sought to use these phonetic principles prescriptively, as a means to redefine and restructure the language. He saw in linguistic theories a way to reform the language, not simply a means to describe its limitations. 28

29

Ivan Parker Hall (1973, 191) claims that Mori “seems to contradict himself flatly in midletter,” referring to his statements that, on the one hand, “the only course to be taken . . . is to start anew, by first turning the spoken language into a properly written form, based on a pure phonetic principle” and, on the other, spoken language is “too poor to be made, by a phonetic alphabet, sufficiently useful as a written language.” However, if we accept that “phonetic principle” refers to the criterion by which to define a new language and the phrase “by a phonetic alphabet” refers to using the alphabet to simply transcribe the spoken, there is no contradiction. Neither of Mori’s proposals was implemented, nor did they garner much support. However, they prompted Baba Tatsui to write An Elementary Grammar of the Japanese Language to argue against Mori’s claim that “spoken language in Japan” was too poor and unsystematic for the new age. As Lee (1996) claims, Baba’s work is the first attempt at “descriptive grammar” to show a certain systematicity of spoken Japanese as a living language. However, it is ironic, as Lee states, that Baba wrote this work of grammar in English. In fact, his endeavor exposed the weakness of the very language he promoted in his work and supported Mori’s criticisms of it.

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The phonetic focus by which linguistics defined itself as a discipline, deployed in the framework of comparative linguistics, produced an influential albeit fundamentally invalid dichotomy between a “phonetic West” and a “hieroglyphic Orient.” Mori questioned this dichotomy, but he was one of the few intellectuals to do so. This dichotomy in fact haunted the linguistic reform movements for decades to come. Partly as a result, the privileging of sound that we see in the early Meiji period has too often been monolithically attributed to the influence of the West. Of course, the Indo-European languages and Western linguistic theories had a large impact upon language reform movements. And the phonetic focus of Western linguistic theories became a more influential force in the 1880s, shaping the reforms, as arguments to adopt the Roman alphabet increased in number. However, Western influence alone cannot completely explain this phonetic focus in the early Meiji period. The following section will show that there were in fact other forces at work that compelled Meiji literati to advocate phonetic scripts and insist on phoneticizing texts written in “hieroglyphic” kanji. The Orality of Sodoku: Maejima Hisoka and the Abolition of Kanji Mori Arinori was certainly not the only one to see the need for an entirely new written language. In fact, most proponents of language reform in the first decade of the Meiji period sought a new medium. Maejima Hisoka, who is perhaps more famous for his contribution to the establishment of Japan’s postal system, was also a strong advocate of language reform; his “On the Abolition of Kanji” (Kanji onhaishi no gi, 1866) has often been identified as the beginning of modern orthographic reform. The main gist of his proposal was to abolish kanji altogether and employ kana scripts, but at one point in the essay, Maejima gives us a glimpse of an idea of the “new language” he sought: In establishing kokubun and its grammar (bunten), I don’t mean that we need to return to the ancient forms of writing (kobun) and use suffixes such as haberu and kerukana, but rather I mean that we should employ the common language of today (konnichi futsū no gengo) like tsukamatsuru and gozaru and apply some rules. That language changes with time is something I believe holds true both in our country and abroad. But I propose a language that, once uttered, becomes spoken language (danwa) and, once written, becomes written language (bunshō). I thus propose a

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language in which there is no disparity in style between spoken and written.30 This is the passage often referred to as one of the first references to genbun’itchi.31 However, as contemporary literary critic Kamei Hideo has argued, Maejima was certainly not conceptualizing the “spoken” language as what is spoken now or as the genbun’itchi that was later established. Kamei contends that Maejima had in mind a language that was very similar to sōrōbun, a style of language that was used in official documents, especially toward the end of the Edo period.32 To further scrutinize what Maejima meant by “the common language of today,” I wish to identify the governing system of language that shaped Maejima’s argument for reform. Rejecting kanji as a “hindrance to progress” and promoting the use of kana (which is likened to the Roman alphabet), Maejima appears to engage with the ideological view of Western linguistic theories. He emphasized the amount of time people wasted learning the means to acquire knowledge and not knowledge itself, to the extent that critics like Lee Yeounsuk have argued that Maejima’s argument was shaped by a “utilitarian perception of language” typical of “practical knowledge” (jitsugaku).33 His anti-kanji sentiments as well as his conscious effort to identify kana with Roman alphabets may lead us to think that his view was largely influenced by Western learn30 31 32

33

Maejima 1969, 18. Yamamoto 1975, 23. Kamei 2000, 61–62. According to Kamei, this language was apparently very similar to the spoken language prevalent among the former samurai class, if the character sōrō is removed. Lee (1996, 29–30) claims the following: “What underlies Maejima’s argument is the utilitarian perception that language is a tool, that language, including the letters that represent the sounds of the language, is not the true object of knowledge; it is, rather, a tool that communicates the object of knowledge. From such a perspective, it follows that letters ought to correspond faithfully to sound and must also have ‘the benefit of everyone uttering the same sound for the same character.’ At the core of Maejima’s rejection of kanji was the ideology of ‘practical knowledge’ (jitsugaku), the idea that true knowledge is in ‘the thing itself’ and not the ‘language’ [that mediates it]. Maejima accordingly thought that kanji were inappropriate for the acquisition and communication of modern knowledge.” I do not disagree with Lee that Maejima sought an easier medium by which to study “modern knowledge,” but I am reluctant to endorse the view that the “core of his argument” was shaped by a utilitarian view of language as “practical knowledge,” which suggests a “Western view” in which the medium and the object of study (modern knowledge) were as logocentric—hence the “object” is privileged as the primary goal of study, and language is relegated to a secondary position as “object”—as Lee seems to suggest.

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ing. However, take the following passage in Maejima’s “A Proposition for Kokubun Education” (Kokubun kyōiku no gi ni tsuki kengi), which he wrote in 1869: The issue of enlightening the people is about providing education. . . . By “providing education” I refer to abolishing kanji and taking kana [i.e., hiragana] as the national script, changing the conventional methods of education, and, with new methods, educating people on subjects that range from ethics, physics, and political science to law, as well as daily things, all in simple national script like kana. . . . When we rely on old methods of education by using kanji, or even when we change the methods of education but use kanji, kanji not only is burdensome for students’ brains (shin’nō) and interferes with their intellect but also interferes with the development of the students’ physical constitution (taishitsu) and weakens their physical frame (taikaku). There is no hope of equaling the physically and intellectually well-equipped people of Euro-America.34 This is a strong criticism against kanji and “the old methods of education.” But notice the inextricable relationship Maejima draws between orthography and the physical makeup of those who study it. Such statements have not been scrutinized beyond noting the significance of emotionally charged metaphors that express anti-Chinese sentiments. I do not doubt that Western linguistic theories reinforced Maejima’s anti-Chinese sentiments. However, perhaps ironically given his strong criticism of kangaku in this essay, this link between orthography and students’ physical attributes reflects the manner in which kangaku was studied in the mid- to late Edo period, the very education that Maejima and his generation received. The study of kangaku, which was predominantly a study of its classics, entailed roughly three stages of learning: “raw reading” (sodoku), reading (dokusho), and instruction (kōgi).35 In the late Edo period, sodoku was foregrounded as one of the most important training practices in kangaku. This is significant, because the practice emphasized the physical aspect of learning. In sodoku students declaimed words and phrases without knowing their meaning. Teachers would read texts out loud, using pointers to indicate the characters and sentences they were reading; then students would repeat what their 34 35

Maejima 1964, 39. On sodoku and kangaku studies in the late Edo period, I consulted Nakamura 2002; Tsujimoto 1999; Takai 1991. I have also learned a great deal from Saitō Mareshi 2005, 2006; as well as Maeda 1987.

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teachers read. This process was repeated until the students had memorized the texts.36 In effect, the body memorized the texts through the rhythm and sound of the sentences.37 In dokusho, students were given instruction about the meaning of the texts that they had memorized. In the third phase, kōgi, the meanings and interpretations of the texts were sought, debated, and discussed.38 The physical posture in which students practiced sodoku was extremely important, and the need for proper posture was carried over to later stages of kangaku studies and beyond. There is a famous anecdote about Nishi Amane, who, upon falling ill, began to read the works of Ogyū Sorai. Nishi reasoned that he could read these works in bed without worrying about proper posture because Neo-Confucianism (Shushigaku) had categorized them as “heretical studies” (igaku). Nishi was pleasantly surprised to find them interesting, a discovery that would not have been possible had he not fallen ill. Appropriate posture was deemed absolutely necessary in reading “proper” kangaku texts, and this belief had been ingrained in him.39 The emphasis on the need for proper physical posture continued well into the Meiji period. On New Strategies of Teaching (Kaisei kyōjujutsu), written as late as 1883 and apparently shaped by the new “Western” pedagogical method of J.H. Pestalozzi, describes the teaching of sodoku. The importance of posture is repeated again and again, with the text outlining the specifications for students’ practice of sodoku:

36

37

38

39

We ought not to imagine a classroom full of students, all studying sodoku under one teacher and at the same level. Instruction was usually given within the family, either by the father or by the elder brother. Many students started sodoku between the ages of five and ten (on average, seven or eight). See Tsujimoto 1999. Students received some instruction as to the meaning of the texts during the sodoku phase, but the main objective of sodoku was to recite and memorize the texts. Also, they started right off with the Four Classics, without any other training. The typical order was Great Learning 大学 (Da xue), Analects of Confucius 論語 (Lun yu), Mencius 孟子 (Mengzi), and The Mean 中庸 (Zhong yong). The sodoku of the Four Classics ended at around ten years of age for quick learners and no later than thirteen or fourteen for others. Despite the importance of later stages, however, it is essential to note that when they had completed the first stage, the students could read other kangaku texts without the help of a teacher. Sodoku even taught kanbun grammar; those who could not compose well were made to do sodoku repeatedly. See Takai 1991, 149. See Noguchi 1993a.

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The legs must be bent sixty degrees, and both feet must be perfectly still on the floor. The student must sit as deeply as possible, and his lower back must slightly touch the chair. The knees must be at a right angle. The entire body should be slightly tilted forward. The student ought to hold out his chest.

The list details thirteen postural specifications for when one is sitting and another fourteen for when one is standing. It was while maintaining such rigid physical poses that students experienced the rhythm and sound of the sentences. Sodoku was, as intellectual historian Tsujimoto Masashi claims, a process through which the entire body consumed the text of recitation.40 It was a process of learning that required one’s full physical attention until the memorized sentences were ingrained in the body. Such a relationship between the body and learning is derivative of NeoConfucian ethics, the implication of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that kangaku education, with sodoku as one of its important components, sought both moral and physical development, which were integral to each other.41 In effect, Maejima’s criticism of kanji betrays the fact that he had internalized the physical training inscribed in kangaku education, especially in sodoku practice. For Maejima, language was inextricably linked to the physical component, which affected the growth of the mind. Note that this system of sodoku, though practiced for a long time in the Edo period, was institutionalized only in the early nineteenth century. A sodoku examination (sodoku ginmi) was set up and attracted students from all over the country when passing this examination became a goal for students not only at Shōheikō, the official school of the bakufu, but also in the provinces and non-bakufu-sponsored private schools (shijuku). Sodoku ginmi played an important role in standardizing the reading of the kangaku classics. It served to authorize the “correct” way of reading, regulating the variations that existed. Prior to such standardization, there were different kanbun-reading methods devised by different masters or schools, which determined how certain characters were read, how certain words were conjugated, where to place which of the te ni o ha particles, and when to employ the on reading (phonetic approximation of the “original” sound, or kaon 華音) or the kun reading (“indigenous” pronunciation) of kanji. There were, in other words, “plural” readings of a 40 41

Tsujimoto 1999, 70–71. See Tsujimoto 1999, esp. 146–156.

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single work, since different masters made different decisions; these decisions were not merely interpretive but also grammatical.42 However, once standardized, it was as if the “right” way of reading preceded the kanji texts. In effect, the kanbun texts were no longer open to structural interpretation; the te ni o ha particles, conjugation, on or kun readings for kanji compounds, and so forth were all determined by the authorized reading. There was, in other words, a “right phonetic reading” behind the characters. Once the structural ambiguity had been erased, it was no wonder that kanji came to be viewed as a hindrance. As a result, it was not a coincidence that the entire focus went to the phoneticizing of texts.43 This explains the unconditional valorization of phoneticizing kanji scripts that we see in Maejima and for that matter in many others in the early Meiji period. Once a kanbun text had been phoneticized, it was then easy to vocalize it. In effect, the institutionalized practice of sodoku created a space in which the main aim was to vocalize the authorized reading, which was a crucial means for learning and accessing “knowledge.” We can now see that what has been taken as an adoption of Western phoneticism and the impact of Western linguistic theories also grew out of sodoku, the first goal of which was to vocalize (hence phoneticize) the written script. One of Maejima’s arguments against sodoku was the length of time a student wasted in mastering the medium of knowledge, time better spent on knowledge itself, which is precisely why Lee characterizes his argument as utilitarian.44 Now we can see that the institutionalization of sodoku, and hence the standardization of “knowledge,” are behind such a positing of the problem. This may have been further reinforced by the ideological view promoted by Western linguistic theories in which phonetic alphabets were considered superior to scripts such as the “hieroglyphic” kanji, but it is also clear 42 43 44

For a detailed analysis of different kanbun kundokutai, see Saitō Fumitoshi 1993, 1995, 1998. Saitō Mareshi 2007a, 95. It is, as Lee seems to suggest, easy to think that Maejima’s argument for the use of kana derives from his urge to identify with the West. Maejima himself appears to adhere to this idea when he states: “When I say that kanji ought to be abolished, I do not mean to say that we should also abolish kango, that is, words, diction, and language that we imported from China. What I mean is to employ not their letters but kana and write down the words as they are. This is just like countries like England adopting Latin words as they are and making it their national language, spelling them in their own national orthography” (1969, 18). In this line of argument, as Lee (1996, 30–31) suggests, Maejima clearly sees a parallel between the Latin-English relationship and the kanbun-kana scripted kokugo relationship.

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that sodoku played a large role in structuring Maejima’s proposal in the first place. Additionally, sodoku ginmi standardized the kundoku reading, which converts the syntactical order of the kanbun to “Japanese-local” grammar by inserting diacritical marks, particles, and suffixes and conjugating words as necessary. The focus on the kundoku reading emerged out of an anti–Ogyū Sorai movement, as Sorai, in his “discovery” of the ancient texts, criticized the kundoku style as “a barrier that stood between the reader and the language of Confucian texts,” suggesting that “the ancient way” could be accessed only through chokudoku (lit., “straight reading,” referring to a reading in pure kanbun syntax) via kaon (the “original” sound).45 In criticizing such a view, NeoConfucian scholars tried to show that it was in fact the kundoku reading that was “accurate.”46 What sodoku ginmi did, in other words, was to disseminate and standardize the kundoku form of reading. What is important to remember, then, is that the core of this institutionalized practice of kangaku study was the orality of kundoku reading. Two issues ought to be highlighted here. First, we must remember that orality was integral to the learning of kanbun. We often lose sight of this orality, given the prevalent emphasis on the dichotomy between phonetic and “hieroglyphic” letters to compare kanji with the Roman alphabet or with kana scripts.47 Second, the orality associated with kanbun was that of the kundoku reading. With this in mind, we need to revisit Maejima’s use of danwa—which is typically translated as “spoken” language—because not all utterances are necessarily “spoken.” In “A Proposition for Kokobun Education,” Maejima says the following: “The new kokugo will accommodate Western words and kanji compounds. Its structure ought not to cater to classic elegance (koga) but to the zokubun of contemporary times (kintai).”48 The typical translation of zokubun is “vernacular prose,” but we must not uncritically equate zokubun here with our sense of the vernacular. Zokubun here aligns with Maejima’s earlier use of “the common language of today” (kyō futsū no gengo) as opposed to “classic elegance.” As Saitō Mareshi has shown, references to “common language” did not mean “vernacular” per se; they signified the kundoku order (as opposed to the kanbun order).49 In fact, “common” (futsū) and “contemporary” (kintai), both of which 45 46 47 48 49

Burns 2003, 511; Nakamura 2002, 122. Saitō Mareshi 2007b, 207. Komori 2000, 106. Maejima 1964, 40. Saitō Mareshi 2007a, 93.

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are used by Maejima to denote zokubun, are terms used to characterize writing that was not pure kanbun, referring to the kundoku style of writing.50 Recall that Maejima was critical of a language in which there was a discrepancy between “spoken” and “written” forms. Given the sodoku practice, it is not too far-fetched to say that the disparity between the danwa (spoken) and the bunshō (written) language that he saw was the disparity between kanbun and its kundoku reading. In effect, the language he promoted by using the term “common,” “the zokubun of contemporary times,” was first and foremost a language in kundoku syntax. This is on a par with his decision to retain kanji compounds (kango), despite his rejection of kanji, given that kundoku syntax strings together the kanji compounds. Whether written or spoken, his new language thus was to follow the kundoku order. The practice of sodoku and its institutionalization played a large role in shaping the views of language that Meiji literati harbored. But because they intersected with the view of language offered by Western linguistic theories, which reinforced anti-kanji sentiments, the role played by the phonetics of kanji and the orality of sodoku practice has been concealed. Characterizing all such anti-kanji movements as manifestations of de-Sinification (and Westernization) reinforces such concealment. For Meiji literati, their opposition to kanji may have manifested itself as the desire to de-Asianize and Westernize, as many expressed. However, we simply replicate their views if we turn a blind eye to the role that the study of kangaku played in fostering anti-kanji sentiment. In the following section, we will see yet another notion of “sound” that shaped the arguments for reform, one that is inextricably linked to the development of the fifty-sound syllabary grid (gojū-on zu). Given that this development is often linked to nativist learning, it is perhaps ironic that this notion of sound appears most tellingly in arguments that advocate the adoption of the Roman alphabet. Assigning the “Correct” Sound: Nanbu Yoshikazu and the FiftySound Syllabary Grid It is easy to imagine how advocates for reform who valued the phonetic nature of kana might take it a step further and argue for the use of the Roman alphabet. The call for the use of the Roman alphabet took off primarily in the second decade of the Meiji period as Western linguistic theories became more 50

Saitō Mareshi 2005, 218.

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influential. However, Nanbu Yoshikazu’s proposals for the Roman alphabet, to which we will now turn, were not grounded in Western linguistic theories and thus ought to be considered independently from what developed later. Nanbu was the first to argue for the use of the Roman alphabet, in “On Learning Kokugo” (Shūkokugoron) in 1869 and “On Reforming the Scripts” (Moji o kaikaku suru gi) in 1872. After arguing how inconvenient kanji was for memorization and promoting instead the use of the Roman alphabet, Nanbu argued that it was necessary to first do the following: “To change the script and establish grammar, we must first decipher the correct sound (oto o tadasu) and designate appropriate script. Our country has fifty sounds—in fact, seventy-five if we include voiced consonants (dakuon)—and all words are produced with these sounds. Therefore, we must first of all identify the correct sounds; to do so we must designate appropriate scripts for them.”51 Nanbu was certainly not alone in arguing for script reform as an essential component of language standardization; we saw that Mori sought the same in his call for simplified English. Yet what is unique to Nanbu is the way in which he associated script, grammar, and “correct” sounds. There are two points to focus on here: the inextricable link he saw between script and grammar, which I will address later in this section, and his use of the phrase “oto o tadasu” (lit., “to correct sounds”). Perhaps the first reaction to “oto o tadasu” is to equate it with correcting pronunciations and standardizing dialects. This is understandable, because many dialects divided the nation in the early years of the Meiji period. Yet, in three essays Nanbu wrote between 1875 and 1877 on adopting the Roman alphabet, he did not once mention dialects or, for that matter, the actual spoken language. Dialects were not taken up as a central issue among the advocates of linguistic reforms until the 1880s, when they began to talk about standardizing Japanese through the Tokyo dialect.52 The sound (oto) Nanbu refers to here does not appear to have any link to actual uttered sounds or spoken language. If it is not spoken language or dialects, what then constitutes the oto of oto o tadasu? Just as for Maejima, the system of language that shaped Nanbu’s proposal is evident from what he criticized, namely kana. One of the main reasons that Nanbu advocated the Roman alphabet was because it notated the vowels and consonants separately, a convenience that, he argued, was nonexistent in kana. Moreover, Nanbu contended that kana scripts needed to “improvise” 51 52

Nanbu 1969, 21. There are a few exceptions to this. Watanabe Shūjirō, for example, argues for the use of the “Tokyo kotoba” (Tokyo language) in “Nihonbun o seiteisuru hōhō,” published in 1875. It is doubtful, however, that Meiji literati shared the notion of “Tokyo language.”

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when representing “contracted sounds” (yōon) like ja じゃ and kya きゃ, which require two kana characters, as well as “voiced sounds” (dakuon) like da だ and ga が, which need two additional dots for ta and ka respectively. Both of these methods of representation were too unsystematic for Nanbu. With the Roman alphabet, he suggested, “equal” value would be assigned to each sound of the syllabary grid. Nanbu, like Mori, sought a language that could be understood equally well when “seen” and when “heard.” Yet Nanbu certainly did not propose adopting English, nor did he cater to Western linguistic theories in the way Mori did. Nanbu instead subscribed to a view of language inscribed in the syllabary grid, which is latent in his use of oto o tadasu. Oto o tadasu is a phrase used with regard to kanazukai (uses of kana) in the history of writing.53 It is used in reference to rendering kanji as kana (i.e., assigning kana to respective kanji characters). With oto o tadasu, Nanbu was thus referring to the act of assigning alphabetical letters to each kana sound. It is these sounds of the fifty-sound syllabary grid, which he at other places called koe (or kowe to be exact, because he opted to use classical orthography; both koe and kowe denote “voices”), that he sought to systematize in adopting the Roman alphabet.54 Let us delve further into the “sounds” of the syllabary grid and kanazukai in order to explore Nanbu’s perception of language.55 The development of the syllabary grid and kanazukai in the Edo period engaged with nativists’ study of ancient texts (kogaku), all of which were written in kanji.56 The nativist Keichū, for example, attempted to recover the “original” sounds inscribed in the Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves (Man’yōshū). Motoori Norinaga, in 53

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See, for example, the following passage by Ōta Zensai, who, in 1828, takes up the controversy over /i/, /u/, and /e/ sounds: “The difference in these three pairs of sounds (i, yi, e, ye, u, yu) is quite subtle, so it is fine to say that they are the same sounds in our everyday use. But we must use the correct kana when we decipher the correct sound (on’in o tadashi) and render them in kana scripts.” Quoted in Furuta 1978, 376. Hirata Atsutane, a well-known nativist, referred to the fifty-sound syllabary grid as “itsura no oto” 五十の音, with kowe glossing the characters for oto. See Sakai 1991. As one can imagine, there were numerous systems of kanazukai prevalent in the Edo period, and a comprehensive survey of these varying systems is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a detailed discussion, see Kuginuki 2007. Also, for the history of the fiftysound syllabary grid, see Mabuchi 1993. On debates over kanazukai in the late Edo to the early Meiji period, I found Furuta 1978 most helpful. See also Sakai 1991 and Burns 2003 for a discussion on textual strategies of Edo intellectuals. This scholarly turn toward kogaku was on a par with the movement in kangaku classics I briefly discussed earlier. One of the pivotal figures in Edo Confucianism, Ogyū Sorai, claimed that kangaku classics ought to be read through kaon (“original” sounds), and not in kundoku, to recover the texts’ original meaning. See Sakai 1991; Noguchi 1993b.

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seeking indigenous “Japaneseness” (defined in opposition to what he called karagokoro, or the “Chinese heart”) in ancient texts, also sought the words of the ancients expressed in the Kojiki. Both sought to access the “sound” behind the kanji, the “voices” that logically preceded the kanji that mediated them. There is a clear inversion at work here: it is the practice of reading that posits the sound behind the kanji, but it is as if that sound had always been there, waiting to be excavated.57 The implications of such an inversion are beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that, through such a scholarly turn, sound had become a central medium by which to access the ancient texts. Only by focusing on these sounds could the readers access the ancient voices.58 Within such a scholarly trend, the syllabary grid became not only a means to represent sound manifested in ancient texts but the embodiment of ancient voices themselves. For the nativists, the syllabary grid signified a meaningful system of sounds that embodied the voices of the past.59 Sound in such a paradigm is an abstract sound, made manifest only textually. It may have been uttered in the past, but it is not linked to a “living” sound. It is, for example, very different from the phonographic kana system (hyōonshiki kanazukai) that appeared in the second decade of the Meiji period, which sought to represent kana in ways closer to contemporary pronunciation. It is also very different from how Mori conceptualized the unification of sound and script. Instead, it features a prescribed system of sound that is linked to past texts and not an actual pronunciation. In effect, Nanbu sought commensurability between two systems of script, kana and the Roman alphabet. Nanbu may have appropriated the syllabary grid in conceptualizing his idea of reform, but this does not mean that he adhered to the nativist ideology. Far from it. He saw the grid purely as a phonetic system and a practical medium to systematize language. He was certainly not alone in this. That the utilitarian value of the syllabary grid was being discovered in the early years of the Meiji period as an appropriate medium to educate young children is evident in its inclusion in many school textbooks.60 Many Meiji intellectuals promoted its use in education, more so than the other well-known syllabary sequence, iro57

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In conceptualizing these “voices,” I owe a great deal to Naoki Sakai’s discussion on the status of language in the eighteenth century, which he presents in his Voices of the Past (1991). See Komori Yōichi’s (2000, 16) discussion of Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, and Ueda Akinari. He discusses how they shared the idea that “sound” can be derived from kanji characters. In addition to Sakai 1991, see also Noguchi 1993a; Maruyama 1993; Kawamura 1990. See, e.g., Furukawa 1870–1872; Sakakibara 1876. See also Furuta 1978.

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ha.61 This was precisely because the syllabary grid was seen to embody a system of sounds, while iroha (which constitutes a poetic sequence) was considered to be a system of writing.62 Iroha was usually the first to be taught in the Edo period in private calligraphy schools (tenarai juku); these were schools for elementary education in which writing was prioritized over reading, given its practical link to letter writing and other daily chores.63 In effect, the fifty-sound syllabary grid as a phonetic system was thus being brought to the forefront in the early Meiji period. And Nanbu was clearly in favor of such a general trend. For Meiji intellectuals, the practicality of the syllabary grid lay not only in its ability to represent the existing sound system but also in its link to a system of grammar.64 Katayama Junkichi, in his textbook for elementary education (Shōgaku tsuzuriji hen, 1873), says the following: The fifty-sound syllabary grid . . . vertically represents the five vowel sounds and horizontally represents the variation of a, i, u, e, o. It also represents shōzengen [the old way of saying mizenkei, or irrealis], ren’yōgen [adverbial], setsudangen [the old way of saying shūshikei, conclusive], rentaigen [attributive], and izengen [realis]. It embodies rules for adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, which also show past, present, and future forms. It is orderly and convenient and surpasses anything that China or Europe has. To educate our children, we must therefore use the fifty-sound syllabary grid as the foundation for education and teach them rules of sound and grammar. The forty-seven letters of the iroha, in comparison, do not offer a system of sounds or a system for conjugation.65 What does Katayama mean when he suggests that the syllabary grid embodies grammatical rules? Take, for example, the word kaku, “to write” (for convenience, I will here use our contemporary orthography): kaku conjugates into 61

62 63

64 65

There are exceptions to this. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1981, 105), for example, promoted the teaching of iroha rather than the fifty-sound syllabary grid, claiming that the former was “knowledge” while the latter was “science.” His rationale was that iroha was the “easier” medium and more “practical” for everyday use, and hence it ought to be learned first. Furuta 1978, 385. As a poetic sequence with its series of words, iroha was a model by which to learn calligraphy (tenarai), and its importance in calligraphic practice continued into the Meiji period. On tenarai juku, see Tsujimoto 1999. The awareness that the fifty-sound syllabary grid embodies grammar necessary for conjugation dates back to the end of the eighteenth century. Katayama Junkichi, Shōgaku tsuzuriji hen, quoted in Furuta 1978, 385–386.

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kaka(nai) (irrealis, to denote the negative), kaki(masu) (adverbial), kaku (conclusive), and kake(ba) (realis, to denote the hypothetical), thus following the ka, ki, ku, ke sequence. In effect, when the word’s column is identified, hence identifying the “correct sound,” its conjugation is also identified. Katayama does not account for the many types of verbs that do not conjugate in accordance with the syllabary grid, but it is clear that Meiji intellectuals saw the grid as a means to standardize grammatical rules. It is worth recalling here that, for Nanbu, sound was inextricably linked to grammar. Nanbu clearly saw the grid’s value in its ability to teach the grammar necessary for standard conjugation. Identifying the proper column for conjugation was especially important for the historical kana system, which Nanbu sought to reflect in his system of Romanization.66 Take, for example, the verb tohu 問ふ, “to question.” In the irrealis form, tohu becomes toha(nai), hence showing us that it conjugates in the h column. Its adverbial and realis equivalents, in the historical kana system, are tohi and tohe 問ひ・問へ, although they were pronounced with /i/ and /e/, like its contemporary conjugation, namely toi and toe 問い・問え. Nanbu clearly valued such systematicity inherent in the syllabary grid. It is thus not a coincidence that after giving up on the Roman alphabet in the second decade of the Meiji period, he joined the historical kana faction of the advocates of kana scripts (as opposed to hyōonshiki kanazukai, those who advocated the use of kana that reflected contemporary pronunciation). It is perhaps difficult to fathom a discursive site in which such a system of language lay “hidden” behind a proposal to adopt the Roman alphabet. In preferring such a system, however, Nanbu sought a way to use the existing system of kana and grammar, very unlike, say, Mori, who sought to alter the phonetic structure as a whole. The paradigm of language inscribed in the fifty-sound syllabary grid that Nanbu sought to deploy has not been scrutinized enough in the study of language reform. This is, in part, because the choice of kana is often likened to choosing the Roman alphabet over “hieroglyphic” kanji. Such a triangular scheme treats kana purely as a phonetic system and relegates kana to a status secondary to the words and concepts that it presumably represents, inevitably divorcing kana from its grounding in the syllabary grid; this further reinforces the severance between the syllabary grid and its ideological link to the voices of the past espoused by the nativists. The idea that kana, because of its “phonetic nature,” is like the Roman alphabet, therefore, is very limiting.

66

“Historical kana system” (or rekishiteki kanazukai) refers to a system of spelling that presumably reflects how the words were pronounced in the Heian period.

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We will now turn to Nishi Amane, who also argued for the adoption of the Roman alphabet, a proposal that engaged with the many “languages” we have seen so far. Nishi and Nanbu were similar in that both sought to establish a system of grammar by adopting the Roman alphabet. But Nishi did not draw on the syllabary grid to systematize grammar; he instead attempted to create his own system of grammar by focusing on the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, drawing on Western linguistic theories and other paradigms of language. Reconciling Pronunciation and Spelling: Nishi Amane and the Roman Alphabet As a strong advocate of the Roman alphabet, Nishi Amane wrote “On Writing Kokugo in the Roman Alphabet” (Yōji o motte kokugo o shosuru no ron, 1874) for the inaugural issue of Meiroku Journal (Meiroku zasshi), perhaps the most famous of his writings advocating language reform. Among the many calls for reform in the 1870s, this work is one of the most complex because it combines many of the “languages” we have looked at in this chapter and challenges the normative understanding of “language” and the unification of spoken and written languages that we in contemporary times harbor. As such, even a sophisticated critic like Lee Yeounsuk sees it as a manifestation of a blind pursuit of the West.67 Yet let us not hastily dismiss Nishi’s claims but first identify the logic behind his choice of the Roman alphabet. He lists ten advantages of adopting the Roman alphabet; here are numbers 1 and 3: By adopting the Western alphabet, we shall establish grammar (gogaku tatsu). This is the first advantage. . . .  Since writing and speaking will follow the same rules, what is written is what is spoken. Lectures, toasts, speeches before assemblies, and sermons by preachers may all be recited as they are written and written as they are read. This is the third advantage.68 What he is claiming is not immediately obvious. “Establishing grammar” was one of the goals that Nishi, along with many others, such as Nanbu, had in devising his arguments for the use of the Roman alphabet. Yet the link Nishi saw between his orthographic choice and grammar is nothing like what we exam67 68

Lee 1996, 33–34. Nishi 1999, 37.

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ined in Nanbu’s work. It is inextricably linked with the third advantage, namely that “writing and speaking” follow the same rules. What does this mean, specifically? Some critics see Nishi’s proposal as one of the early arguments for genbun’itchi, only to criticize it for not pushing the ideals of unification far enough. Yet if we look at the examples he provides carefully, his proposal appears very practical. Here are his examples: ・ denotes characters that are not read ～ denotes a change in sound The top line shows spelling, and the bottom line shows pronunciation. For adjectives that end with ku, si, and ki: 1. Spelling: 　　　　　　・ Pronunciation:

イカサマ ヲモシロシ ikasama omosirosi　

2. ヲモシロキ　コト omosiroki koto 　　　　　　・ ヲモシロイ　コト

(omosiroki koto)

3. コレハ　ヨロシシ kore wa yorosisi 　　　　　　  ・ コレハ　ヨロシイ

(kore wa yorosisi)

(omosirosi)

イカサマ ヲモシロ・イ (omosiro.i)

(omosiro.i koto)

(kore wa yorosi.i)

To make nouns modifiers: 4. キタイ　ナル　ヒト (kitai naru hito) kitai naru hito 　　　　　　　.. キタイナ　ヒト (kitai na.. hito) Verbs: 5. イマ　キカム　ユワム (ima kikamu yuwamu) 6. キルル (kiruru) ima kikam yuwam kiruru 　　　　　　　～ ～ 　　　～

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イマ　キカウ　ユワウ (ima kikō yuō)

キレル (kireru)69

What Nishi has devised here is a system of agreement for “uniting” the written and spoken languages. Take the first example. We may write “omoshirosi” but say “omoshiro.i.” As long as we agree to read omoshirosi as omoshiroi, then the written and spoken languages follow the same rules. By writing in the Roman alphabet, it becomes clear that it is the s that is a silent letter, which ought to be skipped; kana would not be as convenient in this sense. Like Maejima before him, Nishi advocated a new language in which the spoken and the written followed the same structure, but he did not aim to use the same language for both the spoken and the written as Maejima did in proposing to use a “common language.” He sought instead to take the divergence of spoken and written languages and reconcile them by devising a new system of pronunciation and spelling. This is slightly different from Mori’s proposal to establish commensurability between pronunciation and spelling. In proposing simplified English, Mori sought to relegate script to reflecting pronunciation, hence proposing to change “though” to “tho.” Nishi, however, sought to retain the spelling “omoshirosi” but in pronunciation skip the s. The idea may seem absurd on the surface, but any written language features a system of agreement with its reading equivalent. According to Mori’s set of evaluative criteria, Nishi’s system would be considered hieroglyphic, but Nishi’s proposal was a practical way to achieve a systematic unification. Despite the seeming originality of his ideas, Nishi’s proposal drew on many ideas we have seen so far. This is evident from the following list he provided of what ought to be done to adopt the Roman alphabet: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Determine the relationship between the ABCs and our sounds (hōon). Our sounds have four voices. Establish rules for them. Determine the characteristics of words and categorize them accordingly. Determine what is intrinsic and extrinsic in the language. Decide rules for spelling. Decide rules for pronunciation. Decide rules for inflection. Decide tenses and conjugation of verbs. Decide rules for employing the sounds of kanji. Decide rules for employing Western words.70

69 70

Nishi 1999, 43–44. Nishi 1999, 50–51.

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The first two points evoke kanazukai, as he proposes that letters of the alphabet be assigned to “our sounds.” He was clearly adopting the prescribed system of sounds represented by kana scripts. Thus, this is similar to Nanbu, who promoted the kana sounds, and dissimilar from Mori, who sought to introduce an entirely new phonetic structure. Moreover, Nishi’s interest in kana was not spontaneous. He had in fact once advocated the use of kana, as evident in his experimental work on grammar entitled “The Foundation of Language” (Kotoba no ishizue, 1870), which he wrote entirely in kana. He opens the work with his discussion of a section entitled “On Learning Voices” (Kowe no manabi) and argues for the superiority of the syllabary grid over the iroha sequence, showing that his notion of “our sounds” (hōon) is clearly derivative of the former. “Our sounds,” according to Nishi, have “four voices” (shisei). The editors and the translator of Meiroku zasshi claim that the exact meaning of “four voices” is unclear.71 However, I contend that the “four voices,” which typically refer to four tones in Chinese, refer to the pitch accent pronunciation that was used in systematizing a version of kanazukai by Fujiwara Teika (1162–1241) before kanazukai was altered and “corrected” by later nativists.72 Teika apparently assigned kana based on the varying pitches of the “four voices.” Such kanazukai, however, had long been criticized by the Edo nativists as “inconsistent” because it did not properly adhere to the ancient usages (the “pure voices” of the past). Why did Nishi choose to evoke this, in many ways considered “invalid,” kanazukai in systematizing the use of the Roman alphabet? It was because his focus was on pronunciation or, more specifically, phonological changes that would account for the discrepancy between pronunciation and spelling. As his examples showed, Nishi was interested in deciphering the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, which was more closely reflected by Teika’s system of kanazukai. Nishi’s focus on pronunciation is where his engagement with Western linguistic theories, in which he was very well informed, comes into the picture.73 71

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The translator of Meiroku zasshi speculates that Nishi (1976, 20) is referring to kanji pronunciations such as go-on, kan-on, and tō-on and adds wa-on (“Japanese-local” sound) as the fourth. However, because of Nishi’s ninth point, I find it unlikely that Nishi is also referring to kanji sounds here. See Itō 1928. See also Sakamoto 1993. Nishi’s knowledge of Western linguistic theories is evident in his “Kotoba no ishizue” (1961), as well as his Hyakugaku renkan (1870 [1981]), in which he introduced the basic categories used in the study of linguistics. His speech entitled “Katō sensei hakugengaku gian no gi” (On Mr. Katō’s Proposal to Establish the Linguistics Department, 1880) displays much knowledge of comparative linguistics theory in referring to Schlegel, Bopp, and others. See Nishi 1964, 66.

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Even in “The Foundation of Language,” after he argues for the superiority of the syllabary grid, he discusses how these sounds are produced in the mouth, drawing on articulatory phonetics. In a section called “On Words and Sentences” (Kotoba to aya to no koto), he includes what looks like a vowel chart, something he learned when he studied in Europe.74 Drawing on studies of phonological changes in Western linguistics, he sought to establish a system by which to unite pronunciation and spelling. Take the earlier example of “omoshirosi” and “omoshioi” again. Nishi was interested in deciphering the process behind the elision of the s sound. If he could determine the system that enabled the elision of such sounds and hence understand the phonological change, he would be able to establish his new grammar. Yet Western linguistic theory was not the only realm he drew on to decipher phonological change. To explore this issue further, it is important to note that the phonological changes in his examples occur only in inflection. That is to say, he offers examples of verb and adjectival conjugation—such as “yorosisi” to “yorosii,” “kikamu” to “kikau”—but not of nouns or other words in which inflections do not occur. Had he been drawing only on Western linguistic theories, he would have shown interest in all words, not just inflected forms. We could, of course, say that phonological changes occur most often in inflection, but this does not seem to be a satisfactory explanation for Nishi’s curious focus. I sense something quite deliberate in his choice to limit his inquiries into phonological change (and hence the rules to “unite” pronunciation and spelling) to inflected forms. What is behind such a choice? Item 9 on his list, “Decide rules for employing the sounds of kanji,” may give us some clue. Here, we can see Nishi’s urge to represent kanji sounds as such in his new language.75 In other words, he seeks to distinguish kanji-based renderings even in the Roman alphabet. One of Nishi’s earlier orthographic experiments may shed light on his proposal. When studying in Europe, he had been involved in a project to Romanize Great Learning (Da xue), one of the kangaku classics, in the kundoku form. 76 Here is an example: 物有本末。事有終始。知所先後。則近道矣。

74 75

76

Nishi 1961, 603. See also Nakayama Rokurō 2001. The editors of Meiroku zasshi are unclear about what Nishi is referring to here, but they speculate that he is referring to the various on-reading methods, namely go-on, kan-on, and tō-on. Nishi 1999, 51. Nishi coedited Great Learning with Tsuda Shin’ichirō. See Hattori 2005, 54.

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Mono hon-batsu ari; waza siu-si ari. Sen-kou suru tokoro wo sireba, sunavatsi mitsi ni tsikasi.77 Notice how he italicized the kanji compounds as if to retain the orthographic difference in the Roman alphabet. Despite his rejection of kanji, Nishi was never against the use of kanji compounds in the new language he sought.78 In effect, in “employing the sounds of kanji,” it is likely that he was looking for a way to represent kanji compounds as a unit, whether by italicizing them or by devising something else to mark their kanji-ness. This was the same for what he called “Western words” in item 10 in his list. These units, represented as such, would remain free of phonological change in his new language, and hence their pronunciation and spelling would not deviate from one another. In effect, a system of agreement between pronunciation and spelling had to be devised only for inflected forms. This structure inevitably replicates the kundoku structure, which links a series of kanji and kanji compounds by making inflectional changes, conjugating, and adding tenses to the original kanbun. As Saitō Mareshi has shown, kundoku offers a system of grammar by which to link and make sense of kanji compounds.79 Despite Nishi’s rejection of kanji and his strong inclination for Western linguistic theories, kundoku reading played an important role in his arguments for reform. The idea of a unification of spoken and written languages that Nishi proposed is nothing like the other reforms I have outlined here. Nishi’s call for reform involved a combination of the languages we have seen throughout this chapter. While he sought to deploy the existing system of sounds, he devised ways to “translate” them into the Roman alphabet by drawing on theories of Western linguistics and kundoku reading. Conclusion Despite an apparent similarity in the urge to unify the spoken and written languages, the proposals for linguistic reform in early Meiji Japan varied in their 77 78

79

Quoted in Hattori 2005, 54. As a translator of a great many works, Nishi saw the necessity of kango and produced many new compounds, such as tetsugaku (philosophy), shukan (subjective), kyakkan (objective), and shinrigaku (psychology), many of which we still use today. See Yamamoto 1968, 86. Saitō Mareshi 2006, 105.

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methods and goals, probably more so than at any other time in the history of modern Japan. This shows the multiple directions that reforms could have taken before achieving a standardized, national language. Moreover, it also shows that a clear path had yet to be defined. The only thing that these advocates knew was that a new medium had to be produced, be it through the adoption of English, kana scripts, or the Roman alphabet. In effect, what marks the first decade of Meiji period language reform is intellectuals’ search for “languages” that could regulate the new medium they sought. Choices of orthography did not limit these thinkers. Although we often attribute a given orthography to the paradigms of knowledge that support it, the call for the Roman alphabet did not necessarily signify a pursuit of Western learning, nor did the argument for kana signify a longing for nativist learning. In grappling with the many complex issues they faced in producing their own system of language, these advocates freed their orthographic choices from their apparent foundations. From our perspective, too, such a link between orthography and knowledge, often made in studies of linguistic reforms, can only be a hindrance in the attempt to see the complex ways in which varying perceptions of language intersected and were made manifest in arguments for reform. The rejection of kan, too often treated as a given in the early Meiji period, also needs further analysis. Even as kangaku was rejected as a hindrance to progress not only by the four reformers discussed here but by many early Meiji intellectuals, the institutionalization of sodoku was firmly behind the Meiji reformers’ urge to phoneticize scripts. Many intellectuals may have been against kanji as a script, but kanji compounds and kanbun grammatical structure (especially in its kundoku form) were appropriated to produce a new language, as we saw in Maejima and Nishi. As we have seen throughout this chapter, many notions of “sound” shaped the first decade, none of which ought to be conflated with one another. The “phonetic” principles of Western linguistic theories, the orality of sodoku, the “sound” inextricably linked to the syllabary grid, and kanazukai systems all offered themselves as a means to regulate the styles that were available in the discursive site in question. These varying “languages” manifested differently in the way the reformers sought commensurability between spoken and written languages. In Mori’s idea of commensurability, on a par with the idea of phonetics in Western linguistic theories, the pronounced sound was privileged; it was thus up to spelling to reflect the pronunciation (hence the proposal to change “though” to “tho”). Maejima’s concern centered on phoneticizing (and hence vocalizing) kanji scripts, hence seeking commensurability between the oral “reading” (kundoku) and “writing” (kanbun). Nanbu privileged the textual

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sound represented in the fifty-sound syllabary grid, which was perfectly translatable to Romanized script; the commensurability that he sought was technically via one script (kana) to another script (the Roman alphabet), divorced entirely from pronunciation. With Nishi, commensurability between pronunciation and spelling was achieved by a system of agreement, not relegating either mode of expression to a secondary position. The competing languages that were foregrounded through these sounds continued to shape the calls for reform in the 1880s. The recent scholarly focus on the creation of the nation has undoubtedly brought much needed perspective on language reforms by highlighting their political nature. However, there is a kind of inversion at work in how this scholarly work posits the nation, unnecessarily empowering the nation as an entity that motivates the movement that created it. It features, in many ways, an anachronistic projection of a Japanese national identity that necessarily excluded kan as a means of achieving language reform. This scholarship also obscures the fact that the conception of national language that ultimately prevailed after the Sino-Japanese War should actually be traced back to the reform of kan. More attention to the pre–Ueda Kazutoshi era, not simply as an “imperfect” preparatory phase for national language reform but as a space in which the varying forces of linguistic encounters struggled with one another, can help expose what the recent focus on the nation and nationalism conceals. References Burns, Susan L. 2003. Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Formigari, Lia 2004. History of Language Philosophies. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fukuzawa Yukichi 1981. “Shōgaku kyōiku no koto II” [On elementary school education II], in Fukuzawa Yukichishū, vol. 12. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Furukawa Masao 1870–1872. Eiri: Chie no wa [Illustrated: Puzzle links]. Tokyo: Furukawa Masao (i.e., privately published). Furuta Tōsaku 1978. “Ongiha ‘gojū-on zu’ ‘kanazukai’ no saiyō to haishi” [The 50 syllabary grid: On uses and disuses of kana], in Furuta Tōsaku, ed., Shōgaku dokuhon binran [A handbook for elementary school texbooks], vol. 1. Tokyo: Musashino shoin. Hall, Ivan Parker 1973. Mori Arinori. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hattori Takashi 2005. “Nishi Amane to Nihongo no hyōki—Nihongo bunten no kijutsu o chūshin ni” [Nishi Amane and his methods for Japanese orthography—on Japanese grammar books], Jōchi Daigaku kokubunka kiyō 22 (March): 45–66.

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Nakamura Shunsaku 2002. Edo jukyō to kindai no “chi” [Edo Confucianism and the modern “knowledge”]. Tokyo: Perikansha. Nakayama Akihiko 1997. “‘Bun’ to ‘koe’ no kōsō—Meiji sanjūnendai no kokugo to bungaku” [Thoughts on “voices” and “writing”—National language and literature in Meiji 30s], in Komori Yōichi, Takahashi Osamu, and Kōno Kensuke, eds., Media hyōshō ideorogī [Media, representation, ideology]. Tokyo: Ozawa shoten, 227–256. –––––– 2001. “‘Hon’yaku’ suru/sareru ‘kokugo-Nihongo’” [Translated/translating “kokugo-Japanese language”], Kan 4 (January): 152–162. –––––– 2006. “Tonji toshite no kenryoku—Ueda Kazutoshi ‘Kōgohō’ ‘Kōgohō bekki’” [The power of elusive rhetoric—Ueda Kazutoshi’s “On the vernacular” and “On the vernacular continued”], Bungaku 7, 2 (March–April): 127–141. Nakayama Rokurō 2001. “Nishi Amane no Nihongo bunpōron” [On Nishi Amane’s Japanese grammar], Gakugei kokugo kokubungaku 33: 56–64. Nanbu Yoshikazu 1969. “Moji o kaikaku suru gi” [On reforming the scripts], in Nishio Minoru and Hisamatsu Sen’ichi, eds., Kokugo kokuji kyōiku shiryō sōran [An anthology of kokugo and kokuji education]. Tokyo: Kokugo kyōiku kenkyūkai, 20–21. Nishi Amane 1961. “Kotoba no ishizue” [The foundation of language], in Nishi Amane zenshū, vol. 2. Tokyo: Munetaka shobō. –––––– 1964. “Katō Hiroyuki sensei hakugengaku gian no gi” [On Mr. Katō’s proposal to establish the linguistics department], in Yoshida Sumio and Inoguchi Yūichi, eds., Meiji ikō kokugo mondai ronshū [Essays on issues of national language after Meiji]. Tokyo: Kazama shobō, 65–70. –––––– 1976. “Writing Japanese with the Western Alphabet,” in Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment, translated by William Reynolds Braisted. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 3–20. –––––– 1981. Hyakugaku renkan [Encyclopedia], in Nishi Amane zenshū, vol. 4. Tokyo: Munetaka shobō. –––––– 1999. “Yōji o motte kokugo o shosuru no ron” [On writing kokugo in the Roman alphabet], in Yamamuro Shin’ichi and Nakanome Tōru, eds., Meiroku zasshi, vol. 1. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 27–51. Noguchi Takehiko 1993a. Edo shisōshi no chikei [The domain of Edo philosophy]. Tokyo: Perikansha. –––––– 1993b. Ogyū Sorai: Edo no Don Kihōte [Ogyū Sorai: Edo’s Don Quixote]. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha. Osa Shizue 1998. Kindai Nihon to kokugo nashonarizumu [Kokugo nationalism and modern Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan. Robins, R.H. 1997. A Short History of Linguistics, 4th ed. London: Longman. Saitō Fumitoshi 1993. “Kinsei ni okeru kanbun no kundoku to ondoku” [Ways of phoneticizing early modern kanbun], Nagoya Daigaku kyōyōbu kiyō 37: 1–24.

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–––––– 1995. “Meiji shoki ni okeru kanbun kundokutai” [Kanbun kundokutai of the early Meiji period], Jōhō bunka kenkyū 1 (March): 175–184. –––––– 1998. “Kinsei kindai no kanbun kundoku” [Kanbun kundoku of the early modern and modern periods], Nihongogaku 17, 7 (June): 56–62. Saitō Mareshi 2005. Kanbunmyaku no kindai [The modernity of the kanbun domain]. Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku shuppankai. –––––– 2006. Kanbunmyaku to kindai Nihon [The Japanese modernity of the kanbun domain]. Tokyo: NHK Books. –––––– 2007a. “Gen to bun no aida” [In between spoken and written languages], Bungaku 8, 6 (November–December): 91–98. –––––– 2007b. “Rai San’yō no kanshibun: Kinsei kōki no tenkanten” [Rai San’yō’s kanshi style prose: A turning point at the end of the early modern period], in Tokyo Daigaku kyōyō gakubu kokubun kanbun gakubukai, ed., Koten Nihon no sekai: Kanji ga tsukuru Nihon [The world of classical Japanese]. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 189–215. Sakai, Naoki 1991. Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sakakibara Yoshino 1876. Shōgaku dokuhon jibiki [Elementary school textbook dictionary]. Tokyo: Kitazawa Ihachi. Sakamoto Kiyoe 1993. “Keichū no Teika kanazukai hihan—shiseikan to no kankei kara,” [Keichū’s criticism of Teika’s uses of kana—on four voices], Kokubungaku kenkyū, no. 109 (March): 82–91. Takai Hiroshi 1991. Tenpōki, shōnen shōjo no kyōyō keisei katei no kenkyū [On the education of adolescent boys and girls in the Tenpō era]. Tokyo: Kawade shobō shinsha. Tanaka Katsuhiko 1985. “Seiyōjin wa Shinago o dō mitekitaka: Augusuto Shuraihyā no baai” [How did Westerners see Chinese? The case of August Schleicher], Gengo bunka, March. Tsuchiya Michio 2005. Kokugo mondai ronsōshi [The history of debates over kokugo]. Tokyo: Tamagawa Daigaku shuppanbu. Tsujimoto Masashi 1999. Manabi no fukken [The revival of learning]. Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten. Watanabe Shūjirō 1975. “Nihonbun o seiteisuru hōhō” [On the method of establishing Japanese writing], in Yamamoto Masahide, ed., Kindai buntai keisei shiryō shūsei: Hasseihen [A complete anthology of language reform materials: The early years]. Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 154–163. Yamamoto Masahide 1965. Kindai buntai hassei no shiteki kenkyū [The historical study of the birth of modern language]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. –––––– 1968. “Nishi Amane no kokugo kaikaku katsudō” [On Nishi Amane’s attempts at kokugo reform], Gengo seikatsu 196: 86–94.

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–––––– 1971. Genbun’itchi no rekishi ronkō [The historical study of genbun’itchi]. Tokyo: Ōfūsha. –––––– 1975. “Bunken kaisetsu” [A commentary], in Yamamoto Masahide, ed., Kindai buntai keisei shiryō shūsei: Hasseihen [A complete anthology of language reform materials: The early years]. Tokyo: Ōfūsha, 23–122. Yasuda Toshiaki 1997. Teikoku Nihon no gengo hensei [The linguistic terrain of imperial Japan]. Tokyo: Seori Shobō. –––––– 1999. Kokugo to hōgen no aida—gengo kōchiku no seijigaku [In between kokugo and dialects—the politicality of language reform]. Tokyo: Jinbun shoin. –––––– 2006. Kokugo no kindaishi: Teikoku Nihon to kokugo gakusha tachi [A modern history of kokugo: Imperial Japan and kokugo scholars]. Tokyo: Chūkō Shinsho.

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Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China Shang Wei1 Introduction To reflect on the issue of vernaculars in early modern China is to question what has long been taken for granted in the modern discourse on Chinese language, writing, culture, and society.2 If someone asks me what I do in my scholarship, I usually respond that I study early modern Chinese vernacular fiction or, more specifically, baihua xiaoshuo 白話小說 of the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) periods. However, xiaoshuo 小說 is an indigenous concept that is notoriously elusive and difficult to demarcate, and it was often used to designate what we today see as vastly different forms and genres, including both stories and dramas. Even more ambiguous is the concept of zhanghui xiaoshuo 章回小說, now customarily rendered as “vernacular novels,” a term that was coined in the first decade of the twentieth century to help distinguish the traditional Chinese long narrative stories, normally composed in what was retrospectively called baihua 白話, from the early modern and modern European novels, which had been introduced to China under the same rubric of xiaoshuo

1 I want to thank Hirata Shōji, John Phan, Patricia Sieber, David Rolston, Margaret Wan, Geng Zhensheng, and Chih-p’ing Chou for the helpful conversations we have had on this subject. Chen Yufei, Lin Jing, and Wang Chengzhi provided me with the assistance needed for carrying out this project. Lydia Liu, Weigang Chen, Wang Hui, Sheldon Pollock, Benjamin Elman, Judith Zeitlin, Rania Huntington, Zhang Hongming, and Viren Murthy read the draft of this essay and offered important suggestions for revision; David Branner patiently answered my questions on many thorny linguistic issues that this essay touches upon. I am grateful to all of them for their advice and help. Needless to say, I am solely responsible for the errors that remain. 2 This chapter focuses on what is called the early modern era (1550–1911), but as will be shown later, the final decades of the Qing Empire (1644–1911) witnessed some radical ruptures in intellectual discourse on language, writing, and the emerging nation-state in a drastically changed global context. Thus, I use the appellation “early modern” with caveats, referring primarily to the period before the Qing Empire was exposed to the encroaching influence of the Western discourse on language, writing, and nation-state building. I occasionally employ the terms “premodern China” and “traditional China” to refer to linguistic phenomena that can be dated to the earlier eras.

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in the final decades of the nineteenth century.3 In other words, zhanghui xiaoshuo was constructed as a literary genre in the early twentieth century and was retrospectively applied to the narrative texts of the Ming and Qing era; its English rendition as “novel” further clouds the issue. The most problematic concept is perhaps that of baihua, and the questions to ask are: When did baihua become “vernacular”? How and under what circumstances was this equation established, and what were its broad cultural and social ramifications? This study thus begins with translation and commensurability between the host and guest languages in translingual practice. By interrogating the modern equation of baihua with vernaculars, it seeks to illuminate the extent to which modern discourse on the vernacular and classical Chinese was filtered through and distorted by the early modern and modern European model of vernacularization and nation-state formation. The final decades of the late Qing (1850– 1911) constituted a critical turning point in the invention and conceptualization of “Chinese vernaculars,” and the issues that this modern polemic entails were rarely mentioned and much less resonant in the early modern and premodern eras.4 The main part of this chapter, therefore, explores ways of explaining the relationship between writing and speech, which is essential to the modern debates on the vernacular and vernacularization. To understand the linguistic formation and dynamics of traditional China, we need to take into account the linguistic and phonological diversity of a staggering number of regional languages and dialects that have made their way into writing only to a modest extent.5 More fundamental is what I would like to describe as the structural 3 Before the twentieth century, people used a number of other terms, including yanyi 演義 (explication of), zhuan 傳 (biography), and waishi 外史 (unofficial or informal history), to refer to some of these narrative texts, but obviously there was no single rubric they could use to lump together all the literary forms, genres, and texts as we nowadays do under the general category of what is called the novel. Occasionally, they resorted to phrases such as sida qishu 四大奇書 (four masterworks) to single out a few representative specimens of the long narrative stories that stand out for their unusual qualities and influences. More often than not, they tended to use concepts like caizi shu 才子書 (genius books), which transgress not only the boundaries of literary genres but also those between fictional and historical writings. 4 Here I focus on written Chinese, leaving out many other writing systems of the time—for instance, Manchu and Mongol, which, along with Chinese, constituted the official languages of the Qing Empire. 5 Some linguists prefer the term “topolect” in their studies of the regional dialects in China because the term “dialects” usually implies mutual intelligibility. For more on this subject, see Mair 2001, 23. The question is where to draw the boundary between “topolect” and “language.”

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separation of script and sound, and writing and speech, a phenomenon that sets China apart from Europe but permeated the Sino-script sphere of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in the premodern and much of the early modern era, albeit to varying degrees. Following the logic of phonocentrism, one may ask what kind of spoken languages the written Chinese represents, but that question presupposes one-to-one correspondence between script and sound and overall congruence between writing and speech, which did not exist in early modern and premodern China.6 The very fact that a given word or morpheme is often associated with more than one pronunciation and that the same text can be subject to different vocalizations inevitably complicates, if not entirely defeats, the effort to find the exact equivalent of European vernaculars in the Chinese writing system. In other words, it is misleading to raise the issue of vernacularization in discussing Chinese writing, as Chinese writing is almost always at variance with the spoken language and thus stands in a different relationship with speech than Latin does.7 This is not purely a linguistic phenomenon (although the concept of the vernacular makes more sense when applied to alphabetic, phonetic writings, which Chinese is not) but also a cultural and sociopolitical one, with broad ramifications for distinguishing the early modern era—and, for that matter, the premodern era altogether—from modern times. Despite criticism from the phonocentric perspective, the striking divergence in the practices of writing and speaking suggests a potential Chinese alternative to the linguistic conflicts at the center of the sociopolitical, religious, and cultural ruptures that most parts of the world have experienced over the past millennium. 6 Phonetic script has usually been regarded as the transcription of speech, but it seems risky to generalize about alphabetic writings in terms of their relationship with spoken languages. There is always a gap between the practices of writing and speech. This applies to classical Arabic and, to a lesser extent, even to English and other European alphabetic writings, but it is undeniable that Chinese is without parallel in its structural separation of writing and speech, largely due to its employment of the square-block Chinese script. 7 This is also true to some extent of Latin in medieval France, where it was presumably pronounced as French, and it was only when the separation between the spoken and the written became too vast for the church to tolerate that French was, in a way, conceptually constituted as a vernacular language. For more on this, see Duggan 1989, 20. However, what sets the Chinese case apart is that the separation of writing and speech in the premodern and early modern eras was the norm instead of the exception; nor did this characteristic represent a transitional state of development that ultimately led to the creation of new writing systems, thereby accommodating the native tongues and the native oral renditions of the written Chinese in whatever forms they took. Perhaps more importantly, there was hardly a “correct” pronunciation against which all the vocalization practices were adequately measured and judged.

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Chinese Vernaculars: A Critical Review of Modern Chinese Discourse on Writing and Speech

Pursuing a meaningful discussion on Chinese vernaculars requires that we clarify a conceptual ground for the issue, so as to eschew the built-in assumptions and attendant confusion about baihua and other related terms. In their definition and employment of baihua (plain, unadorned speech) to refer to the written vernacular, modern scholars often confound writing with speech, as hua 話 in baihua indicates speech; to put it differently, the phrase baihua itself presupposes the continuum and congruence of writing and speech. This is also true of the concept wenyan 文言, “written speech” or, rather, classical Chinese, which is normally used in modern discourse to mean the opposite of baihua, a sort of equivalent to Latin. Just like hua in baihua, yan 言 in wenyan designates speech and oral articulation. Although May Fourth scholars tended to dismiss wenyan as a dead written language, the very word yan in this compound suggests that, as they and other like-minded scholars assumed, what is called classical Chinese was based, at least in its formative stage, on speech. Only later did wenyan become somehow ossified, incapable of keeping up with the changing colloquialism, and thus divorced from speech altogether. This deplorable separation of writing from speech was then duly remedied by the embryonic baihua writing in the medieval era, which redeemed written Chinese by connecting it again to its oral sources. This modern view of the evolution of Chinese writing and its changing relationship with speech is both conceptually and historically questionable, to say the least, but has long been taken as a starting point for scholarly and popular discourse on Chinese writing culture and politics. As will be shown, the concepts of baihua and wenyan are both modern inventions, and the dichotomy of baihua and wenyan is fashioned after that of European vernaculars and Latin. In traditional China, there were no generally defined rubrics meant to incorporate all the diverse writing styles and registers into the opposing categories of baihua and wenyan. In the modern era, an extremely wide range of heterogeneous writing styles normally associated with specific genres, forms, literary schools, and eras is retrospectively lumped together under wenyan. It seldom occurred to the writers of the ancient-style prose or the parallel prose of the early medieval era that these styles in any way originated from the same wenyan source, and the stylistic differences between them can be easily reconciled. Likewise, what is called baihua writing is no less heterogeneous; its boundary with wenyan is always fluid; its infiltration of a variety of wenyan registers has been the norm since its emergence in the medieval era. To avoid the historical baggage that comes with these terminologies, I will use baihua

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and wenyan with quotation marks mainly in citing the modern view of premodern and early modern Chinese linguistic and writing practices, while avoiding them in my own discussion of the related issues. For the same reason, I occasionally resort to terms like “plain writing” in reference to the written colloquial (a wide range of linguistic registers dated to medieval times that gestures toward the spoken but does not necessarily correspond to actual speech or any specific language or dialect); it is “plain” in part due to its colloquial flavor, but it could also be more or less ornate and elaborate, contingent on the varying degrees of its mixture with ancient and foreign linguistic registers and syntaxes. Although I continue to use the term “classical writing,” I use it in a much more restricted sense than the modern concept wenyan. In this usage, it is closely associated with ancient-style prose (guwen 古文), thus standing in contrast in syntax, diction, and style to parallel prose (pianwen 駢 文), which rose to prominence in the early medieval period. As I will show, polarizing wenyan and baihua as two mutually opposed and exclusive writing systems is misleading to begin with, and doing so on the basis of their correspondence or lack of correspondence with speech is no less problematic. What is vernacular Chinese in the context of early modern China? My answer to this question is largely negative: there is no such thing unless we refer to an extremely broad range of regional languages and dialects, which rarely entered the realm of writing.8 It is no surprise that European Jesuits of the Ming and Qing era often adopted the term “vernacular” in reference to regional speech (xiangtan 鄉談; xiangyu 鄉語; tuyin 土音).9 Based on the vocabulary list prepared by the Reverend J. Lloyd, Carstairs Douglas (1830–1877), missionary of the Presbyterian Church in England, published the Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy in 1873. In the preface, he criticized Walter Henry Medhurst, the compiler of a dictionary on “the Hok-Kien Dialect of the Chinese language,” for its use of the concept of “dialect” in naming what he believed to be a “language.” He further explained: “It is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois; it is spoken by the highest ranks just as by the common people; by the most learned just as by the ignorant” of the same region; all the regional languages of the Central Kingdom bear to each other “a relation similar to that which subsists between the Arabic, the 8

9

As Victor Mair (2001, 25) correctly points out, it is indeed groundless to assume that written Chinese or, rather, “sinographic script,” “has the power to transmute mutually unintelligible spoken language into mutually intelligible written language.” See, e.g., Francisco Varo’s (1627–1687) use of “vernacular” or “romance, o lengua natural (the common vernacular, or the native or local tongue of a place),” in his Glossary of the Mandarin Language (Coblin 2006, 1:24).

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Hebrew, the Syriac, the Ethiopic, and the other members of the Semite family; or again between English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, &c.” In identifying the regional “languages” as “vernaculars” similar to the European national languages, Douglas implicitly set them in contrast with the “written language of China,” dismissing the latter as “a dead language” that is “related to the various spoken languages of China somewhat as Latin is to the languages of Southwestern Europe.” Accordingly, he admitted that these local tongues were glaringly absent from the existing Chinese writing system, and thus, “every missionary, and every one who would be counted a scholar, must study the written characters too, for the Vernacular or Colloquial cannot for a very long time to come possess any literature worthy of the name.”10 This view of the Chinese regional tongues as equivalents to the European vernaculars did not enjoy wide currency among the Chinese elites in the late Qing and the early Republican era. Nor did the dichotomy of the Chinese vernaculars versus the written Chinese—“a dead language”—gain immediate acceptance from the educated men of the time. Instead of rejecting written Chinese as a holistic block as Douglas did, Qiu Tingliang 裘廷梁 (1857–1943), a late Qing reformer, singled out classical Chinese as his target and went on to endorse the use of baihua writing in light of the replacement of Latin by the European vernaculars.11 Although his limited references to European history were by and large based on Protestant missionary sources, his view of baihua seems to have anticipated the May Fourth scholars’ advocacy of baihua as the basis of the national language for the burgeoning Chinese nation-state.12 In this case, the concept was redefined as a sign to embrace both speech and writing: baihua writing is the natural extension of baihua speech.13 Inspired by the model of the Italian Renaissance, Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), a leading May Fourth intellectual, saw the rise of vernaculars as a crucial component of the European Renaissance and the formation of early modern and modern European nation-states.14 He conceived of baihua as possessing the salient characteristics of the Italian “vulgar tongue” and engaging in a con10 11 12 13 14

Douglas 1873, vii, ix. Qiu (1898) 1963, 123. See also Kaske 2008, 77, 106–110. See G. Zhou 2011, 29. In this usage, baihua is regarded as a rough equivalent to Mandarin, an issue to which I will soon return. Hu Shi was once credited by the American magazine Look (October 4, 1955, 40) as “one of the world’s 100 most important people,” who “has invented a simplified Chinese language.” In his English-language memoir, Hu Shi (2012, 117–118) brushed aside the praise as amusing: “This is an honor which no one in the world, man or woman, can deserve: I never invented a language for China; no one invents a language for any country.” Instead,

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sequential struggle with “dead” classical Chinese for dominance, a battle that baihua needed to win if China was to experience a similar rebirth into the modern world. In other words, he and his fellow intellectuals of the time managed to repackage what is called baihua into a preconceived project of Chinese renaissance, granting it an ideological import alien to its indigenous connotations and orientations. The agenda of the May Fourth baihua writing movement was based in part on this radically redefined concept, and what follows is an all-too-familiar narrative: the literary history of the past thousand years (from the tenth century through the nineteenth century) is described in terms of the struggle between classical (wenyan) and vernacular (baihua) literatures. Within this dichotomy, baihua writing is seen as rooted in the vulgar tongue of the people (renmin 人 民); it is thus a “living language” (huode yuyan 活的語言) involved in daily oral communication, in striking contrast to wenyan, a dead language of the past to be learned only from the Classics of ancient times through mind-numbing memorization.15 It does not require much effort to debunk the May Fourth narrative of vernacular literature in traditional China, in part because it is often plagued by self-contradictions and shifting claims.16 For instance, despite their adamant endorsement of baihua as the people’s language, the May Fourth scholars tended to associate the written baihua with Mandarin (guanhua 官話), a sort of koine of the Ming and Qing era that was employed by officials, traveling monks, and merchants for oral communication and that was therefore transregional and cosmopolitan by nature, defying the very definition of “vernacular” as it is used in the European context. In advocating baihua writing as the common linguistic ground for nation-state making, Hu Shi harnessed the koine of the empire in service of a new and modern mission. Fu Si’nian 傅斯年, another leading figure of the May Fourth movement, went a step further and advised contemporary baihua writers to learn to speak Mandarin before beginning to write, as he was convinced that efforts should be made to firmly ground the written baihua on a colloquial basis.17 However, in so doing, he reversed the relation between writing and speech that Hu Shi elaborated in his well-known “eight don’ts”: rather than “write as one speaks,” Fu made it imperative for those writing in baihua to speak the correct language

15 16 17

he described his achievement, in the same memoir, as advocating “the use of the living language, the vernacular, to take the place of the classical language” (117). Hu (1918) 1988. Shang 2002. Fu Si’nian, in Zhao Jiabi 1935, 1:223.

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(Mandarin) or to improve their speech first. Hu Shi brushed aside this advice as unfeasible because most of the contemporary baihua writers could not speak fluent Mandarin, and as irrelevant because he himself had learned to write decent baihua without having mastered Mandarin. Citing the fact that he became a veteran baihua writer at the age of sixteen or seventeen, despite his disadvantage of coming from a non-Mandarin-speaking area of Anhui Province whose regional dialect was very different, he attributed this achievement to his extensive reading of baihua novels of the Ming and Qing periods, including Water Margin, from childhood.18 Despite his intention to encourage contemporary authors in their baihua writing practice, his conclusion had the unanticipated effect of putting the opposition of baihua and wenyan into question: how should we measure the differences between them if baihua turns out to be a written language, just like classical Chinese, learned from books composed three or four hundred years ago? If classical Chinese is already permanently dead with respect to oral communication, as Hu Shi himself put it, how much more alive could baihua be if it is at best an imagined colloquial to its writers? It is important to ensure that here we are not just beating a dead horse, showing that Hu Shi and his comrades were wrong again. The point is that they did not do exactly what they said they were doing or were expected to do. It is no surprise that Hu’s baihua proposal has long been criticized from different directions: some dismissed his baihua writing for not being plain or colloquial enough (or not being “sayable,” as Zhao Yuanren 趙元任 once famously put it) to meet the criteria he himself set;19 others found it too slack, flat, and wordy and thus lacking the qualities of a suitable literary language. However, the most devastating criticism probably comes from the historical and linguistic approaches, as the baihua writing of the past is vastly different from the colloquial baihua that he advocated, and its relationship with speech and vocalizing practice is much more complex and precarious than he wanted us to believe. As Victor Mair points out, even the Dunhuang transformation texts (bianwen 變文) of the ninth and tenth centuries, which were considered by the May Fourth scholars as the origin of baihua literature, “can by no means be said to represent a pure form of VS” (by which he means Vernacular Sinitic, as it is commonly referred to by the linguists who see VS and LS, i.e., Literary Sinitic— Classical or Literary Chinese—as two wholly different categories of language), “as they still contain a significant proportion of Literary Sinitic elements.” He 18 19

Tang 1983, 167; Hu (1918) 1988, 60; (1935) 1988, 264. Hu (1952) 1970, 228.

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continues, “This is probably due to the nature of the sinographic script which is so perfectly well suited to Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) but rather inimical to a full representation of any Vernacular Sinitic language.”20 It seems that Mair’s emphasis on the “pure form of VS,” however defined, ignores the fact that spoken languages are inevitably messy and can hardly be pure, let alone find their way into any writing systems without the intervention or mediation of the written tradition. These concerns can be left aside for the time being, however, as the issue of definition arises here: following the model of European alphabetic and phonetic script, Mair assumes that what is called vernacular writing is a full representation of speech and, thus, that even the Dunhuang texts and, by extension, any kind of “vernacular texts” composed in Chinese fall short of the standard, largely due to the intrinsic limitations of  Sino-script.21 It then seems only logical to assume that there will be no authentic Chinese vernacular texts unless each region invents its own phonetic script or else employs the script based on the Roman alphabet to transcribe its regional phonologies. The first step is to abolish Sino-script and the existing Chinese writing system.22 The controversy about Chinese script and vernaculars is not without precedents; it goes back to the genbun’itchi (vernacularization) movement of Meiji Japan, when Maejima Hisoka submitted a petition in 1866 to the Tokugawa shogunate, calling for “abolishing Chinese characters” from the Japanese writing system as a necessary step toward “the unification of the spoken and written language.” “As an official interpreter for the shogunate,” Karatani Kōjin writes, “Maejima found himself captivated by the economy, preciseness, and egalitarian nature of phonetic writing systems. He saw Western superiority as linked to that phonetic system and believed the implementation of such a 20 21

22

Mair 1994, 712. Elsewhere, Victor Mair (2001, 29) argues that “in China, writing in the vernacular was unthinkable before the Buddhists came along.” However, he immediately qualifies this by adding that “despite the limited legitimization of writing in the vernacular brought about by the spread of Buddhism in China, the full implications of the vernacular revolution have never come to fruition” (30). It is noteworthy that the cult of the phonetic script developed in the West is sustained by what Derrida dubs “logo-centrism,” which goes back to Plato in ancient Greece and in the modern era takes the linear form of an evolutionary narrative in the history of writing— “a story of progress,” as W.J.T. Mitchell (1994, 113) puts it, “from primitive picture-writing and gestural sign language to hieroglyphics to alphabetic writing ‘proper.’” See also Liu 2010. Christopher Bush (2010) argues that “ideograph” is a modernist invention and offers a critical account of its functions in developing the modern European discourse on the issue of representation.

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system was an urgent priority for Japan.” So conceived and presented, the genbun’itchi movement not only sought to replace Chinese characters with the native Japanese phonetic syllabary kana, thereby bringing writing into conformity with speech, but also introduced “a new ideology of phonetic writing,” “a new conception of writing as equivalent with speech.”23 Maejima Hisoka’s proposal was indeed ideologically driven, but it is hard to dismiss altogether his concerns with sound and speech in our own inquiry on the subject of vernaculars. Although it is tempting to tailor the concept of vernacular to suit the Tang transformation texts, what purpose does that serve if it evades the issues at stake in what is called vernacular? The important questions to address are why some of these issues did not arise in the context of premodern and early modern China in the first place and how other, related concerns were dealt with, directly or not, without resorting to vernacularization as experienced in early modern Europe and many other parts of the world. I will return to these questions later; for now it is important to note that the phonetic experiment meant to transcribe the sounds of speech did occur in early modern China, though it was mostly scattered and on a limited scale; it can be traced to the Ming dynasty, when European Jesuits began to employ the Roman alphabet in compiling Chinese dictionaries and language textbooks. Protestant missionaries who arrived in China in the nineteenth century adopted the Roman alphabet to render the Bible not merely in Mandarin but also in different regional dialects, in the hope of reaching out to the large illiterate population of the empire.24 Carstairs Douglas, the compiler of the ChineseEnglish Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy, explained why he included no Chinese characters: There are a very large number of the words for which we have not been able to find the corresponding characters at all; and the time when it was necessary for me to take my furlough made it impossible to make the search for the missing characters, many of them rare, and many difficult to recognize from the great variations that take place between the written and spoken forms of the language. While I greatly regret that the Chinese character does not appear in the book, I am in one sense glad that it is absent. For it may serve to make manifest the fact that the Vernacular 23

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Karatani 1993, 47, 39. See also Atsuko Ueda’s chapter in this volume, in which she discusses the pre-1900 discourses and failed initiatives that aimed to bridge the distance between the spoken and the written but that were not necessarily driven by the nationbuilding aspiration. For more on these translations, see Phonetic Promotion Committee Records 1919–1930.

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of Amoy is an independent language, which is able to stand alone without the help of the written character.25 The missionaries’ linguistic experiments gradually gained the attention of the Chinese elites during the final years of the nineteenth century and inspired them, already under the influence of the genbun’itchi movement, to similar efforts. Instead of transcribing the diverse regional pronunciations as their European predecessors had, however, the late Qing reformers seemed more interested in seeking consensus on what might constitute the basis for a standard pronunciation system of a national language, and thus they resorted to phonetic symbols mainly for notation. Despite all the controversies and challenges, the majority of them appear to have been determined to invent a homogeneous and eclectic pronunciation system that could be spoken by people across the empire, thereby diverging from the paths the Jesuits and missionaries had pursued. Perhaps most ironically, the phonetic experiments initiated by Jesuit and Protestant missionaries were later embraced and further advanced by the Chinese leftists and Communists, who took up different forms of alphabetic, phonetic writing as tools for social mobilization and mass education in service of their revolutionary and egalitarian agenda in what was known as the Latinization movement, from the late 1920s through the 1950s.26 To a large extent, the Latinization movement emerged in response, on the one hand, to what the leftist intellectuals saw as the failure of the May Fourth baihua writing movement, which seemed in their eyes to have evolved into an elite written medium with an uneasy fusion of foreign lexicon, syntax, and styles and conventional written baihua sources and was thus far removed from the realm of the common people’s oral communications and expressions. On the other hand, the Latinization movement gained a sense of urgency to meet the needs for social and political mobilization in the wake of the Japanese invasion in 1937, when the Chinese Communists sought to establish their bases of military resistance in vastly different rural regions with heterogeneous local tongues.27 This shift of attention from city to countryside forced language reform activists and educators to confront regional dialects as what they are—the languages of place— thereby launching a vernacularization movement in the true sense of the term, albeit with modest success. Not only did they propose a number of alphabetic forms for transcribing various regional dialects, but they also managed to 25 26 27

Douglas 1873, viii, ix. Li (1934) 1990; Ni 1949, 1987. Wang Hui 2008.

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implement them through primers, schools, training programs, and other institutional and technological means. However, the Latinization movement gradually ran out of steam after the Communist Party founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949, with a few exceptions: in the 1950s, the Chinese Communist government went out of its way to help some “ethnic minority nationalities” develop their own writing systems on the basis of Latin alphabets, in part to satisfy Stalin’s definition of minority nationalities, in its effort to build a nation-state of multiple ethnic nationalities, cultures, languages, and writing systems.28 In accordance with the principles stipulated by the Institute of National Minority Studies in 1957, fifteen written languages were invented for eleven minority nationalities, employing “Latin alphabets” in general while resorting to the Chinese pinyin system for the languages whose pronunciations are said to approximate that of Han Chinese Putonghua 普通話, the officially sanctioned “Modern Common Chinese” based on old Mandarin.29 The phonetic experiments that attempted to invent vernaculars in early modern and modern China moved beyond Sino-script and the existing Chinese writing system. This does not, however, imply that no serious effort has ever been made to accommodate the colloquial languages, including a variety of regional dialects, through the Chinese character script. New vocabularies were invented in the Dunhuang transformation texts in the ninth and tenth centuries, including transliterations of Sanskrit words from the Buddhist sutras. In the literature of subsequent periods, regional differences occasionally register in lexicon and to a lesser extent in syntax, although within the constraints of the established and accumulated written and generic traditions. Only in a limited number of regions, such as Guangdong and Jiangnan, did the push for the written representation of regional dialects sometimes take a radical form, using the Chinese characters merely for their phonetic values or as phonetic signs, as demonstrated in the dialogue in The Shanghai Flowers (Hai­ shang hua liezhuan 海上花列傳), a late nineteenth-century novel set in the brothels of Shanghai. The regional pronunciations of the Wu dialect found their way into the written Chinese text, generating a sort of Chinese writing that would make no sense to any competent Chinese readers not adequately exposed to Wu phonology.30

28 29 30

Stalin 1954, 300–381. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guowuyuan gongbao 中華人民共和國國務院公報 [Bulletin of the State Council, People’s Republic of China] 54 (1957). For more on the infiltration of the Wu phonologies and dictions into the literature of the late Qing and early Republican era, see Chen 1989, 164–174; Fan 1999, 1:30–51.

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Other efforts to accommodate local dialects with Sino-script include the dramatic texts of the Yuan (1271–1368) (although these plays went through an evolving and complex process of textualization and redaction that did not end until the second half of the sixteenth century), the popular songs of the Ming as exemplified by The Mountain Songs (Shan’ge 山歌) and The Dangling Tree Branches (Guazhi’er 掛枝兒) compiled by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 of the late Ming, and a number of printed regional plays of the Ming and Qing periods, but they all pale in comparison with The Shanghai Flowers in scope and scale. And indeed, no other text better illustrates the limitations of the Chinese writing system in transcribing local phonologies and the lack of feasible alternatives.31 To this I must hasten to add that northern phonologies, whose regional differences are much less prominent than those of southern phonologies, seem to lend themselves more readily to representation in written Chinese through transliteration and other means. But the extent of their representation in writing varies both geographically and temporally, contingent on generic expectations, styles, and conventions. In The Shanghai Flowers, the use of Sino-script in a large-scale phonetic transcription of the Wu dialect presupposes the stability and standardization of a cross-regional pronunciation system, which had not even been fully achieved by the language reformers of the late Qing and early Republican era. In other words, using Chinese characters as symbols for regional phonology is at best a risky enterprise with no guaranteed success. Nevertheless, the very fact that similar experiments were undertaken well into the twentieth century indicates the desire of modern writers to capture the regional sounds that had for the most part eluded the Chinese writing system. I will address how the issues of place and localism were dealt with in early modern China later; for now it is noteworthy that even Hu Shi and his contemporary advocates of baihua writing occasionally backed off from their usual discourse on baihua/vernacular and recognized the value of using Chinese characters to transcribe regional phonologies. In an article written in 1925, Hu 31

From the final decades of the nineteenth century onward, Sino-script grew into a vital source for linguistic experiments in accommodating regional expressions both phonologically and semantically in the writing of Cantonese and South Min (Southern Fujian) languages. In these cases, Chinese characters are altered to form new phonographs and logographs that make sense only to the native speakers of the regional tongues. In other words, what is called Sino-script is no longer taken as given; instead, it is appropriated and modified to serve a variety of purposes and regional agendas (see Gunn 2006, 17–107). Related to this kind of practice is the invention of the writing systems modeled upon Chinese characters by other non-Han peoples; some of these systems can be traced to much earlier periods. See Peter Kornicki’s chapter in this volume.

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Shi spoke highly of The Shanghai Flowers. He went on to comment on a poem by his contemporary Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 that simulates the Wu phonology in the same way: “Those who know the Wu dialect can immediately catch its flavor; it is the genuine baihua, truly a language that is alive.” He elaborated further by referring to the True Story of Ah Q (A Qiu zhengzhuan 阿 Q 正傳), authored by Lu Xun 魯迅, another contemporary writer: “How vivid it would have been if Lu Xun had used Shaoxing dialect in representing Ah Q.” Judging the recognized literary masterpieces of the Qing dynasty by the same standard, he remarked: “It would be absurd if everyone spoke in baihua as the characters in The Scholars and The Story of the Stone do.”32 Thus, in praising regional language or dialect, Hu Shi contrasted it with baihua, thereby criticizing baihua literature for not reflecting the spoken languages that people used in everyday life. It is interesting to see how he phrased his argument: by baihua he usually meant “a living language,” but here he instead suggests that only a regional language or dialect fits that definition—only the written transcription of the regional tongues constitutes the true baihua. To put it another way, in its presupposed opposition to classical Chinese and implicit equation with the vernacular, what is called baihua is now recast as local speech. II

Reexamining Baihua, Wenyan, and Mandarin Speech

This leads us to reexamine the term baihua, which has long been identified as vernacular Chinese by modern Chinese linguists and literary scholars. A concept with evolving and changing connotations, baihua means “plain, unadorned speech” in one of its standard modern usages. Even when it refers to writing, its employment of the word “speech” (hua) blurs the boundary between writing and speech, rendering baihua in some common usages nearly interchangeable with “Mandarin” (guanhua), a hybrid spoken language containing elements mainly from a variety of northern dialects. In most cases, however, modern Chinese scholars use baihua as an offhand abbreviation of “baihua writing” (baihuawen 白話文), which they deem to be a kind of transcription of Mandarin speech. As argued above, Mandarin was a common form of speech shared by officials, traveling monks, merchants, and other members of well-educated, if not always privileged, social classes and groups and is thus by definition a transregional and cosmopolitan form of oral communication and expression. This puts Mandarin at odds with the basic definition of “vernacular.” Moreover, its 32

Hu (1925) 1988.

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status as official speech (guanhua) sets Mandarin further apart from vernaculars as the written form of regional “vulgar tongues.”33 The modern definition of baihua as a written medium of the Mandarin phonology is misleading: it not only misrepresents the relationship between script and sound but also presupposes that Mandarin is a holistic and homogeneous entity readily transposed into writing through the use of Sino-script. It would be a mistake to turn away from the messy reality that Mandarin is at best a loosely constructed form of speech that was far from standardized and homogenized in early modern times, as it consisted of different regional variations in constant negotiation with the local dialects. The degree of localization varies from region to region, and so does the communicability of Mandarin’s variants. Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, people from the same Mandarin-speaking region sometimes found it hard to communicate among themselves using what they assumed to be Mandarin, let alone communicate with those from other regions.34 This is not surprising, given the lack of modern technologies and institutional supports necessary for homogenizing and standardizing a language and maintaining its uniformity across time and space. In addition to its regional divergences, Mandarin underwent more historical changes in the early modern era than are registered in the written colloquial of that period, as its phonology was largely dictated by the dialects of the capital region—Nanjing in the Ming (the founding father of the Ming established its capital in Nanjing) and Beijing in the Qing. However, we know little about the extent to which this geopolitical shift of the Mandarin basis affected all other regional variants or how the accompanying changes in diction, pronunciation, and, to a lesser extent, syntax spread. The existing evidence suggests that Jesuit and Protestant missionaries and Japanese visitors were more attentive to the subtle differences between the Nanjing and Beijing Mandarins; Jesuits turned to native Nanjing residents for Mandarin tutors in the Ming period, and the Protestants and the Japanese scholars compiled new language textbooks in 33

34

Antonio Gramsci (1991, 168, 188) once described the rise of early modern and modern European vernaculars as a popular sociopolitical movement driven by the national populace” or “the people” in an uprising against Latinizing “mandarinism.” Following the same logic, some European missionaries referred to Chinese Mandarin as “Chinese Latin.” Cai Yuanpei ([1922] 1995), the president of Peking University, complained that both the faculty and the students were so ill-equipped to speak and comprehend “the national language” (based on old Mandarin) that the professors had to circulate their lecture notes among the students or else lecture in English to overcome the barrier of oral communication. See also Qian Xuantong (1925) 1999; Jin 2000, 45–46.

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the Qing dynasty to help teach and update their own knowledge of Beijing Mandarin and plain writing.35 Nor can we assume that Mandarin, because of its official status as guanhua, was universally acknowledged as a “high language” with unquestionable prestige and dominance over all the regional phonologies. The controversies resulting from government efforts in the 1910s to reach consensus on a common phonology for the national language are a case in point. In 1912, just one year after the demise of the Qing dynasty, the Ministry of Education of the newly established Republican government embarked on an ambitious mission to unify pronunciation by organizing a national conference “to establish a standard national pronunciation for the written characters, to analyze the national pronunciation in terms of its basic sounds, and to adopt a set of phonetic symbols to represent these basic sounds.”36 The goals so defined show that, first, Mandarin had not yet achieved unquestionable dominance in China, although it had long been used as the spoken language for imperial administrative purposes; and, second, given all its regional variations and divergences, even Mandarin fell short of the goal of providing “a standard national pronunciation for the written characters.” In other words, the Ministry of Education was fully aware of how far they had to go to establish a unified, standard national language, much less achieve the unification of speech and writing—the genbun’itchi, as advocated by the leaders of the Japanese language reform movement in the Meiji period. The struggles on these two fronts clearly demonstrate what Mandarin had failed to achieve despite its long history and official status. At the 1912 national conference, the northerners’ proposal to make Mandarin the standard phonology for the national language met staunch resistance from the southern delegates, who were rooting for their own regional phonologies (including Cantonese) as the more qualified candidates, citing the noble origins of the southern phonologies dated to the medieval era and the unsurpassable prestige that came with them, and the fact that these southern phonologies had served until 1905 as the basis for the rhyme scheme of poetry composition in the imperial civil service examinations. After three months of heated debates and negotiations among the delegates from all the major regions of Republican China, Mandarin won most of the votes and became the national standard for pronunciation, but the conference committee had to make concessions to the delegations from the south by adopting phonetic symbols that contain some old phonological traits well preserved in the 35 36

Lu 2007; Zhang Meilan 2011. G. Zhou 2011, 27. See also Kaske 2008, 405–416.

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pronunciations of a number of southern dialects, including Hubei Mandarin. Generally based on Mandarin, the phonology of this new national language is by and large an artificial system that does not exactly match any existing Mandarin varieties, much less any particular regional tongues. The final compromise made at the national conference underscores the phonological diversity among the varieties of Mandarin and opened the door for experiments in the following years with “integrated Mandarin” and “fabricated Mandarin.” Qian Xuantong 錢玄同, a French-trained linguist who hailed from the south, went further than most of his contemporaries and insisted on integrating the fundamental phonological features of regional dialects and languages into the emerging national language: “Integrating the dialects of all provinces and producing one new national language of the Republic can be compared to the invention of Esperanto by mixing the various languages of European countries as was accomplished by Zamenhof. As Zamenhof could not use Russian or French as an ‘international language,’ we cannot use Beijing dialect as a national language either.”37 In this bold proposal, Qian even suggested that the original pronunciation of some dialectical expressions be preserved. However, his resistance to Beijing Mandarin did not prevail, and by the early 1920s, he had already given up his position on what the new national language should be. Those who advocated Beijing Mandarin as the basis of the national phonology also made necessary concessions: they insisted that the standard pronunciation be based on Beijing Mandarin but did not prohibit anyone from following the model of baihua writing endorsed by the May Fourth literary revolution.38 In other words, they seem to have been fully aware of the divide between writing and speech: the standardization of pronunciation would occur mainly within the realm of phonology and was not expected to have a direct bearing on writing and textual production. If bringing writing into conformity with speech was still an anticipated or actual goal, it was again left unfulfilled. Our understanding of baihua would be incomplete without taking into account its evolving history and changing connotations. In its formative stage, the term baihua did not designate any kind of writing, and its earliest usages include “casual chats,” “leisure conversations without substance,” “empty talk,” and simply “baseless gossip,” “nonsense,” and “lies.” A cursory look at definitions culled from a few databases shows that from the Song (960–1280) onward, the term added to its accumulated usages that of “storytelling and singing,” with reference to various forms of oral articulation associated with 37 38

Qian Xuantong 1918. For more on this subject, see Kaske 2008, 454–455. See also DeFrancis 1972.

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stage performance as part of the rising urban entertainment of the time. Most important for this study is the fact that during the second half of the nineteenth century the word baihua came to be commonly used to refer to a “plain” or “unadorned (style of) speech,” and its usages extended from the realm of speech to that of writing, as exemplified in the titles of baihua newspapers usually associated with a specific city or province, such as Suzhou baihua bao, Hangzhou baihuo bao, and Zhejiang baihua bao. Even in these instances, however, baihua was often loosely defined and varied greatly in style and linguistic register, and it was almost always mixed with wenyan—classical Chinese—to some extent.39 Likewise, the term wenyan had never enjoyed wide currency until this period, when it began to be used for what was then generally understood as classical Chinese or classical writing.40 As one could always refer to a specific kind of writing by identifying the genre or the form with which it was normally associated, it marked a drastic change when all the prose forms and genres were subsumed into two broad categories of wenyan and baihua during the final decades of the nineteenth century.41 It would be erroneous to regard wenyan and baihua as the indigenous Chinese concepts for two opposing writing systems in a set dichotomy happily coinciding with that of Latin and European vernaculars. On the contrary, the dichotomy itself was the product of the modern vernacularization movement that originated in Europe and swept through East Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century.42 This modern view of Chinese literary history as shaped by the conflict of two different writing systems hardly squares with the reality: few texts employ what is called baihua to the absolute exclusion of wenyan, perhaps with the exception of a limited number of regional folksongs that found their way into 39

40

41

42

As shown earlier in this chapter, in the late Qing and early Republican eras, scholars used the term baihua to designate not merely the transregional written registers of Chinese but also the regional dialects that adopted the Chinese script as phonetic signs. When the word wenyan occasionally appeared in written documents prior to the late Qing, it could mean “literary pronunciation,” similar to what is otherwise called wendu (literary pronunciation). For more on the practice of wendu, see section III. In the Qing dynasty, Western missionaries sometimes resorted to such terms as wenli 文 理 to describe what would later be recognized as wenyan, but more often than not, they immediately modified the term with qian 淺 (easy) or shen 深 (hard). They saw nuances and differences where the scholars of the late Qing and early Republican eras did not. For more on this term, see Kaske 2008, 61–64. Harbsmeier (2001, 377) is correct in pointing out that “the term baihua is as modern as the term wenyan. The dichotomy between the two is not traditional.” As shown above, the term baihua has a long history, but its meanings kept evolving until it was radically redefined in the late Qing as “Chinese vernacular.” See also Owen 2010.

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collections such as Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs, in which baihua registers are mixed with diction from the Suzhou tongue. Even what are retrospectively called baihua stories of the Ming and Qing periods contain elements of wen­ yan and such genres as classical poetry and fu-style prose, not to mention plays, whose defining generic profiles include the alternation and combination of multiple genres and linguistic registers. Baihua “novels” are no less than encyclopedias of all the existing genres, literary forms, and written and colloquial styles at the time of writing, and few works can be said to be in baihua only. In other words, instead of baihua and wenyan as two incompatible and mutually exclusive writing systems caught in the competition of a zero-sum game, we find different concentrations of written baihua in these genres or forms. Despite their alleged adherence to the Italian Renaissance as the putative model for the Chinese vernacularization movement, Hu Shi and other likeminded intellectuals of the late Qing and early Republican eras misunderstood, deliberately or not, Dante and his views on Latin and its relationship with the Florentine vernacular. Dante never condemned Latin as a dead language, much less demonized it the way Hu Shi did classical Chinese. More important is that Latin played an indispensable role in molding the nascent Florentine vernacular writing and elevating its status, as recognized by Dante himself.43 In their militant campaign against classical Chinese, the May Fourth scholars not only misrepresented their assumed European model but also put forward a historical account of Chinese language and writing that in some fundamental ways distorts the linguistic and sociopolitical dynamics of early modern China. III

The Making of Plain Writing in Pre-Twentieth-Century China

Let us proceed from here to examine a few genres that have been retrospectively acknowledged as baihua, with special focus on a number of key issues essential to the formation and transformation of baihua writing in premodern and early modern China. To avoid the modern assumptions about baihua writing and its history, I use in its place “plain writing” (occasionally, “plain Chinese”), which is semantically neutral without presupposing a relationship with speech. Do the texts and genres related to oral articulation, performance, and speech represent the spoken Chinese of the time, whatever it was, or in any 43

For Dante’s indebtedness to Latinism, see Curtius 1990. Curtius (1990, 355) attributes the rise of the vernaculars in part to the re-Latinizing elites. See also Pollock 2006, 438; G. Zhou 2011, 11–12, 59, 149.

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way preserve the authenticity of the speaker’s voice? Do they bear witness to any kind of individual or collective interiority or subjectivity that “is brought into being through a sense of the presence of one’s own voice, to which one listens,” as espoused by the Japanese genbun’itchi movement?44 Was anyone in the premodern and early modern eras concerned with these issues that have loomed so conspicuously in our own consciousness and have influenced what may be called the modern sensibility with regard to language and writing? As early as the Tang dynasty (618–907), there had arisen a variety of interrelated oral performance genres, including popular storytelling (bianwen, transformation texts; hua 話, stories) and sutra explanations (jiangjing wen 講 經文); each of these terms denotes a particular form of oral articulation and performance that involved to some extent the colloquial language of the time. However, the elements and proportion of the colloquial in these texts should not be overestimated for two reasons. First, the language employed by these genres is highly formulaic and in most cases alternates between prose and verse, which usually overlap in content. Second, the stylization of the language can be attributed not only to orality but also to the textualization process, or deliberate literary composition. Instead of being direct transcriptions of actual performances, most of the Dunhuang texts that have survived to the present are at least twice or thrice removed from the original oral events, having gone through repeated redactions and adjustments. Some hand-copied manuscripts even bear the marks of revisions and corrections. In other words, they constitute the emerging written genres that gradually took shape and formed their own conventions through the complicated process of textualization. Rather than transparent or unmediated conveyances of the colloquial expressions of the day, these texts were subjected to the shaping forces of generic expectations, textual precedents, writing techniques, and the contingencies of the textualization process through which they came into being.45 They were hardly free of the influence of classical genres and styles. 44 45

Karatani 1993, 69. Victor Mair (1989, 119–120) makes a very convincing argument about the nature of these performance genres and their linguistic compositions: “Inasmuch as there were no developed stenographic, mechanical, or electronic means available to make a verbatim transcription of any single performance, it was inevitable that written versions would be composite in nature because all previous encounters with the story at hand—whether oral or written—would be operative, to greater or lesser degree, in the mind of the inscriber. Therefore, it may be concluded that not one of the Tun-huang manuscripts of popular narratives accurately represents any single performance.” He also writes: “The overall impression one gains from the available data is that the majority of transformation texts, evolutionally speaking, were already several generations removed from the

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Yulu 語錄, records of words, is another genre that emerged in the Tang. Originally associated with Zen Buddhist masters’ fragmentary speeches and oral comments on a wide range of subjects, it gained enormous popularity among the Neo-Confucian scholars of the Song dynasty (960–1280). For some modern scholars, this genre is by definition a colloquial one, that is, a vernacular genre that records the Neo-Confucian masters’ speeches in Mandarin Chinese. However, not all of the extant texts so entitled are written in colloquial style. For instance, Lu Jiuyuan’s 陸九淵 and Yang Shi’s 楊時 yulu texts are weighted toward classical or semiclassical registers, while other yulu texts, including Zhu Xi’s 朱熹, compiled by his disciples, present an idiosyncratic mixture of the idioms and syntax of the classical and plain writings. In his article “Getting the Words Right,” Robert Hymes offers a close-up observation of the ways in which the baihua and wenyan registers are combined or alternated in The Records of Master Zhu’s Words (Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類). Refuting the generally accepted view that yulu are simple or direct transcriptions, he cites Zhu Xi’s own preface to Cheng Yi’s 程頤 yulu to demonstrate that “Zhu is fully aware that a direct record of speech is a most elusive thing: the most unbiased records he has, he believes, are abbreviated.”46 Huang Shiyi 黃士毅 describes the compilation process of the Neo-Confucian yulu in his afterword to a late Song edition of Zhu Xi’s collected conversations: On those occasions when things were heard together at the same time, but differences appeared as [the disciples] withdrew and copied them down, it is because their reception of the meaning occurred with varying degrees of detail or approximation. Some were able to get everything out of the words, and the thread is complete from beginning to end. Some could not get everything out of the words, and the veins of discourse are broken off midway. Some got a few words out of it, roughly, and stopped. Here I retain only the one authority who is the most detailed, and note all

46

seminal oral performances that led to their birth. Conversely, the less sophisticated sutra lectures have all the earmarks of being in the first generation of descendants from their original oral parent(s). . . . It is also significant that the quotative formula (‘Please sing’ or ‘Now I shall begin singing’) appears only infrequently in the less sophisticated sutra lectures, whereas it occurs with fixed regularity in the more polished ones. Likewise, I have deep reluctance to admit the transformation-text verse-introductory formula as evidence of direct derivation from oral performance on the grounds that it is too obligatory. No other form of storytelling with pictures anywhere in the world that I am aware of employs this kind of formula with such fixed regularity. The very fact that it is required with such constancy smacks of literary convention rather then oral improvisation” (87–88). Hymes 2006, 38.

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the others below him. As for cases [in which transcribers] do not differ by even one word within a particular item, this can only be because at the moment of copying down they consulted each other, or else that [in other cases] it was not what they had heard, but they got it from transmission and copied it. In this case too I only retain the one authority, and simply add a note: “The same as so and so.”47 According to Hymes, Huang “thinks it virtually inconceivable that even one recorder could get things word-perfect”; he further elaborates the implications of Huang’s view by saying that word-perfect recording was never a goal for the Neo-Confucians’ disciples and the editors of the yulu. The Neo-Confucians themselves were not without certain reservations about this genre. Cheng Yi, for instance, remarks: “To transmit the Way in writing bears almost no relation to transmitting it to one another orally. When we meet together and speak, we rely on the situation to make things clear, so that our whole meaning is transmitted at once. With writing, the reality is left incompatible no matter how many the words.” Zhu Xi had to slightly modify Cheng Yi’s view to ensure that the yulu would remain helpful in conveying Zhu’s thoughts, but “the central point,” Hymes argues, “is that neither Cheng Yi nor Zhu Xi imagined a ‘record of words’ rendered in the vernacular to be a particularly sure, reliable, or primordial approach to a teacher’s thoughts. Rather the transmission process is unsure, difficult, inherently vulnerable to the shaping force of the recorder’s own ideas; and its product is only useful if read critically by a reader well informed of the recorders’ own personalities and biases.”48 Zhu Xi’s and Cheng Yi’s lack of confidence in the capacity of yulu to offer direct and unmediated access to their own views is very telling: it is not merely that word-by-word transcription of their speech was technically impossible or unavailable; what really matters is that even if any edition achieved word-perfect transcription, there was no guarantee that the masters’ ideas would be transmitted without compromises or corruptions, as these words would be filtered through the transcribers’ and editors’ agendas, biases, or interests, and the original context within which the words were articulated, exchanged, and transmitted is lost for good. In other words, these Neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty did not favor spoken words and colloquial expressions over written traditions on the ground of authenticity and immediacy. Their “speeches” recorded in yulu constantly shift among different linguistic registers and styles, and “there is simply no hint here of an opposition between the classical writ47 48

Hymes 2006, 40. Hymes 2006, 40–41, 30.

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ten language, on the one hand, and the spoken language rendered into writing, on the other,” much less an overall tendency toward favoring the spoken language over the written classical or disavowing and downgrading the classical.49 Drama is a vital genre that allows us a rare glimpse of the relationship between speech and writing, but the earliest extant dramatic texts, the thirty northern plays that appeared in woodblock print in the Yuan dynasty (1206– 1368), evince little interest in dialogues and monologues; instead, they present mainly arias in classical or semiclassical Chinese, with occasional colloquial markers and flavor. Given that only the male or the female lead assumes the singing role in each, what we have from these Yuan dynasty editions is mostly the lyrics of the leading role, with limited prose dialogue and stage directions. Even a glance at these texts leads to some unsurprising hypotheses about their production: except for the arias, the plays were not composed by individual authors; they were performed by professional troupes, and certain parts of each play were improvised or filled with ready-made comic skits and acrobatic routines pulled from the repertoire. Since each performance was different, it was impossible to give a play a fixed form in text.50 Not until the Ming dynasty, when the plays were performed at the imperial court and subjected to official censorship, were the fuller versions transcribed. However, even the court manuscripts that claim to include the complete dialogue hardly contain all the spoken passages, often marking the omitted sections with stage directions such as “Perform X here” and using shorthand markers like “and so on and so forth.”51 In examining the linguistic profiles of the plays in the Yuan and Ming periods, we must remember that the aria/dialogue divide does not constitute a neat line of demarcation between the classical and plain writings. Arias are peppered with phrases and words normally seen in written colloquial, while the dialogues and monologues demonstrate a wide range of variations in linguistic register, contingent to a large extent on the role types and their social status: a civil official often speaks in the formal style that suits his status, weighted heavily toward classical and semiclassical Chinese, and a low character tends to be colloquial, testing the limits of the written text in accommodating regional phonologies. In the early southern plays preserved in Yongle’s Grand Canons (Yongle dadian 永樂大典) of the early Ming, the spoken words of the low, comic characters (especially the clowns) that seem to derive from a 49 50 51

Hymes 2006, 38. Ning 1988. For more scholarship on the Yuan editions of the northern plays and the court manuscripts of these plays produced in the Ming dynasty, see West 2004; Idema 1996, 2005– 2006.

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certain branch of southeastern dialects are inadequately represented in the text.52 Even Zhang Xie, the Top Student (Zhang Xie zhuangyuan 張協狀元), which involves more elements of the Wenzhou dialects than other plays within the same volume, includes only a limited number of phonological and syntactic markers (a number of nouns, personal pronouns, auxiliary adverbs, and modal particles) that gesture toward colloquiality and regionality. In other words, its use of the Wenzhou dialect is neither fully mimetic nor systematic or consistent; it conveys no more than a general impression of the local phonology instead of actually transcribing or representing it. One way of illustrating the relationship between speech and writing in the early modern era is to compare the dramatic performance with the text. Peking opera is a case in point. A performance genre that hails from Anhui, with diverse sources in both language and music from the nearby regions, Peking opera secured the status of national opera in Beijing during the final years of the Qing, with the support of the royal patrons, and continued its sway into the Republican era (1911–1949) and beyond. Its national status is informed by the rich stratification of regional phonologies in performance: the leading male role adopts in speech and singing a highly stylized Hubei variety of Mandarin tempered by the phonological features of other regional speeches, the result of which cannot easily be understood by audiences in Beijing and many other regions, while the comic roles of low status are in Beijing dialect and occasionally in other regional dialects, with an accented and exaggerated tone and flavor. What we have on the stage of Peking opera is the epitome of the phonological and linguistic diversity of the empire: characters speak to each other in mutually incomprehensible languages, and their oral communication with the audience of any particular region is by no means guaranteed. In a way, Peking opera is a genre with prerequisites for the audience, as it takes years of exposure to performances for one to finally feel at home with its dialogues and arias. However, when Peking opera moves from stage to page, the distinction between regional phonologies is hardly noticeable except for a few regional syntactic and phonological markers; the stylized Hubei Mandarin is generally rendered in a formal style laced with classical and semiclassical expressions and formalities, while Beijing dialect is registered in a plain style gesturing toward colloquialism. As a whole, the dramatic texts capture a wide range of the spectrum of written Chinese, with many intersections between and mixtures of the classical and nonclassical registers.53 52 53

See Qian Nanyang 2009. Xikao daquan (1948) 1990.

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What can we derive from the above observations about the relationship between dramatic performance and text? First, despite all the divergences in lexicon, syntax, grammar, and morphology, the classical and plain writings constitute two different registers of the same linguistic continuum, and their differences are understood primarily in terms of taste (either ya 雅, “refined,” or su 俗, “popular and vulgar,” in forming cultural and social distinctions in the sense of the word as defined by Pierre Bourdieu) and style. Even this distinction is far from absolute, as the classical and plain writings are often mixed in the early modern era, and thus there are always differences in degree or proportion instead of in kind. Although May Fourth intellectuals saw plain and classical writings as in constant conflict and competition with each other, serious linguistic studies of this subject did not emerge until the 1930s. However, even the emergent scholarship falls far short of what is required to back up the May Fourth claims. In a pioneering study of wenyan and baihua, Zhang Shilu proposed only a modest scheme in delineating what he regarded as “a few diverging points” between them in grammar and diction. Bolder and more systematic efforts were made later by other linguists to demarcate wenyan and baihua as two different, if not opposing, writing systems, but the distinction between them, as demonstrated in their scholarship, is far from as striking as that between Latin and European vernaculars.54 Second, it would be misleading to draw a strict line of demarcation between classical and plain writings in terms of their correspondence or lack of correspondence with speech. Both are employed in the written texts of Peking opera, although neither accurately reflects the actual oral utterances onstage, which heavily involve regional tongues. Nevertheless, far from being a “dead language” as stigmatized by the May Fourth scholars, classical or semiclassical Chinese, just like plain Chinese, readily lends itself to different regional pronunciations. Rather than generalize about the relationship between writing and speech in the premodern and early modern eras, it would thus be more productive to examine how speech is rendered in writing and how writing is rendered in speech. As demonstrated in the case of Peking opera, the transportation from stage to page involves not exactly transcription but a sort of translation—what may be described as the practice of approximation—in quest of rough equivalents to the local lexicon and phonology by drawing on the existing repository of written Chinese, including both classical and plain writings. The same is true of the vocalization practice that turns the written texts into lively oral performance. 54

Zhang Shilu (1930) 1984, (1939) 1984.

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Third, closely related to the practice of approximation is the wenbai yidu 文 白異讀 method, prevalent in many regions and especially in the southeast, that renders certain morphemes in two (and, in some regions, more than two) different pronunciations: wendu 文讀, a literary pronunciation, and baidu 白 讀, a colloquial pronunciation. The former usually shows the influences of Mandarin or the local variety of Mandarin to varying extents, while the latter is deeply rooted in local tradition, whose origins may go back to ancient or medieval phonologies.55 In some regional languages and dialects, the literary and colloquial forms of pronunciation “are subject to semantic and morphological differentiation and therefore rarely interchangeable,” but in others, speakers may shift between the two, though not always consciously;56 the choice is dictated by habit, local convention, and circumstances. The literary and colloquial forms of pronunciation constitute an enabling condition for the practice of approximation that, as shown above, occurs in both the vocalization and the textualization process of the regional theaters and other oral and performance genres. IV

The Vernacular and Linguistic Politics of the Empire

If the late Qing and May Fourth intellectuals were entirely off the mark or even dead wrong in their conceptualization of vernacular Chinese, should we simply consider the subject irrelevant? To answer this, we must ask more questions. First, what are the issues at stake in the historical process of what is called vernacularization in Europe, South Asia, and elsewhere? Second, to what extent are these issues relevant to early modern China? In his studies of the divergences in the conceptualization of the vernacularization process in South Asia and Western Europe, Sheldon Pollock singles out “language ideology, including the sources and moral status of language diversity, the correlation between language and community, and, perhaps, most 55

56

The term wenbai yidu is potentially problematic in part because the word du 讀 does not necessarily refer to the practice of reading: in the case of baidu, it designates vocalization and oral articulation that may or may not have to do with the written texts. Likewise, on some formal occasions, well-educated gentlemen might resort to the wendu form of pronunciation in oral communication. It is noteworthy that modern linguists have not yet reached consensus regarding wendu, due to the regional diversity and historical changes it might have experienced. It seems premature to tie wendu exclusively to the influence of Mandarin; it may have multiple historical origins with evolving traditions, depending on the specific region in which it is practiced. Bordahl 1992, 40.

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important, the linkage between vernacular language and political power (which in the case of early-modern Europe is manifest in the emerging nationstate, while in the context of Southern Asia, in the rise of the vernacular polities).” He points out that the notion of “mother tongue” and the assumption that “languages make people,” which became a cornerstone of the early modern and modern European nation-state, were rare in South Asia from 1000 to 1500.57 And what was referred to as “the vernaculars” is first and foremost “languages of Place.” In other words, what is important is not biology but ecology: “In Southern Asia, there appears to have been some linguistic and cultural accommodation to the conditions of a region on the part of those who entered it; and if power typically expressed itself in the language of Place, power did not make that language instrumental to its own self-conception, let alone to the being of the citizen-subject.”58 Rather than make any sweeping generalizations about the linguistic conditions and makeup of early modern China, I want to emphasize that indeed, as in South Asia, the notion of a mother tongue seems to have been alien to the people of the early modern period. There was a sense of local affiliation, belonging, and pride that could be expressed through the use of common spoken languages and dialects, but nowhere in premodern and early modern China could be found exact analogies to the essentialist assumptions of early modern and modern European vernacularization: the linkages between tongue and blood and among language, religion, and ethnicity (what Max Weber called “ethnic fictions”), and “a concern with origins, purity of descent, and exclusion of mixture, as well as a sense of historical necessity and a growing conception of peoples as the subject of history—and therefore, perhaps inevitably, of peo-

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Closely related to the concept of “native language” or “mother tongue” is that of “people” in early modern European discourse. Citing Jacob Grimm’s statement that “a people is the essence of all those who speak the same language,” Habermas (2001, 6–8) comments: “Despite what appears at first glance to be a purely culturalistic determination, ‘a people’ is thus reformulated in substantialist terms. It is no coincidence that all the metaphors for language, in which the spirit of the people expresses itself, are borrowed from natural history and biology.” Such a conceptualization of the spirit of the people, “grounded in the history of its people, endows the Volksnation, the nation of the people, with a quality of naturalness or organicity” and thus gives rise to a series of dichotomies as elaborated by Wilhelm Scherer in 1874: “Nationality against cosmopolitanism; the force of nature against artificial cultivation; autonomous powers against centralization; self-governance against satisfaction from above; individual freedom against the omnipotence of the state; the dignity of history against the constructed ideal.” Pollock 2000, 612, 614.

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ples and languages in competition.”59 In fact, rarely does anyone describe his home region in biological terms. Du Yaquan 杜亞泉 (1873–1933) once argued that what is called place or local region in imperial China does not acquire human attributes and is thus categorically not “personified” 人格化.60 No speaker of the regional language or dialect describes his relationship with it in the way that Dante did with the Florentine language—“natural love of one’s own speech.” There is nothing “natural” or “inevitable” about this relationship: the regional language or dialect happened to be the one that one learned to speak from birth; it came to the speaker from without and by accident. It did not in any fundamental way shape the inner core of his very existence or his selfidentity, much less endow him with a sense of shared destiny with those of the same region who happened to speak in the same or a similar tongue. Closely associated with the modern concept of people or peoplehood is that of race or ethnicity, which in return constitutes one of the cornerstones for the modern construction of the nation-state. However, scholars have not reached a consensus as to its relevance to the Qing Empire of the early modern era, not to mention the relationship between ethnic identity and spoken tongue. As Pamela Crossley points out, no unequivocal statement that the hostilities between Chinese and Manchus were due to “hypostatic racial qualities” can be found in this period. Although “the eighteenth-century Qianlong ideology of genealogical and archetypical identity” ironically fed the rhetoric of radical Chinese nationalists of the late Qing in their political campaign to “expel the Manchus in order to facilitate a republic,” it is not until the Taiping War (1851– 1864) that a discourse of racial divisions became explicit and found its most concrete and compelling expression in the mechanism of population registration under Taiping rule.61 As the ruling class of a multiethnic and multilinguistic empire, the Manchu aristocrats granted Manchu the unique and privileged status of guoyu 國語 (state or national language) and used it as a written medium in official communications and on diplomatic occasions until the end of the Qing. However, as Mark Elliot observes, “by 1800 the court had lost the fight to preserve Manchu as a spoken tongue among the majority of bannermen.” Although the Manchu rulers once regarded their native tongue as a distinctive marker of and indispensable source of their self-identification, “[t]he loss of Manchu,” Elliot hastens to add, “did not automatically result in the erasure of

59 60 61

Pollock 2006, 474–475. Du 1916. Crossley 1999, 338, 342; 1990.

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ethnic difference.”62 In other words, their sense of ethnic identity remained largely intact and unchanged. Nor does the notion of a collective local identity that provides the basis for the national identity of a people as elaborated in modern and early modern European discourse seem to have ever resonated in premodern and early modern China. The need to ensure their shared, imagined “national” identity and destiny through the use of a common spoken language rarely occurred to the people of this period, including the emperors and the political, cultural elites. Within the historical context of the early modern empire of the Ming and Qing era, what is called a region can be perceived from geographical, administrative, economic, ecological, ethnic, social, cultural, and linguistic perspectives, but what is of great importance here is that none of these approaches seems to perfectly coincide with the others in defining any particular region and demarcating its boundaries.63 The administrative divisions and subdivisions of the empire were not always made in accordance with the ethnic and linguistic or phonological (much less the religious) distinctions of their occupants, especially in the regions whose social and linguistic characteristics were constantly shaped and reshaped by waves of immigration. In many of these areas, different languages interacted with and infiltrated one another, while individual languages became increasingly diversified over time, sometimes even evolving into a number of mutually unintelligible subdialects. The linguistic map of the empire thus varies significantly, depending on which historical stratum and linguistic features of the regional languages and dialects are emphasized. 62 63

Elliot 2001, 301, 304. This was a common problem faced by the emergent nations in early modern Europe. As Habermas (2001, 9–11) points out: “Even in the case of a Greater German solution to the problem of national unity, the cultural borders of the linguistic community could not be adequately reconciled with the political borders of a legal community. In each case, the borders of the nation-state would both exclude German-speaking minorities and include non-German-speaking ones.” This process of imagining and constructing the unity of the linguistic nation inevitably involves cohesion, repression, and the standardization of dialect forms: “There is nothing originary about the homogeneity of the linguistic community; it requires a leveling of different dialects in favor of a written language imposed by administrative means. But the fact that all those valuable national particularities could only be manufactured through the active repression of already developed particularities fits rather poorly with the antiquarian conception of the organic spirit of the people. No less bothersome is the fact that the very national languages that supposedly ground the individuality of different peoples are themselves the products of a long process of mutual interaction and influence, making any such clearly demarcated linguistic unities impossible.”

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In his study of urban development in late imperial China, G. William Skinner delineated nine physiographic regions of the empire and suggested that “we can think of the physiographic subregions and macro-regions as the ‘natural’ vessels whose potential for shaping and integrating human interaction was realized only as their space was ‘filled up’ by Chinese settlement.” Although he immediately modifies the metaphor “natural vessels” by cautioning that it should not be understood to “imply historical inevitability or geographic determinism,” he sees the physiographic subregions and macroregions as the infrastructures that must be taken as given for any historical developments and human interactions within these regions.64 He is absolutely correct in emphasizing the importance of geoeconomic conditions for shaping and integrating human interaction in any particular region of the empire, but this should in no way suggest that administrative divisions and subdivisions were only part of an artificial system imposed from without, the result of mere administrative intervention in what would otherwise be an entirely “natural” process of geosocial and ecologic-economic interactions among the people who happened to enter and occupy these regions. This dichotomy of the artificial versus the natural is potentially misleading in explicating the complex historical development of any particular region or “place” within the empire, which involves the constant interactions of multiple players who do not fit either category. It has been accepted as a commonplace in the study of Chinese history that the regional gentry gained much more power over their affairs from the Southern Song onward, as they tended to marry locally and established their moral and social leadership through community-building activities in their home regions, while the central authorities remained limited in their ability to reach down to society at the county level and below.65 However, the rise of regional gentry in managing local affairs was not a sociopolitical watershed remotely resembling what Pollock describes as the rise of “vernacular polity” in South Asia during the period 1000–1500. Nor did their practice of power lead them to employ and advocate their own regional language or dialect in writing. Although the nature and scale of this “regionalist turn” in Chinese history may lend itself to different interpretations, it is evident that the newly empowered regional gentry continued to use the existing writing system and operate within the existing frame of the empire in political practice, despite frequent tensions with the central authorities in defending their local interests. Following the precedents established in the Ming, the Qing authorities continued to depersonalize the regime’s relationship with the local by 64 65

Skinner 1977, 11. Hymes 1986.

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implementing the rule of avoidance whereby, to prevent conflicts of interest, civil officials should not serve as administrators in their home regions (more specifically, within a five-hundred-square-li area of their birthplace). Appointed by the emperor, these officials represented the imperial court in constant negotiations with the regional gentry. It was thus crucial for the imperial authorities to ensure that the local administrators came from elsewhere and were therefore unlikely to identify with the regional gentry through local affiliations and blood ties, much less to gain the advantage of a means of private oral communication with them through a shared regional language or dialect. Regional languages and dialects were therefore left with a double disadvantage: no formal role in administration and minimal entrance into writing. In a culture that gave so much prestige to Sino-script, this lack of access to writing appears to indicate their poor cultural and sociopolitical standing.66 More importantly, when it comes to the relationship between language and power, neither the European model of the nation-state nor the South Asian model of vernacular polity proves relevant to early modern China. In the realm of writing, political elites had at their disposal both classical and plain Chinese, with the choice being largely predicated on generic convention, precedents, and the specific contexts within which the writing was employed. Emperors who occasionally made use of plain writing in imperial edicts and other less formal forms or genres seem to have enjoyed the privilege of shifting registers freely, regardless of the status of readers. “Others are constrained in language both by their social position as such and by their relation to those they address; the person of real authority is not.”67 This shows that prestige and power are not qualities entirely inherent in the writing register itself. Plain writing is not intrinsically inferior to classical writing, nor does it always reflect the status of those who use it and those to whom it is addressed. Nor should it surprise us that plain Chinese can also be found in the written records of testimony by illiterate witnesses at court hearings, including the confessions of suspects and convicted criminals, which “are probably as close as we will ever get to the ‘voice’ of the illiterate in late imperial China. [However,] they are not verbatim transcriptions of witnesses’ utterances; rather, they are summaries of testimony crafted from witnesses’ answers to questions posed during interrogation.”68 Robert Hegel observes that these depositions 66

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This is, however, only part of the story. As shown earlier, the speakers of some southern languages and dialects often claim high prestige for their regional tongues, whose origins they believe can be traced to the medieval era. Hymes 2006, 51. Sommer 2000, 26–27.

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not only were reformulated but also “were all rewritten from the deponents’ original dialect into standard Chinese (guanhua, or Mandarin), the language of administration throughout the realm.” Thus, although the defendants and witnesses were required to agree with their “original stories” presumably recorded in these documents, the yamen clerks in charge of the cases were compelled to prepare the written texts in accordance with the categories of the penal code, instead of conveying the defendants’ or witnesses’ distinctive voices.69 Just like classical Chinese, plain Chinese is used for a variety of administrative purposes, but in most cases, its colloquial qualities or effects do not reflect actual utterances, and the authenticity and credibility of the defendants’ confessions or eyewitness accounts lie in the “stories” conveyed by the documents, instead of the singularity and immediacy of the speakers’ voices. The regional dialects are filtered by the written tradition and “translated” into Mandarin and then encoded in plain writing or else directly “translated” into plain writing according to the requirements of the legal procedures. The above observations seem to point to a conclusion about the triumph of writing over speaking and the dominance of the center over the local in government administration and the overall culture of the early modern era. They may also reinforce the ingrained assumptions that the empire operated on the basis of written media instead of oral communication, and that when it came to oral communication, Mandarin always ruled over the regional languages and dialects. The linguistic picture of the Ming and Qing periods is, however, much more complicated and can be elucidated only through case studies. V

Cosmopolitan and Regional at Once: Written Texts and Vocalization Practice

To ensure effective oral communication among the different levels of government administration, the imperial court endorsed Mandarin as a legitimate official language to overcome the barriers posed by the mutually unintelligible regional languages and dialects. The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty went much further than their Ming predecessors in promoting Mandarin, partly in response to the mounting challenge of overseeing the growing empire, which underwent an unprecedented expansion in both territory and population throughout the eighteenth century. To bring under administrative supervision the vast southwestern region, which was inhabited by a mixture of Miao, Li, Yi, Yao, Han, and other ethnic groups, they replaced the local chieftains with 69

Hegel and Carlitz 2007, 18.

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administrators appointed by the central authorities while taking the necessary measures to ensure that both the Han and the non-Han residents of the area would be educated in Mandarin in government schools. Emperor Yongzheng (1723–1736) was exceptionally vigorous in requiring the literati of the southern provinces (especially Fujian and Guangdong) to go through the years of training in Mandarin he believed necessary to qualify them for official posts.70 At least in a few cases, he was greatly displeased with the candidates for the civil service examinations from Fujian and other peripheral regions, who were incapable of speaking intelligible Mandarin. In 1728, he issued an imperial edict urging the governors and the school tutors of Fujian and Guangdong to integrate Mandarin education into the curriculum at both district and county levels. He intended to extend the Mandarin campaign to other areas if he succeeded in Fujian and Guangdong. In another edict issued later the same year, he went even further by setting eight years as the time needed for all the students to master Mandarin, and those who failed to meet the standard by the end of the eighth year should not be recommended for the civil service examinations.71 However, six years later, Yongzheng had to extend the deadline to the end of the twelfth year. Twelve Mandarin teachers, selected from the degree holders in Jiangxi and Zhejiang, were dispatched to Fujian, but they spoke Mandarin with strong Gan and Wu accents and were thus not equal to the task; in addition, their lack of knowledge of Fujian dialects left them unable to communicate with their students in the first place. After Yongzheng’s death, Emperor Qianlong gradually backed away from his father’s policy. In 1774, he openly admitted its failures, dismissing the mandatory Mandarin tests for the examination candidates as irrelevant and misleading: the civil service examinations were designed to test the candidates’ knowledge of the subjects included in the official curriculum, not their Mandarin skills, and it would go against the established practice to summon them for a Mandarin test as the prerequisite for the civil service examinations.72 By 1858, according to an observer, the Mandarin curriculum put in place in Fujian by Yongzheng had been largely abolished, as it had yielded no satisfactory results except in Shaowu District, but even there, it had given way to the curriculum of poetry and essay composition required

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I am especially indebted to Hirata 2006. Daqing lichao shilu (Daqing Shizong Xianhuangdi shilu) 大清歷朝實錄 • 大清世宗憲皇 帝實錄 (Veritable records of the Qing, the Yongzheng reign), juan 72, 4–5. Xuezheng quanshu 1812, juan 65, 11–12.

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for the civil service examinations.73 Obviously, Emperor Yongzheng underestimated the difficulties and challenges in convincing the elites of these regions of the importance of Mandarin for office-holding; he might also have been puzzled and irritated by their apparent unwillingness and unpreparedness for learning the language, given that he and his fellow Manchu aristocrats had long been well versed in Mandarin and had even chosen it over their own language for administrative purposes. How do we account for his failure to institutionalize Mandarin teaching in these regions, and what does it tell us about the language politics of the Qing Empire? A comprehensive answer to these questions requires further research, but it suffices for now to focus on the ways the imperial administration accommodated the language barriers with respect to oral communication and the indispensable role the regional phonologies played in education. To explain why Yongzheng failed in his Mandarin campaign, one has to ask why he was, arguably, the only Manchu ruler so obsessed with this issue. None of his predecessors and successors seems to have shared his anxiety and sense of urgency about the inadequate training the examination candidates and civil officials received in speaking Mandarin. Barring his petulance, obstinacy, and other personal traits, he seems to have set high standards for the administration in terms of efficiency, while in reality the existing administrative structure had already developed its own way of coping with some of the barriers to oral communication. Yongzheng was certainly right in noticing that the Fujian and Guangdong candidates for the palace examinations, presumably the most qualified men of letters in the kingdom, had poor Mandarin-speaking skills, but that was true of many civil officials, especially those from the southeastern and southwestern regions of the empire, whose own knowledge of Mandarin was uneven at best. This may lead us to wonder how they fulfilled their official duties, but it is important to keep in mind that up until then, the local administration of the Qing Empire had been heavily dependent on professionally trained legal advisers (muyou 幕友) and legal clerks, who were hired and paid by the local magistrates themselves. They followed a different career path: instead of taking the civil service examinations, they usually went through professional training in legal and tax codes at a young age, while the local magistrates, who had successfully passed different levels of the civil service examinations, received no systematic education on these subjects. Whether the magistrates were well trained in Mandarin or not, the legal advisers and clerks surely took it as part 73

Shi 1985, juan 3, 41–42, “Zhengyin shuyuan” 正音書院 (Academy of Correct Pronunciation). See also Wang Chen et al. (1898) 1967, 208.

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of their duties to have a command of Mandarin, and their career success depended on their oral and written communication skills to a large extent. Sometimes they even went the extra mile and familiarized themselves with the regional tongues of the area over which the magistrates presided. Thus, surrounding the local magistrates, there emerged a group of trained experts on legal matters, tax codes, and financial policies who were especially articulate in both writing and speech. Some of them took on this career after repeated failures in the civil service examinations, but others inherited the position of legal adviser or clerk from their fathers and passed it on to their own sons. In the Qing dynasty, Shaoxing, in Zhejiang Province, was known for, among other things, producing generations of legal advisers and clerks, who formed a large network across the kingdom and advanced their careers while getting things done at the different levels of the bureaucracy.74 Yongzheng’s failure to implement successful Mandarin programs in the southern part of the kingdom can also be explained by reference to the deeply ingrained regional culture and the role the local phonologies assumed in education and book learning. As a Manchu ruler who began learning Mandarin in childhood, Yongzheng showed no sympathetic understanding of the pride the southerners took in the noble medieval origins of their regional tongues, which continued to serve as the phonological basis for the rhyme scheme of poetry composition. As normally was the case in early modern China, an educated man of the southeast nearly always used his own local phonology or its modified wendu forms in vocalizing the written texts and, in this way, related himself to the texts written long ago by authors of other places and times. In other words, this vocalization practice became an essential way for him to localize or domesticate the texts he read, thereby bridging his distance from the authors in both space and time. In his 1728 edicts, Yongzheng found this vocalizing practice and language pedagogy especially troubling, and he emphasized that students would not be appropriately prepared to learn Mandarin unless they ceased to apply their regional phonologies in declaiming written texts: Although the regional tongues are different in all the places, the pronunciation of each character is the same across the kingdom. Now that 74

Emperor Yongzheng himself was fully aware of the indispensable role the private advisers, clerks, and local yamen runners played in the administrative process, but it comes as no surprise that he would grow concerned when his local administrators appeared to be increasingly dependent upon them for routine bureaucratic functioning. He saw the lack of smooth oral communication as a contributing factor to this unacceptable situation.

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people read books using their regional phonologies to begin with, once they get used to the regional pronunciation, they may find it difficult to change their tongues when learning Mandarin later. So I order that the governors and provincial education commissioners of the regions where people apply their regional tongues in book reading find some influential elite families and urge them to invite the Mandarin teachers from the nearby area to teach their own youngsters, so that hopefully these students can pass their knowledge of Mandarin to others, and thus, all school students will command Mandarin within eight years.75 Based as it was primarily on Mandarin, Yongzheng’s view of language lost sight of the complex history of regional phonologies that continued to shape the ways people spoke and read.76 It would have been difficult for the local residents to eliminate this reading and vocalizing practice, and such top-down government intervention often backfires, provoking complaints and resistance. In endorsing Mandarin phonology, Yongzheng paid no heed to the fact that the pronunciation of a given character or morpheme is not in any way dictated by the written script.77 Instead, it is subject to different executions depending on the readers’ regional tongues and the tradition of wendu, a vocalizing practice that accommodates some Mandarin influences but retains distinctive local pronunciations and, in many cases, presents compromises between the Mandarin and regional phonologies.78 A reader of the classical texts was able 75 76

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Xuezheng quanshu 1812, juan 65, 1. By “regional pronunciation,” Yongzheng was very likely referring to the literary pronunciation of the Minnan language. The practice of using the regional phonology in reading aloud written texts is not limited to such southern provinces as Fujian and Guangdong. Zhao Yuanren (1997, 3–37), who hails from Changzhou, Jiangsu, recalled his childhood experience of declaiming books in his local tongue. It is a mistake to ignore the sound component of Chinese characters, as xing-sheng 形聲 (pictophonetic) was one of the six methods for creating characters in ancient China. However, the sheng 聲 component does not dictate the pronunciation of a character in the way most phonetic scripts do, and the actual pronunciation has evolved across time and space (see Qian Xuantong [1925] 1999, 371). Lydia Liu (2004, 205–206) has coined the term “attributed phonetic value (APV)” to emphasize “the fluidity of the abstract phonetic value assigned to the written character as opposed to its actual pronunciation in speech, whether Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, or otherwise.” It should be noted that we may risk overstating the case if we see wendu, the literary form of pronunciation, as the exact phonological equivalent to Mandarin or the local variety of Mandarin, for after all, it is entangled, to varying extents, with the regional phonology. Moreover, the importance of wendu should not be overemphasized, as the morphemes

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to render them orally in ways that would be intelligible to himself and his fellow students or men of letters from the same region. Thus, there was a largely uniform writing system (including both classical and plain Chinese and a variety of genre-specific styles or mixed forms of writing) comprehensible to educated readers of different regional backgrounds, but its oral renditions were more or less local, tied closely to a specific place and its own tradition of reading practice. One may argue that such a linguistic system is both cosmopolitan and regional at once: uniform or unified in writing and diverse in pronunciation or oral rendition.79 This can be explained to some extent linguistically, but it was also a matter of choice: in traditional China, education was almost always conducted locally, and literary practices were deeply entrenched in the regional tradition. Perhaps no less important, vocalization was an essential component of the training that students received in acquiring and honing their reading and writing skills. Although the government occasionally emphasized the need for civil officials to learn Mandarin, no efforts ever succeeded in institutionalizing the teaching of Mandarin as the officially sanctioned language in the south while suppressing the local tongues. The unity of the Qing Empire, built in part on the shared Sino-script and writing system, was not achieved at the expense of regional diversity in speech and vocalization practice. The argument I am making here is not only a linguistic but also a sociopolitical and cultural one. I do not suggest that the separation of writing and speech is a perfect solution to the potential conflicts between the center and the local or peripheral. Nor do I presuppose that regionalized vocalization practice alone is sufficient

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that are subject to literary and colloquial alternation constitute only a small fraction of the overall vocabulary in the vocalization practice of a given region. And frequently, both the literary and the colloquial pronunciations of the same morpheme are appropriate for the same circumstances and linguistic contexts. In many cases, a regional language or dialect contains more than two phonological substrata, bearing influences from other regional languages and dialects or the residues of medieval phonologies, and thus the dichotomy between literary and colloquial pronunciation alone is far from adequate to explain the phonology and the vocalizing practice of a particular region. Carstairs Douglas (1873, vii) observed Chinese linguistic practice in the second half of the nineteenth century: “The so-called ‘written language’ of China is indeed uniform throughout the whole country; but it is rather a notation than a language; for this universal written language is pronounced differently when read aloud in the different parts of China, so that while as written it is one, as soon as it is pronounced it splits into several languages.” His view of written Chinese as no more than notation is obviously colored by the bias of a speaker of a language written in alphabetic script, but the distinction between writing and speech that he observed in China is noteworthy: writing is uniform and universal, but its oral renditions are diverse, as they are largely dictated by the regional tongues.

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to satisfy the diverse needs of people of different regions, religious traditions, social classes, and ethnicities. However, it is undeniable that the distinction between writing and speech functioned for a long time as an indispensable mechanism to help reconcile cosmopolitan and provincial demands, rendering the issue of vernacular writing by and large moot: by leaving regional tongues relatively free from the constraints and standardization tendencies of the writing and print technologies, it contributed to linguistic diversity and plurality in the realm of sound and speech. If the moral status of language diversity is indeed our main concern here, it is perhaps immediately evident to us that this diversity is subject to erosion caused by the type of wholesale vernacularization movement that gave rise to the nation-state in early modern Europe. Compared with the hegemonic dominance of Chinese script in the Ming and Qing eras, what is called vernacularization has long been deemed to be a liberalizing force, enabling the peoples of different regions and ethnicities to reinforce their mother tongues in ways previously unimaginable. However, the actual process of transforming one particular regional or native tongue into a national language and national written medium is inevitably accompanied by coercion, suppression, and exclusion, not to mention the homogenization and standardization that come with writing and print. To put it another way, in combating the superimposed and uniform writing system of the old empires, it brings about diversity in writing but not necessarily in speech.80 In some cases, the diversity in writing is achieved at the expense of the diversity in speech. By contrast, the characteristic demarcation of writing and speech as two separate realms in early modern China appears to be more congenial to the survival of regional tongues. In the premodern era, the hegemony of written Chinese within the Sino- sphere of Korea, Japan, and Vietnam was achieved to a large extent in similar ways: since the Confucian and Buddhist texts constituted the common ground for education, religion, and intellectual life, the majority of the educated elites in these societies were trained to read and write classical Chinese without being capable of speaking in Mandarin or communicating with their Chinese counterparts in any shared languages. For them, classical Chinese was, in this sense, a written language they could only vocalize through mechanical memorization or with the aid of their indigenous languages.81 Largely divorced from 80

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Despite the dominant status of the Chinese writing system in the premodern and early modern eras, multiple scripts and writing systems, including Manchu, Mongol, and Uighur, were in use during the empires of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing. We should not overlook the role bilingualism played in the linguistic practice of certain regions in Japan, Korea, and especially Vietnam during the long premodern era, as some

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speech, classical Chinese traveled far, lending itself to various oral renditions. From very early on, glossing techniques were invented in both Korea and Japan to facilitate the oral reading of the classical texts in accordance with native phonologies. Besides indicating the native pronunciation of the Chinese words, some glossing systems also mark syntactic inversion with added grammatical signs to ensure that the texts would be read aloud in the word order of the native languages, and hence a sort of “vernacular translation” occurs in the realm of vocalization and reading while leaving the original Chinese texts largely intact.82 The dominance of the metropolitan Chinese writing within the Sino-sphere was modified with the invention of vernacular scripts to transcribe the native tongues: the Japanese kana syllabary by the ninth century, the Vietnamese Nôm characters in the tenth century, and the Korean han’gŭl alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century. In all these cases, however, the invention of the vernacular scripts facilitated the production of a variety of hybrid writings, instead of leading irreversibly toward independent vernacular writings, let alone superseding written Chinese.83 To take Nôm writing as an example, the bilingual

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residents of these regions and a limited number of Buddhist clergy were able to speak Chinese or read aloud the Chinese texts in either an actual or an idealized Chinese phonology. However, just as important is the fact that some of them would chant or read aloud the Chinese texts in ways they associated with Chinese pronunciation without being able to speak Chinese. And in these cases, what was deemed the Chinese vocalization was reconstructed from Chinese rhyme books, inherited from text recitation practices, and derived from a regional variety of koine or Mandarin in combination with the regional or native vocalizing practices. Thus arose the Japanese methods of “sound-reading” (on’yomi 音讀み) and “reading by voice” (ondoku 音讀), both of which “approximate the sounds of the Chinese words with which they are originally associated” (Lurie 2011, 183), but the former was largely limited to loanwords, while the latter was associated with specific genres or forms (such as the Buddhist sutras) and thus employed in limited settings. See Lurie 2011, 177–185. For more on the Sino-Vietic contact, see Phan 2013, 71–302. It is also noteworthy that Sino-script is not infrequently used to create hybrid forms of writing in these areas, as demonstrated in the mixture of Japanese and Chinese word order and usage in what is called hentai kanbun 變體漢文, “variant form Chinese writing” or, more precisely, “mixed logographic writing” (Lurie 2011). This mixed logographic writing, as shown in the practice of kundoku, generates a new linguistic register “through an intense involvement with Chinese-style logographic writing—a kind of creole— rather than a written record (or reflection) of pre-existing oral speech” (Lurie 2011, 181– 182). See Whitman 2011; Kin 2010. As David Lurie (2011, 346) observes: “So it was not only in Japan, but also in Korea, Vietnam, and other peripheral cultures that Chinese-style texts—that is, character-texts

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prefaces to a seventeenth-century Sino-Vietnamese dictionary, Zhinan yuyin jieyi 指南玉音解義, sought to, as John Phan states, reimagine “Nôm not as a vulgar copy of sinographic writing nor as a rising competitor, but as an extension of the basic intellectual technology of Han writing, governed by the same principles and capable of the civilizing achievements.” Thus, the author of the preface “justifies the culture of vernacular writing without challenging the fantasy that literary Sinitic was the rightful and natural literary form of expression for Vietnamese elites.”84 This remained largely unchanged until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the genbun’itchi movement initiated the move to replace Chinese characters with vernacular Japanese scripts under the direct influence of European-style modernity and nation-state development. Despite its early advance on this front, Japan proved less radical than Korea and Vietnam in its vernacularization aspirations. Korea went further by establishing the Korean script in place of the Chinese characters. Vietnam adopted the modern Vietnamese alphabet, which was based on the Latin script originally codified by the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660), and made it the official language under French colonial rule in 1910. Against this general trend, the case of modern China stands out as an anomaly. Taking part in the vernacularization movement that was sweeping through East Asia, modern Chinese intellectuals ended up accomplishing something else, whose full range of ramifications lies well beyond immediate recognition: a selective reappropriation and reinterpretation of the linguistic legacy of the empire in an all-out endeavor to remake China as a modern nation. Coda To conclude, let us refer to Benedict Anderson’s thesis about empire and language: the ancient empires in both East and West “were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script.”85 He writes: “Take only the example of Islam: if Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other’s languages, incapable of communicating orally, they

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arranged according to literary Chinese usage—were supplemented rather than supplanted, continuing long after the emergence of localized systems of writing.” Phan 2013, 16–17. As made evident in the next example Anderson gives, he means to emphasize the importance of the sacred written script, instead of the sacred language per se, in holding together an empire. Here as elsewhere, he tends to confound writing with language.

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nonetheless understood each other’s ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic. In this sense, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds.” He further explains, “such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations. One crucial difference was the older communities’ confidence in the unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about admission to membership.” In other words, the function of the sacred silent languages in holding together the great global communities depended on “the non-arbitrariness of the sign”; that is, “the ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it.” These “truth languages,” he claims, were imbued with “the impulse towards conversion” by admitting their users into the sacred community of civilization.86 The question that follows from this is: What constituted the linguistic foundation for the burgeoning nation-state in place of the declining global communities of the empire sustained by the sacred written language in early modern Europe? Anderson points out, “The birth of administrative vernaculars predated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century,” but it was “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language” that “created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation.”87 Thus, the fortune of vernaculars became irreversibly tied to the erosion of the empire and the rise of the nation-state. Extending what they understood to be the European model to explicate the linguistic scene of premodern and early modern China, modern Chinese intellectuals identified plain Chinese as the equivalent of the European national vernaculars, thereby stipulating the replacement of classical Chinese by plain Chinese as a prerequisite for the formation of a modern Chinese nation. As shown above, however, plain Chinese had long been an integral component of the written language of the empire, helping to fulfill administrative functions while granting educated men of all regional and ethnic origins access to the imagined multiethnic community of “civilization.” Sharing the same sacred script with classical Chinese, it was constructed by a logic alien to that of the national vernacular; and again like classical Chinese, it was by no means fixed in its relationship with speech, much less bound to transcribe its writer’s “mother tongue.”

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Anderson 1991, 13, 14–15. Anderson 1991, 41, 46.

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In the context of early modern China, the structural separation of writing and speech fulfilled two apparently opposite functions: it helped to lock plain Chinese into the category of the sacred written signs instead of speech sounds, thereby setting it further apart from European national vernaculars, and it also in its own way offered a major venue for expressing and satisfying what might be described as the vernacular impulse. It certainly became less urgent to transcribe one’s native tongue in Sino-script when one could apply the regionalized vocalization method in the oral rendition of written texts composed in both classical and plain Chinese. The language politics of the early modern era was confronted by increasing challenges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Western concepts of language, writing, and nation-state became deeply entrenched in the living reality of modern China. To sort out the logic beneath all the changes brought about by linguistic experiments in this brave new age would require patience and an unusual degree of tolerance for contradictions and misguided ideas and endeavors. In retrospect, Hu Shi seems to have been happy that despite all the debates on the need to replace Sino-script with Roman alphabets, a position he himself once held, the effort to carry it out eventually fell through. As he implicitly acknowledged in his later years, the unity of China as a nation-state depended on Chinese square-block character script, which would ensure the extension of the empire—“the sacred community of the written script”—into the modern era.88 As a result, China did not experience the radical rupture with its own written past that modern Korea and Vietnam did when the replacement of the Sino-script by the alphabet scripts for Korean and Vietnamese speech left native speakers with no assured access to the written traditions of their own past. However, Hu Shi and his fellow intellectuals did leave some permanent marks of radical change on the linguistic landscape of modern China: instead of pursuing the goal of vernacularization as they openly stated, they ended up abolishing one cosmopolitan writing style (classical and semiclassical Chinese) and replacing it with another existing cosmopolitan writing style (plain Chinese), which they misidentified, deliberately or not, as vernacular Chinese. 88

On June 21, 1936, Hu Shi ([1936] 2003, 292–293) replied to Zhou Zuoren in a letter to lend his support to the latter’s view that China needed to “enhance its national consciousness” during the Japanese invasion by adopting Sino-script in writing baihua. He dismissed phonetic script as a feasible alternative for the spoken languages; given the enormous size of China, if each region developed its own writing, then the people of different regions could hardly communicate through writing. Thus, he asserted, writing the spoken national languages in Sino-script was the only way to help bind together China as a nation.

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This misidentification is of tremendous significance, as it allowed them to embrace and appropriate what they understood to be the modern European views on vernaculars and vernacularization as ways of explaining and justifying their own agenda. The modern Chinese state followed suit and brought new changes to the movement. With the aid of the government apparatus and audio-, video-, and other modern technologies, it subjected plain Chinese to radical transformations through the “standardization” and “purification” process while advocating it as the officially sanctioned “national language” and, indeed, as “the mother tongue of the Chinese people,” in the service of modern nation-state building. What is called the Chinese vernacularization movement availed itself of plain writing, part of the linguistic legacy of the empire, while resorting to the modern Western discourse on vernaculars, phonocentrism, modernity, and the nation-state, thereby setting the emergent Chinese “nation-state” on its unique and intriguing route for achieving the standardization of pronunciation and the unity of script and sound, writing and speech. In the end, the vernacularization movement did not occur exactly as the May Fourth intellectuals claimed, and this misguided and misrepresented linguistic revolution offers us a fitting perspective on the unique path China took toward becoming a modern state: instead of breaking up into multiple nationstates, it was transformed into a “nation” within the inherited frame of the early modern empire. Such a transformation ensured that part of the linguistic legacy of the empire survived into the modern era despite all the ruptures from the past, thus shielding China from the conflicts of the vernacularization process that contributed to the rise of modern nation-states in Europe. Yet ruptures did occur, and the linguistic practices and discourses of twentieth-century China testify to the extent of the historical changes to which the heritage of the empire was subjected. References Anderson, Benedict 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. London: Verso. Bordahl, Vibeke 1992. “Wen bai yi du: Literary and Colloquial Forms in Yangzhou Storytelling,” CHINOPERL Papers 16: 29–55. Bush, Christopher 2010. Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, and Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1922) 1995. “Guoyu de yingyong” 國語的應用 [The functions of the national language], in Cai Yuanpei wenji 蔡元培文集 [The collected works of Cai Yuanpei]. Taibei: Jinxiu chuban shiye youxian gongsi, 506–508.

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Index Abe Tadaaki (1602–1675)  150–151n13 academies: calligraphy schools, (tenarai juku)  240 of Confucian learning  157 Donglin Academy  209 and the gentry teaching profession  24, 204, 206, 207 literary schools  200–201, 257 vocabulary of Daoism and Buddhism avoided in  201 and medical training  157, 201, 203 private academies  203, 206, 209–210, 212–214 private schools (shijuku)  233 Ahn Kye-hyŏn  38n35 Algitai  180n31 Allon, Mark  30n2 alphabetization: of Chinese advocated by Hu Shi  295 of Chinese by European Jesuits  263– 264 and the Chinese pinyin system  188, 265 and de-Sinification  12, 17, 22, 220, 236 and information management  191–192 of Korean  59–61, 60–61n9, 63, 71–74, 71n47, 72n50, 74n54, 76n64, 76, 78, 87–89 lexicographic ordering of the Latin alphabet  172–173 of Tibetan script  34, 72 of Vietnamese by European Jesuits  293 See also kana syllabaries; katakana (alphabetic script); Manchu script; phonetic scripts; script invention; scripts; semantosyllabicity Alston, Dane  66n29 An Pyŏnghŭi  76n64, 79n76 Analects (Lun yu) of Confucius. See under Confucian classics Anderson, Benedict  17, 293–294, 293n85

Arabic: and manuals written in Braj  12 and the separation of writing and speech  256n6, 294, 294 viewed as a Semitic vernacular  258– 259 Ashikawa Keishū  153, 155 Attewell, Guy N.A., 161n52 Baba Tatsui, An Elementary Grammar of the Japanese Language  228n29 baihua (lit., “plain speech”): as a term  59n3 elite use of  66, 284 Mandarin (guanhua) associated with  260, 267–268 misidentified as Vernacular Chinese by May Fourth intellectuals  19, 20, 270, 295–296 mixed with diction from Suzhou in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs  272 mixed with wenyan (classical Chinese)  271–272, 271n39 newspapers in Suzhou written in  271 Sino-script used for writing of advocated  266–267, 295–296, 295n88 See also spoken language baihua xiashuo (vernacular novels)  254– 255 Water Margin  141, 261 See also vernacular fiction Bai Xinliang  210n19 Ban Kōkei (1733–1806)  141–143 Báo cực truyện  108 Bawden, Charles R., 47n80 Berezkin, Rostislav  43n62 Bianchi, Alessandro  149n8 bianwen (transformation texts)  261–262, 263, 265, 273, 273–274n45 See also oral performance; vernacular fiction Bitō Masahide  150n12

* Page numbers in italics indicate tables. Page numbers in bold indicate main entries.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/9789004279278_012

304 Blader, Susan  21n17 Blair, Ann M., 154 Bordahl, Vibeke  279n56 Borgen, Robert  42n56 Boulanger, Jean-Claude  172n11 Bourdieu, Pierre  210n21, 278 Bowring, Richard  31n8 Braarvig, Jens  30n2 Brisset, Claire-Akiko  44n64 Brokaw, Cynthia  4n7, 14–15 Brose, Michael  67n34 Buddhism: Chinese script sacralized as the language of  31, 48 and fushidan sekkyō (rhythmical, gestural sermon)  137–138 and Lê vernacular history  97, 104–105, 109–110 medical learning associated with monastic practice in Japan  14, 151 Buddhist temples: Hoa Yên Temple  100 library of Chinese Buddhist literature in Khocho  46 literary Chinese taught to children at schools of  133 printing of Buddhist texts in Vietnam  37 Tangut texts hidden in  6 vernacular writing embraced by women educated in Lê Buddhist temples  124 See also setsuwa (anecdotal literature) Buddhist texts: Buddhist canons and Japan  41–42, 44 Jurchen edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon  44–45 Kaibao edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon  31–32, 34, 35, 36, 38–39, 42, 45, 49–50 Khitan edition of the Chinese Buddhist Canon  36, 44, 47 Korean edition of  36, 39 Manchu vernacular translation and printing of  47 Pāli canon  29 Tangut vernacular translation and print-

Index ing of  39, 45 Tibetan Kanjur  6, 46–47 Hōbutsushū (Collection of Treasures, ca. 1179–1183)  135, 136 Kaiyuan shijiao lu (Record of Buddhist Teachings of the Kaiyuan Era) of Zhisheng  31, 31n6, 41 linguistic transformations of  29–30 oral transmission of  29 printed with movable type by Tanguts  6, 35 sutra explanations (jiangjing wen)  273 wakan-konkōbun (mixed Sino-Japanese vernacular style) associated with  129–130, 139 Burns, Susan  235n45, 238n55 Busch, Allison  12 Bush, Christopher  262n22 Buswell, Robert E., 31n6, 38n37 Buzo, Adrian  87n93 Cai Yuanpei  268n34 Cawdrey, Robert (1604)  173 Chan Hok-lam [Chen Xuelin]  67n31 Chandra, Lokesh  47nn79–80 Chang Ae-sun  39n43 Chang, Chungli  206 Chang Tong’ik  63n19 Charabarti, Pratik  161n52 Chase, Hanson  169n3 Chen, Janet  5 Chen Jinghe  101n14, 102n18 Chen Long  61n13 Chen Pengnian (961–1017)  114–115n54 Chen Pingyuan  265n30 Cheng Yi (1033–1107)  199, 274–276 Cheung, Martha  30nn4–5 Chibbett, David  43n61 Chikusa Masaaki  32n10, 44n67 Chỉ nam phẩm ngọc âm gải nghĩa (Explication of the Guide to the Jeweled Sounds): bilingual prefaces to  10, 123, 125–126 introduced  111–112 Literary Sinitic preface to analysis of  117–122 introduced  111 Nôm preface to absence of Chinese in  114, 117

Index analysis of  112–117 introduced  111 See also Nôm poetry; vernacular explication China Teikan  47n81 Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi): and Manchu characters  173–174 zi as general term for Manchu writing  178, 180–181 mythically invented by Cang Jie (Thương Hiệt)  119n66 the sheng component of  289n77 See also kanji characters; kundoku (reading conventions); Manchu script; Sinoscript Chinese poetry: as a lingua franca in interactions between China, Japan, and Korea  8–10 in baihua stories  272 Classic of Poetry cited by a Korean interpreter  85 Kwŏn Kŭn’s impromptu poetic compositions for Ming Taizu  66 and learning from 1990–1937, 19n16 vernacular translation of as part of the Japanese literary tradition  11, 131–133, 141–145 See also poetry Cho, Eunsu  38n36 Cho, Young-mee Yu  60n6 Ch’oe Sejin (?–1542): about  78, 78n70, 79n75, 80 Comprehensive Explanation of the Four Tones  74, 74n56, 75 Chŏng Inji, Koryŏsa [The Koryŏ history]  38n39, 39nn40–41, 64n23 Chŏng Kwang  74n54 Chŏng P’ilmo  38n39, 39nn40,42 Chŏng Taham [Chong Daham]  60n7, 62n16, 65n25, 71nn45,47 Chosŏn wangjo sillok (CWS) [Veritable records of the Chosŏn dynasty]  60– 61nn6,8–9, 62n18, 65n24,26, 66nn28–30, 67nn32–33,35, 68n36, 69n39, 70nn40–44, 71n45, 72nn48–49, 74nn54,56, 78nn70–71, 79n74 Chow, Kai-wing  4n7 Chu Qishu and Chu Jingfu  179n27

305 chungin (professional bureaucrats)  58n2 Chunhua  181n32, 183nn34–38, 184n41, 185n42, 186n46, 189n55 Chữ Nôm “characters for talking”. See Nôm script Chuxue bianshi Manwen zhimeng ge [Educational jingles for the beginning student of Manchu]  180n31 Chuxue bianshi Qingzi xuzhi [What the beginner needs to know to decipher Qing characters]  180n31 civil examination system: and alternative careers  16, 204, 206, 210, 213–214 classical learning as the curriculum for  198–200, 202, 206, 207–208, 209, 211–212, 214 and education standardization in Imperial China  202, 204, 207–210, 216 and the exclusion of Koryŏ interpreters of spoken Chinese  58, 64, 78 high failure rate of  16, 201, 204, 205t1, 207, 208 and Korean literati  58, 64, 64n21, 67n35, 76–77 and Mandarin promotion  286–288, 290 periodic assessment of  212 and rhyming standards of Chen Pengnian’s Guangyun  114–115n54 and social hierarchies  25, 58, 206, 210–211, 212–217 classical language: classical Chinese in Japan (kanbun)  3, 14, 148–149, 163, 233–234 kobun (Japanese “high classical language”)  129, 229 wabun (Japanese classical prose style)  14, 134 See also classical/vernacular dichotomy; Literary Sinitic; waka (classical Japanese poetry); wenyan (“written speech”) classical learning. See Confucian classics classical/vernacular dichotomy: Chữ Nôm as both a sagely script and spoken language  11

306 classical/vernacular dichotomy (cont.): cosmopolitan Sanskrit versus vernacular languages model of Pollock  1–3, 5, 9–10, 14, 20, 96, 130, 163 Latin in Europe as the model for  1–3, 7, 20, 259, 271–272 classical/vernacular dichotomy—spoken Chinese/“vernacular” Korean: and Chinese poetry as a lingua franca  9–10 and graphocentrism in the diplomatic records  59, 62–63, 81–82, 87, 89 and the Korean alphabet  7, 58–62, 59n3, 63, 71, 87–90 clerical writing (liwen/imun)  59n3, 68 Coblin, W. South  258n9 Cổ Châu pháp văn phật bản hành ngữ lục [Recorded Sayings of the Native Practices of the Cloud-Dharma Buddha of Cổ Châu]: ancient history of  108–109 and Lê vernacular history  97, 105, 108–110 Collected Poems in the Kingdom’s Speech (Quồc âm thi tập) attributed to Nguyễn Trãi  100, 101, 102, 103, 106 Collected Poems in the Kingdom’s Speech attributed to Chu Vân An  99 Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing. See Wakan rōeishū commensurability: cultural commensurability and Pollock’s voluntaristic cosmopolitanism and vernacular accommodation model  1–3, 5, 9–10, 14, 20, 96, 130, 163 semantosyllabicity  110–111, 113–114, 117, 120, 122, 125–126 political commensurability and Korean script elevation  59–63 and Tangut script invention  6–7, 8, 33–34 commentary traditions: classical Chinese used for Confucian commentary writing  10 European interest in “voices of the past” as tokens of a new modernity  5 in Japan

Index commentaries on Chinese medical classics in kanbun and kana  148–149, 155–158, 156n36, 163–164 new commentaries (shinchu)  143– 144 oral commentary tradition  11–13, 137–138 paratextual adaptations of ancient texts  13, 134–137 on the Tales of Ise  137 See also Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing) and the superiority and exclusivity of master texts  5 Complete Records of the History of Đại Việt (Đại Việ sử ký toàn thư) of Ngô Sĩ Liên  98–99n5, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107 Confucian classics: Analects (Lun yu) of Confucius  232n37 as “authoritative classics” in Chosŏn Korea  75 as “authoritative classics” in Japan  23, 25, 134 on proper names assigned to the myriad things  10, 118 translated into Tangut  34 in Chosŏn Korea  61, 74, 75 Classic of Filial Piety  35 and cultural authority in Japan  24–25, 134, 136 Hồ Quý Ly’s Vernacular Explication of the [Book of] Songs  103, 104 and sodoku (“raw reading”)  231–232, 232n37 and the spread of Chinese writing system  10, 40, 47–48, 117–120 vernacular translations in setsuwa literature  135, 136 See also Literary Sinitic Confucian orthodoxy: harmonized with Buddhist pursuits in Đai Việt  112–113 and Ming ordered reforms in Đại Việt  98–99n6 and the spread of the Chinese writing system  117–120 See also semantosyllabicity

Index and the Sūtra on Requiting Parental Kindness  37, 40 Confucian scholarship: decay of orthodox education in Vietnam  124–125 medical learning grouped with  150– 151, 150–151n13 Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Kingdom  72n48 Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Reign  71, 72nn48,51 Cressy, David  49n89 Crossley, Pamela Kyle  169nn2–3, 174n18, 181n32, 181n78, 281 cultural commensurability. See under commensurability Curtius, Ernest B., 272n43 CWS. See Chosŏn wangjo sillok (CWS) Daigu, Qingwen beikao (Ready Examinations of Qing Writings)  183 Daly, Lloyd W., 172n12 Ðào Duy Anh  99 Daoism: and the Ming occupation of Đại Việt  98–99n6, 113 Neo Daoist (xuan-xue) notions of language and statecraft  111, 118–119, 118–119n64 priesthood career of failed civil exam candidates  204, 214 vocabulary of Daoism and Buddhism avoided in literary schools  201 Daqing lichao shilu (Veritable records of the Qing, the Yongzheng reign)  286n71 Dardess, John  215n29 de Bary, William Theodore  31n7, 199n3 DeFrancis, John  170–171, 270n38 De Heer, Philip  80–81nn82, 85 de Rhodes, Alexander (1591–1660)  293 De Visser, M.W., 49n86 dead languages of the past: classical Chinese/wenyan categorized as  5, 17, 257, 259–261, 272, 278 texts written in dismissed by Western phonologists  225 See also Latin; wenyan (“written speech”)

307 Demiéville, Paul  36n28 demotic vernacular: and Edo-centered, chōnin-based genres  142–143 of kana medical writing  149 translations of Heian Japanese classics  129–130, 131, 144 translations of Heian Japanese poetry (waka)  139 See also vernacular language Derrida, Jacques  222n11, 262n22 des Rotours, Robert  198n2 Deuchler, Martina  80n80 dialects: Beijing dialect  270, 277 Cantonese  266n31, 269, 289n77 “diglossia” in terms of “vernacular” (Korean) and “literary/classical” (Chinese)  59–60, 60n6 and Edo-centered vernacular genres  142–143 of Fujian and Guangdong  266n31, 286, 287, 289n76 Meiji period standardization of  17–18, 222n10, 237n52, 237–238 reading aloud written texts using regional phonology  288–290, 289n76 regional dialect of Anhui Province spoken by Hu Shi  261 regional dialects translated into guanhua (officially sanctioned spoken language)  21, 284–285 regional languages distinguished from  258–259 regional names for plant and animal species  161–162 “topolects” as a term for  255n5 Wenzhou dialect represented in Zhang Xie, Top Student (Zhang Xie zhuangyuan)  277 Wu dialect and phonology  265–267, 286 See also Mandarin; spoken language Diamond Sūtra  37n3, 46 “diglossia”: and “bound translation”  22 and the fifty-sound syllabary grid  238, 238n54

308 “diglossia” (cont.): of “vernacular” (Korean) and “literary/classical” (Chinese)  59–60, 60n6, 75, 292 Dikotter, Frank  198n2 Dormels, Rainer  75n62 Douglas, Carstairs (1830–1877)  258–259, 263–264, 263n79 drama. See oral performance; Peking Opera; plays Drège, Jean-Pierre  49n87 Dreyer, Edward L., 65n26 Du, Huiyue  81n85 Du Yaquan (1873–1933)  281 Duden, Barbara  163n63 Duggan, Joseph J., 256n7 Dunhuang: bianwen (transformation texts) from  261–262, 263, 265, 273, 273–274n45 manuscripts written in Central Asian scripts from  13, 22 Dunnell, Ruth  32, 33–34 Dutch Learning (rangaku)  162–163, 223 ĐVSKTT. See Complete Records of the History of Đại Việt (Đại Việ sử ký toàn thư) Dyer, Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff  73n53 Education. See academies; Buddhist temples; civil examination system; grammar and grammarians Eimer, Helmut  46n77 Elliot, Mark C., 191, 281–282 Elman, Benjamin A., 1–28, 198–217 citations of work  158n44, 198n1, 205 Elverskog, Johan  46n74 Emmerich, Michael  139n19 Emperor Taizu (r. 1368–1398)  64–67, 67nn31,35 See also Ming Empire Emperor Trần Nhân Tông. See Trần Nhân Tông (Trần Khâm 1258–1308) Emperor Yongle (aka Ch’eng-tsu [Chengzu]): representation of regional phonologies in Yongle’s Grand Canons  276–277 See also Ming Empire Emperor Yongzheng’s promotion of Mandarin  286–289, 288n74

Index Esperanto  270 ethnic identity: and linguistic diversity  285, 290–291 and Mandarin promotion  285–286 and vernacularization  169, 265, 280– 282, 290–291, 294 See also “mother tongues” Evon, Gregory N., 61n10 Fan Boqun  265n30 Flower Garland Sūtra  34, 37n31, 40, 42–43 Foucault, Michel  216n30 Fozu Tongji  31n8, 32n10 Fu Si’nian  260 Fuchs, Walter  47n80, 174n18, 183nn35,37 Fügiyün [Fugiyûn] (fl. 1748–1792)  Sanhe bianlan  183–184, 184n40 Fujikawa Yū  156n38 Fujimoto Yukio  42n58, 47n81 Fujinami Kōichi  151n14 Fujiyoshi Masumi  42nn55–56, 42nn55– 56 Fukui Tamotsu  154n25 Fukuoka, Maki  160n51, 161n53 Furgimari, Lia  225nn16,17, 227n25, 249n224 Furukawa Masao (1870–1872)  239n60 Furuta Tōsaku  238nn53,55, 239n60, 240nn62,65 Gan Bao  136n13 Gardner, Daniel  215n29 Ge Zhaoguang  11n12 Gelb, Ignace J., 178n26 Genshin, Essentials of Rebirth in the Pure Land (Ōjō yōshū)  42–43, 135 Gerstle, C. Andrew  150n12 Glassman, Hank  44n64 Goble, Andrew  9n10, 151n18, 152n20 Gong Yongqing (1500–1563)  81–82, 84–86 Goody, Jack  30n3 grammar and grammarians: and access to classical language  23–25 and kanbun-reading methods  233–234 kōgo bunten (Japanese grammar books of spoken language)  222n10 notion of the letter as unknown to Qing grammatology  181–182

Index See also kanbun kundokutai (Japanese way of reading Chinese writing); punctuation Gramsci, Antonio  268n33 Grimm, Jacob  280n57 Grinstead, Eric  34n21 Gugong Bowuyuan  176n23, 183nn37–38 gunki-mono (military narratives): Chinese history transmitted through  135–136 and zodanshu (miscellaneous stories)  136n15 See also Record of Great Peace; Tale of the Heike Gunn, Edward, M  266n31 Güthenke, Constanze  5 guwen (ancient-style prose)  258 See also Literary Sinitic; wenyan (“written speech”) Ha Ubong  47n81 Hà Văn Tiến  124n74 Habermas, Jürgen  280n57, 282n63 Haboush, JaHyun Kim  87nn94–95, 88n96 Halkias, Georgios T., 45nn72,73 Hall, Ivan Parker  228n28 Han Yu (Viet Hàn Dũ  768–824)  100 Han characters. See Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi) han’gŭl script: to increase reading skills  22 invented to facilitate the correct pronunciation of Chinese texts  9, 18 and hybrid writings  292 and Japanese editions of Hǒ Chun’s Mirror of Eastern Medicine  162 and the promotion of Buddhism  40–41 and vernacular printing in Korea  35, 40 See also scripts Hangzhou: baihua newspapers in  271 civil examinations in  205t1, 207 Hu Wenhuan’s publishing enterprise in  201–202 Han-i araha manju gisun-i buleku bithe: Uheri hešen [Imperially commissioned mirror of the Manchu language: Index]  189–190n56

309 Hán Việt  105–107, 107n34, 114 Harbsmeier, Christoph  271n42 Hattori Nankaku (kanshi poet)  141 Hattori Toshirō  150–151nn13,15 Hayata Teruhiro  181n32, 182n33 Hedin, Svin  33 Hegel, Robert  284–285 Heine, Steven  43n60 Henderson, John B., 49n90 Herbert, P.A., 198n2 Hi Yiya  176n25 hieroglossia of sacralized languages  48, 293–295, 293n85 Hindi  12 Hirata Atsutane  238n54 Hirata Shōji  22n19, 254n1, 286n70 historical writing: and baihua narrative texts  254–255, 255n3 and the Ming occupation of Đại Việt  98–99n5 Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan)  41, 131, 136, 139, 144 See also Chosŏn wangjo sillok; Complete Records of the History of Đại Việt (Đại Việ sử ký toàn thư); gunki-mono (military narratives); philological scholarship; setsuwa (anecdotal literature) Ho, P’ing-ti  209n18 Hồ Quý Ly (1336–1407?): about  100–103, 104, 125 Lê surname adopted by clan of  102n18 Vernacular Explication of the [Book of] Songs  103, 104 Hồ Xuân Hương  110 Holcombe, Charles  41n52 Hong Taeyong (1731–1783)  88–89 Hoshina Masayuki (1611–1673)  150–151n13 Hozumi Hoan, Marvelous Drugs to Aid the People (Kyūmin myōyaku)  159 Hu Shi (1891–1962): about  259–260n14 baihua writing advocated by  259–261, 266–267, 295–296, 295n88 “eight don’ts” of  260 replacement of Sino-script with Roman alphabets advocated by  295 Huang Huaisheng  118n63 Huang Shiyi  274–275

310 Hubei: Mandarin spoken in  270, 277 provincial examinations in  201 Hudson, Alan  59n4 hundok (vernacular reading techniques)  13, 40 Hung, Eva  30n5 Huýnh Sanh Thông  96–97, 98n5 Hwang, Kyung Moon  58n2, 89n102 hybridized literature: baihua mixed with wenyan  271–272, 271n39 and the Japanese genre of travel literature  142 mixture of classical and nonclassical forms in Peking opera  277–278 and script invention  40, 97, 110, 125– 126, 291–292n81, 292–293 Hymes, Robert  274–276, 283n65, 284n67 Idema, Wilt L., 276n51 idu (lit., “clerical reading of documents”)  13, 97n93, 162 Ikegami Eiko,, 24n24 Imanari Genshō  136 Imanishi Shunjū  174n18 indigenous scripts. See kana script; kana syllabaries; script invention; scripts inflectional languages: “isolating languages” contrasted with  225 particles and inflections (tenioha) in Japanese  13, 140, 225n19, 233, 235, 244, 246, 247 See also Latin; Sanskrit interpreters in the Chosŏn: and cultural commensurability  9, 82–87 discrimination against  80–81, 80– 81n82 low regard for  8, 63, 68, 76–80 Office of Interpreters  9, 68, 68n37, 70, 72, 79, 89 parallel roles of interpreters during the Manchu invasions  87n95 See also Ō Sukkwŏn; spoken language iroha (Japanese poetic sequence)  240, 240nn61,63, 245

Index Īta Shōjirō  132n2 Itō Masayoshi  133n6, 134n11, 137n15 Itō Shingo  245n72 Jacobowitz, Seth  226 Jacques, Guillaume  106n33 Jan, Yün-hua  31n6 Jesuits: alphabetization of Chinese by  263–264 of Vietnamese by  293 in China  200, 202, 258, 263–264, 268– 269, 268n33 Ji Yonghai  181n32 Johnson, David  210n20, 211n23 Juntu  176n20, 179n30 Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714)  Instructions for Nourishing Life (Yōjōkun)  154, 154n27, 161, 162 Kaiyuan shijiao lu (Record of Buddhist Teachings of the Kaiyuan Era) of Zhisheng  31, 31n6, 41 Kajiwara Shōzen (ca. 1265–ca. 1337)  151, 152, 152n20 Kama no Mabuchi (1697–1769)  142, 143 Kamei Hideo  220–221n4, 222n10, 230, 230n32 Kaminishi, Ikkumi  43n62 Kamio Kazuharu  45n70 Kanaoka Shōkō  44n65 kana script: and honzōgaku (literature on materia medica)  160–162, 162n59 and moveable-type printing  18 and the “phonetic principles” of Western linguistic theories  17, 221, 223– 228, 248–249 See also phonetic scripts kana syllabaries: hiragana  129, 231 man’yōgana (Japanese vernacular writing system)  130–131 See also katakana (alphabetic script); scripts kanbun (Chinese writing): as a “vernacular” vis-à-vis classical Chinese in Japan  3, 14

Index and medicine and medical learning in Japan  14, 148–149 See also wakan-konkōbun (mixed SinoJapanese vernacular style) kanbun kundokutai (Japanese way of reading Chinese writing)  17–18, 225n18 Kanda Nobuo  174n18, 181n32 Kane, Daniel  44n68, 45n69 Kang Hŭimaeng (1424–1483)  77–78 kanji characters: ancient Japanese texts written in (kogaku)  238–239 anti-kanji movement  17, 221–223, 221n5, 230–231, 236 equated with hieroglyphs  224, 226, 229, 234–235, 241, 244 and kundoku punctuation  22, 246–247 and oto o tadasu (lit., “to correct sounds”)  237–238, 238n56 See also Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi); kundoku (reading conventions); Sinoscript kanshi (Chinese poetry): Hattori Nankaku (kanshi poet)  141 and the Wakan rōeishū  132–133 Kapstein, Matthew T., 38n36, 45n73 Kara, György  187n48 Karatani Kōjin  222n11, 262–263, 273n44 Kaske, Elisabeth  259n11, 269n36, 270n38, 271n41 Kaster, Robert  24n26 katakana (alphabetic script): and interlinear glosses of medical texts  155, 158 and wakan konkōbun style texts  129, 133–134, 134n10 See also alphabetization; kana syllabaries; scripts Katayama Junkichi  240–241 Katō Hiroyuki  225, 225n19 and Nishi Amane  245n73 Kawakami, Seishi  36n27 Kawamura Minato  239n59 Kazama Kiyozō  224n13 Keichū  238 Kennedy, George A., 171n10 Kermode, Frank  211n23 Kern, Martin  5, 11–12

311 Khitan Liao: invasion of Korea  39 Khitan edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon  44 Khitan script  6, 44 Khotan  30, 45 Ki Taesŭng  79n73 Kieschnick, John  49n87 Kim, Joy  18 Kim Wanjin  79n76 Kin, Bunkyo [Kim Mungyeong]  292n82 King, Ross  59n4, 60n7, 61n15, 90n103 King Sejong (r. 1418–1450)  60–61, 69, 71n47, 71–72, 73, 76, 78, 88, 90 kobun (“high classical language”)  129, 229 Ko, Dorothy  215n29 Kokinshū, and other “authoritative classics” 134–135, 136 Kokugaku (nativist movement)  129–130, 139–140, 141, 142, 143–144 See also nativist studies kokujikai (“explaining in Japanese words”)  141 Kollmar-Paulenz, Karénina  45n72, 46n77 Kolokolov, V.S., 35n23 Komine Kazuaki  143 Komori Yōichi  220n1, 226n20, 235n37, 239n58, 239n58 Kornicki, Peter  1, 2n4, 6–8, 13, 15, 16n12, 21, 29–57, 61n12, 150nn10,11, 152n21, 154n26, 266n31 Koyama Shisei  149n5 Kracke, E.A., Jr., 198n2 Kudara, Kōgi  45n71, 46n74 Kuginuki Tōri  238n55 Kuhn, Philip A., 203n14 Kuhn, Sherman M., 170n5 kundoku (reading conventions): as a type of translation from classical Chinese to a written form of classical Japanese  13, 22, 129 combined with Western linguistic theories by Nishi  245–247, 245n73, 248–249 katakana (alphabetic script)  129 “kundoku-mediated logography”  148n2 and sodoku reading conventions  233, 235–236

312 kundoku (reading conventions) (cont.): and the vernacularization of Buddhist texts  42, 129 See also pronunciation; punctuation; vernacular explication Kwŏn Kŭn  62n18, 66, 82 Kychanov, E.I., 33nn13,17, 34n20–22, 35n23 Lach, Donald  202n12 Laitin, David  80 Lancaster, Lewis R., 39n42 language reform: and de-Sinification  12, 17, 22, 220, 236 in Meiji Japan linguisitic nationalism (gengo nashonarizumu)  17, 220 and Mori’s call for pure phonetic principles  223–229, 228n29, 241, 248–249 Nishi’s system drawing kundoku reading and Western linguistic theories  242–247, 245n73, 249 in Republican China and alphabetization  170–171 and linguistic diversity  19–20 and the standardization of cross-regional pronunciation  266, 269–270, 285 See also alphabetization; semantosyllabicity Latin: and the classical/vernacular dichotomy in Europe  1–3, 7, 130, 259, 268n33, 271–272 Latin-English relationship as parallel to the kanbun-kana scripted kokugo relationship  294n44 Italian Renaissance as the model for the Chinese vernacularization movement  20, 256, 259–260, 263–264, 272 lexicographic ordering of  172–173 modern Vietnamese alphabet codified by Alexandre de Rhodes  293 pronounced as French in medieval France  256n7 as a transregional language compared with literary Chinese in tenth and eleventh

Index century Japan  3, 130–131 See also inflectional languages Ledyard, Gary Keith  71n47, 72nn49–50 Lee, Peter H., 38n34, 39n42 Lee Yeounsuk  220n1,3, 226n24, 227n26, 228n29, 230n33, 234n44, 234, 242 lèijù “compendia” (Viet. loại tụ)  111n48 Leiyin zhihui [The collected characters classified according to sound]  188n51 Li Dannian  188n51, 189n55 Li Fuhua  32n10, 44n67, 45n70 Li Shizhen (1518–1593): medicine as an alternative career for  201 Systematic Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) of  154, 161 Li Yanji, Qingwen huishu (Manchu Collected)  183, 185, 186, 189, 191n57 Liao Lunji, Manchu syllabary published in 1670, 176–177 Ligeti, Louis [Lajos]  174n17 Ling Shawen and Chen Kechen  176n22, 187n49 linguistic diversity: and ethnic identity  291 and language reform in Republican China  19–20 and Peking opera  277 linguistic mastery: interpreters in the Chosŏn, and cultural commensurability  9, 69–70, 82–87 and technical knowledge  69–73 linguistic nationalism: and early modern Europe  5, 282n63 in Japan Edo period Kokugaku (nativist movement)  129–130, 139–140, 141, 142, 143–144 Meiji genbun’itchi (Japanese “vernacularization”) movement  220, 220n1, 230, 243, 262–263, 293 Meiji gengo nashonarizumu  17, 220 in Korea Chosŏn cultural legitimacy  59–60, 64–70, 87–90 in the nineteenth century  60, 60n6 Manchu identified as guoyu (state or na-

Index tional language)  169, 281–282 Mandarin as guanhua (officially sanctioned spoken language)  20, 21, 260, 268n34, 268–270, 285 See also nativist studies linguistic theories: kundoku reading and Western linguistic theories used by Nishi  245–247, 245n73, 248–249 and Mori’s call for pure phonetic principles to reform Japanese  223–229, 228n29, 241, 248–249 and Nishi Amane’s system for uniting the written and the spoken  242–247 literacies. See civil examination system; classical language; ethnic; Kobun; language reform; literary Sinitic; vernacular; zokugo literary Chinese. See Literary Sinitic literary culture (wen hua)  24 Literary Sinitic: and Buddhist vernacular practices in the Cổ Châu  105, 108, 109–110 in the Phật thuyết  105, 107–108, 110 and Chữ Nôm “characters for talking” 96 cosmopolitan language  12, 14 and kokujikai (“explaining in Japanese words”)  141 Literary Sinitic preface to the Chỉ nam  111, 117–122 and the Neo-Confucian society of Dai Viet  104, 125 Nôm as an extension of  10–11, 110–111, 116–117 prestige value of  1 See also classical language; Confucian classics; wenyan (“written speech”) Liu, Lydia He  61n11, 262n22, 289n77 Liu Yujun  36n39, 37n31 Lotus Sūtra  34, 37n31, 40 Lu Guoyao  269n35 Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q (A Q zhengzhuan)  267 Luc Kwanten  33n16 Lurie, David  1n2, 4n6, 13, 22, 41nn51–52, 42n58, 48n82, 144n29, 148, 148n2, 291–292n81, 292–293n83 Ma Zuyi  30n5

313 Mabuchi Kazuo  238n55 McBride, Richard Dewayne  40n44, 49n85 McCallum, Donald F., 41n52 Macé Mieko  151n17, 163n60 Machi Senjurō  148n3, 149n9, 157n40 Maclean, Ian  161n52 Maeda Ai  231n35 Maejima Hisoka (1835–1919): “common,” “zokubun of contemporary times” promoted as a language in kundoku syntax  235–236 phoneticizing of kanji with the kana syllabary supported by  17, 231, 262–263 “A Proposition for Kokubun Education” (Kokubun kyōiku no gi ni tsuki kengi)  231, 235 Mair, Victor  255n5, 258n8, 261–262, 262n21, 273–274n45 Makino Kazuo  134n10, 136n15 Manase Dōsan (1507–1594)  152–153, 155 Manase Gensaku (1549–1631)  152–153 Manchu language: as a spoken tongue among bannermen  281–282 translation of the Nogŏltae for language learning  74n58 Manchu lexicography: Chinese dictionaries in Manchu alphabetical order  183–184, 187 word ordering of Chinese lemmata  187–189, 189n55 Manchu script  173–177 and alphabetical literacy  15, 169–170 analyzed by Qing scholars  178–179 Buddhist texts translated using  46–47 Chinese character zi as general term for Manchu writing  178, 180–181 Liao Lunji’s Manchu syllabary  176–177 and political legitimation  7–8 “twelve heads” (juwan juwe uju or Ch. shier zitou [“twelve character heads”]) paradigm of  174–176, 178–179, 180n31, 181 and Quanxi’s lexicographic arrangement  188 and Shen Qiliang’s lexicographic arrangement  175n19, 181–184, 186, 188

314 Manchu script (cont.) untapped potential of  15 Mandarin: associated with baihua (lit., “plain speech”)  259n13, 260, 267–268 Beijing Mandarin  270 as guanhua (officially sanctioned spoken language)  20, 21, 260, 268n34, 268–270, 285 Hubei Mandarin  270, 277 regional forms of  9, 19–20, 65, 268 Yongzheng’s promotion of  286–289, 288n74 See also dialects; Sino-script Man-Han shier zitou [The twelve heads in Manchu and Chinese]  176n25 Man-Han tongwen quanshu [Complete book in standardized Manchu and Chinese writing]  183, 183n35 Man-Han ziyin lianzhu shiwen [Character pronunciations, linked annotations, and textual explanations in Manchu and Chinese]  180n31 Manwen zitou [The twelve heads of Manchu]  180n31 Marcon, Federico  150n12, 160, 161n53 Mari Arinori (1847–1889)  Roman letters favored over Chinese scripts by  17 Maruyama Ryūji  239n59 materia medica (Ch. bencao; J. honzō): alphabetization applied to in ancient Greece  172 honzōgaku (commentaries on materia medica)  14, 160–162, 162n59 and idu and han’gŭl records by Korean scholars  162 kanbun vs. kana used for treatises on  148–149, 161 pre-Tokugawa period importance of  155n30 Systematic Materia Medica (Bencao gangmu) of Li Shizhen  154, 161 See also medicine and medical learning Matsudaira Tadatsugu (1605–1665)  150– 151n13 May Fourth movement: baihua misidentified as Vernacular Chinese by  19, 20, 295–296

Index and modernist views of premodern languages in China  18–20 See also Hu Shi Medhurst, Walter Henry  258 medicine and medical learning: as an alternative career for failed exam candidates  16, 204, 213 associated with monastic practice in Japan  14, 151 and Confucian scholarship  14, 23, 25, 150–151, 150–151n13 kanbun and kana commentaries on Chinese medical classics  148–149, 155–158, 156n36, 163–164 and kanbun literacy  14, 148–149 kanbun translation of A New Book of Anatomy (Kaitai shinsho)  163 kanbun translations of Dutch medical treatises  163 textualization of vernacular medicine  14–15, 147, 153–159 See also materia medica (Ch. bencao; J. honzō) Mencius, as an “authoritative classics” in Chosŏn Korea  75 Menglong, Feng, Mountain Songs (Shan’ge)  266, 272 Miethaner-Ven, Karin  172–173, 173n14 Miki Mashahiro  133n9 Minagawa Kien (1734–1807)  157–158 Ming Empire (1368–1644): Emperor Taizu (r. 1368–1398)  64–67, 67nn31,35 Korean diplomats required to speak and write in Ming Chinese  8–9, 64–71 linguistic profiles of plays in the Yuan and Ming  266, 276–277 and Mandarin  9, 65, 260, 268–269, 285 multiple scripts and writing systems in use during  291n80 occupation of Vietnam  98–99n5, 99, 100, 103–104, 125 print culture of  216 Way Learning (Daoxue) tradition  199– 200 See also civil examination system; Emperor Yongle (aka Chengzu) Ming shi lu (MSL) [Ming veritable re-

Index cords]  64n21, 67n31,35, 69n39 Mitchell, W.J.T., 262n22 Miyai Rika  43n63 Miyazaki, Ichisada  216n30 Mochizuki San’ei (1697–1769)  156 Mongols and Mongolian: and classical Chinese  24, 26 Mongol-Chinese-Manchu dictionary of, Sayišangγ-a  184–186, 185nn42–43, 186n45, 187, 191n57 Mongolian script  47 vernacularization and political legitimation  7–8 Mori Arinori (1847–1889): pure phonetic principles to reform Japanese sought by  223–229, 228n29, 241, 248–249 Roman alphabet (simplified English) favored over Chinese script by  17, 224, 229, 237, 239 Morisse, G., 32 “mother tongues”: and the assumption that “languages make people” 169, 279–281, 280n57, 291, 294 plain Chinese (baihua) advocated as  295–296 Motoori Norinaga  139–142, 144, 238–239, 239n58 MSL. See Ming shi lu Nakaizumi Tesshun  157n40 Nakamura Shunsaku  231n35, 235n45 Naka Sumio  44n67 Nakayama Rokurō  246n74 Nakayma Akihio  220–221n4, 222n10 Nanbu Yoshikazu (1840–1917): Roman alphabet for the fifty-sound kana syllabary favored by  17, 239–240 and syllabary grid use divorced entirely from pronunciation  236–237, 238, 241, 242, 245 Nanjing (or Jinling, Viet. Kim Lăng): and the Ming occupation of Đại Việt  98–99 provincial examinations in  200, 201, 202, 203, 205t1, 207 as an publishing center  201–202 regional dialect of  9, 65, 268

315 Nasu Tsunenori (1774–1841)  159–160 nativist studies: and demotic vernacular translation  129–130, 142–144 Kokugaku (nativist movement)  129– 130, 139–140, 141, 142, 143–144 and medical scholarship  149, 159–160 and Meiji period language reforms  222, 236, 238n54, 238–241, 245, 248, 263n23 See also linguistic nationalism Neo-Confucianism (Ch. Daoxue; J. Shushi­ gaku): and the Chŏson ruling class  87–88 and Đại Việt intellectuals  103, 104 and the integration of moral and physical development  233 and the Ming  199–200 occupation of Vietnam  98–99n6, 103–104, 125 proper posture required for reading “proper” kangaku texts  232 and yulu texts  274–275 Zhu Xi (1130–1200)  103, 199, 274–276 See also Ngô Sĩ Liên Ngô Sĩ Liên: Complete Records of the History of Đại Việt (Đại Việ sử ký toàn thư)  98–99n5, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107 and the Neo-Confucian tradition  103– 104 Nguyen, Cuong Tu  36n30, 37n31 Nguyễn Đán (1325–1390)  101 Nguyễn Du, Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiếu)  96, 97, 110, 111 Nguyễn Quang Hồng  99 dating of the Cổ Châu by  108, 109 dating of the Phật thuyết by  105–107, 107n34, 116 Liu Yujun  37n31 Nguyễn Tái Cẩn  99, 106n33 Nguyễn Thuyên (thirteenth century poet)  99, 100 Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442)  Collected Poems in the Kingdom’s Speech attributed to  101 Nienhauser, William H., 98–99n5 Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan)  41, 131, 136, 139, 144

316 Ningxia wenwu kaogu yanjiusuo  33n14 Ning Xiyuan  276n50 Nishi Amane (1829–1897): anecdote about reading Ogyū Sorai without worrying about proper posture  232 Roman alphabet for the fifty-sound kana syllabary favored by  17, 221–222 and Western linguistic theories  242–247 Nishida Naoki  43n59 Nishida Tatsuo  33n17, 34n21, 35n23 Nogami Shunjō  39n41 Nogŏltae; Nogŏltae Ŏnhae [Nogŏltae; Vernacular explication of Nogŏltae] (14th–17th cents)  73, 74, 74nn54,58, 75 Noguchi Takehiko  232n39, 238n56, 239n59 Nôm poetry: golden age of  110–111 See also Chỉ nam phẩm ngọc âm gải nghĩa; poetry Nôm preface. See under Chỉ nam phẩm ngọc âm gải nghĩa (Explication of the Guide to the Jeweled Sounds) Nôm script (aka Chữ Nôm “characters for talking”): and literary Chinese  10–11 not viewed as a vernacular alternative to the classical  11 Norman, Jerry  173n16 Norman, K.R., 29n1, 30n3 Nozawa Katsuo  43n59, 43n59 O Kŏn  85n91 Ō Sukkwŏn (Chosŏn interpreter): mastery of both literary and written Chinese by  80 P’aegwan chapki of  69n39, 76n65, 79nn73,75, 80 status as a secondary son of an aristocrat  80n80 See also interpreters in the Chosŏn Office of Interpreters  9, 68, 68n37, 70, 72, 79, 89 See also interpreters in the Chosŏn Ogata Yasuhiro  132n2 Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728)  158, 232, 235, 238n56, 239n58

Index Okamoto Ippō (1654–1716)  155–157, 156n36 Ono Ranzan (1729–1810)  161–162 Ooms, Herman  41n52 oral performance: bianwen (transformation texts)  261– 262, 263, 265, 273, 273–274n45 fushidan sekkyō (rhythmical, gestural sermon)  137–138 kōdan (lecture conversation)  137, 137n17, 138 oral exposition of the meaning of Buddhist paintings  43 of popular classics  135, 137–138 pronunciation in regional theaters and other oral and performance genres  279 See also oral reading; Peking Opera oral reading: of Buddhist scriptures  37, 42 kōshaku (lecture commentary)  137, 137n17, 138 See also kana script; phonetics; vernacular explication; vocalization Oryun chŏnbi ŏnhae [Vernacular explication of the complete Five Morals]  75n61 Osa Shizue  220n1, 226n20 Ōta Shōjirō  132n2 Ōta Zensai  238n53 Ōtsuka Norihiro  42n57, 49nn86, 88 Ōtsuki Gentaku  163n61 Owen, Stephen  271n42 Ozaki Masayoshi  139 Ozaki Yūjirō  22n19 Ozment, Stephen  202n13 Pak Che-ga (1750–1805)  89 Pak T’ongsa ŏnhae [Vernacular Explication of Interpreter Pak]  73–75, 73n53 Pak Wŏnho  65n27, 81n86 paratextual adaptations of ancient texts  13, 134 Park Si Nae  61n12 Pasterich, Emanuel  21n17, 24n25, 158n43 Peking opera  277–278 Pestalozzi, J.H., 232–233 ’Phags-pa  46, 72, 72n50

Index Phan, John D., 7, 10–11, 96–128, 292n81, 293 Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh (Sutra of the Buddha’s Teaching on the Profound Grace of Parents): Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh Chinese edition of  37n32 and Lê vernacular writing  37, 97, 105–108, 107n34, 109, 110 philological scholarship: and the civil examination curriculum  212 and Japanese medical treatises  156, 158–160 on the linguistic transformation of Buddhist teachings  29–30 of Manchu script  177–181, 185n42 phonetics study severed from  225–227 and rhyme books  114n54, 114 phonetics: Cho’oe Sejin’s Comprehensive Explanation of the Four Tones  74, 74n56 furigana (phonetic glosses) of Chinese characters in kanbun and kana medical texts  152 Meiji script reform  221–223 and the “phonetic principles” of Western linguistic theories  17, 221, 223–228, 248–249 regional phonologies declaiming written Sino-script according to  288–289 and the limitations of Sinoscript  262, 266, 276–277 literary and colloquial alternation as a small fraction of  289–290n78 rhyme books and Korean alphabet development  61, 71, 72nn48,51, 73 and semantosyllabicity  114–115n54, 114 See also kana script; pronunciation; spoken language phonetic scripts: and alphabetic writing  256, 256n6 dismissed as replacement for Sinoscript  262, 295, 295n88 Manchu script theorized in Chinese phonology treatises  178–179

317 the sheng component for creating characters  289n77 and Western “logo-centrism”  262n22 See also alphabetization; kana script; kana syllabaries; script invention; scripts Pillow Book (Makura no sōshi)  43, 132 p’iltam (lit., “brush talk”; written conversations)  81–82, 81n84 plain writing (plain Chinese). See baihua plays: Noh plays based on medieval commentaries  136–137 representation of regional phonologies in Yongle’s Grand Canons  276–277 representation of Wenzhou dialect in Zhang Xie, Top Student (Zhang Xie zhuangyuan)  277 spoken Japanese in kyōgen (comic) plays  129 transcription of local dialects in Yuan dramatic texts  266, 272, 276, 276n51 See also oral performance; Peking Opera poetry: vernacular poetic tradition in Vietnam  99–102, 106, 110–111, 121 See also Chỉ nam phẩm ngọc âm gải nghĩa; Chinese poetry; Nôm poetry; phonetics; waka; Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing) political commensurability. See under commensurability political legitimation, and the use of written and spoken language  6–8, 296 Pollock, Sheldon: on the notion of “mother tongue” and the assumption that “languages make people”  279–281 vernacular polity model  283, 284 voluntaristic cosmopolitanism and vernacular accommodation model of  1–3, 5, 9–10, 14, 20, 96, 130, 163 Polyakov, A.B., 36n27 Pomeranz, Kenneth  4n5 Poppe, Nicholas  46n76 printing technologies: Chosŏn dynasty Sūtra Printing Office  40 and cultural development  4, 4n7 movable type and kana graph standardization  18

318 printing technologies: movable type (cont.) medical books printed in Japan using  152 typographically printed Tangut texts  6, 34, 35 typographically printed edition of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra  40 woodblock printing and the book market since the Song dynasty  2, 216 in Japan  2, 42, 43 of the Kaibao Chinese Buddhist canon  31–32, 35, 36, 38–39 in Korea  2, 39 of Tangut texts  34–35, 46 of Uighur texts  46 in Vietnam  36–37, 108 pronunciation: Hán Việt sound changes  105–107, 107n34, 114 Korean hangŭl script invented to facilitate the correct pronunciation of Chinese texts  9, 18 poetic tonal rules  133 in regional theaters and other oral and performance genres  277–279 systematic agreement of pronunciation and spelling  221–222, 223, 245– 247, 248–249 Tokyo pronunciation of Japanese  17– 18, 237–238 and the use of rhyme tables in Korea  73, 88–89, 88n98 wendu (literary pronunciation)  271n40, 279, 279n55, 288, 289–290, 289–290n78 See also dialects; kundoku (reading conventions); oral performance; oral reading; semantosyllabicity; spoken language; vernacular explication; vocalization Pu Songling (1640–1715)  201 Pulleyblank, E.G., 114–115n54 punctuation: and access to Sinitic texts  13, 22, 129 and classical Chinese grammatical particles  21, 23 and mistakenly marked Japanese editions of Buddhist texts  44

Index and the systematic agreement of pronunciation and spelling  221–222, 223, 245–247, 248–249 See also grammar and grammarians; kanbun kundokutai; kundoku (reading conventions); phonetics Qiang Nanyang  277n52 Qian Xuantong  270, 289n77 Qingding huangchao tongzhi  179n29 Qingding Qing-Han duiyin zhishi  187, 188, 189n55 Qingshu zhinan (Guide to Qing Writing)  174–175 Qingwen houxue jinfa  180n31 Qiu Tingliang (1857–1943)  259 Quan-xi  188, 191n57 Quỡc Ngữ (“the vernacular” or “the kingdom’s speech”)  96, 100n12 first vernacular history of Vietnam composed in  98 Quỡc Sử Quán (Ngyuyễn Bureau of History)  98–99n5 Rawski, Evelyn Sakakida  46n78, 169n4, 174n18, 181n32 Recorded Sayings of the Native Practices of the Cloud-Dharma Buddha of Cổ Châu. See Cổ Châu pháp văn phật bản hành ngữ lục Record of Great Peace (Taiheiki)  134, 135, 137n17 Taiheiki-yomi oral commentary on  138 Reischauer, Edwin O., 40n45 rhyme books. See under phonetics Robert, Jean-Noël  48n84 Robinson, David M., 64nn20,22 Robins, R.H., 224n13, 227n25 Roddy, Stephen  199n4 Rōei gōchū (Wakan rōeishū Ōe Commentary) of Ōe no Masafusa  132–133, 132n4, 133n8 Rowe, William T., 203n14 sacralization languages, and hieroglossia  31, 48, 293–294, 293n85 Sagaster, Klaus  46n75 Saitō Fumitoshi  234n42

Index Saitō Mareshi  222n10, 231n35, 234n43, 235–236, 235n45, 247, 247 Sakai, Naoki  222n10, 238n54–56, 239n57 Sakakibara Yoshino  239n60 Sakamoto Kiyoe  245n72 Sanskrit: and cultural commensurability  1–3, 9–10, 96, 130, 163 new vocabularies invented from transliterations of Sanskrit words Buddhist sutras  265 translation of Buddhist texts written in  30–31, 33, 45–46 See also inflectional languages Sayišangγ-a [Saišangga] (1797–1875)  184– 186, 185nn42–43, 186n45, 187, 191n57 Scherer, Wilhelm  280n57 Schiebinger, Londa L., 161n52 Schlegel, Friedrich von (1772–1829)  225, 245n73 Schopen, Gregory  30n5, 49 Schuessler, A., 113n52 script invention: to facilitate the correct pronunciation of Chinese texts  9, 18 and the Latinization movement  264– 265 Manchu script, Chinese character zi as general term for Manchu writing  178–179 ’Phags-pa  72, 72n50 and political legitimation  6–8, 21, 33–34 and the production of hybridized vernacular literature  40, 97, 110, 125–126, 291–292n81, 292–293 Uighur script development  46 See also kana; scripts; vernacular writing systems script reform: commensurability between kana and the Roman alphabet sought by Nanbu  236–238, 239, 241, 242, 245 and the unification of “spoken” and “written”  221, 237 and vernacularization  21 scripts: baihua written in Sino-script  266–267,

319 295–296, 295n88 Jurchen script  44–45 Sogdian script  46, 47 See also Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi) ; Manchu script; Nôm script; phonetic scripts; script invention; Sino-script; vernacular writing systems Sekiyama Kazuo  43n62 semantosyllabicity: and cultural commensurability  110–111, 113–114, 117, 120, 122, 125–126 and the interaction of classical and spoken vernaculars in Vietnamese  11, 109, 112–117, 119–120, 122–123 semantosyllabic characters introduced  113n52 and the Nôm of the Chỉ nam  10, 117, 122–123 and the Nôm of the Cổ Châu  109 See also pronunciation Sen, Tansen  31n8 Seng You (445–518)  30 Šeo ping  179n30 Serruys, Henry  46n76 setsuwa (anecdotal literature): criticism of  143–144 Hōbutsushū (Collection of Treasures, ca. 1179–1183)  135, 136 vernacular translation of Confucian classics and Chinese histories transmitted via  135–136, 139 See also Buddhist temples Shang Wei  18–20, 59n3, 61n15, 213n26, 254–301 Shanxisheng wenwuju  44n66 Shen Qiliang (fl.1645–1693)  174–175, 175n19, 176nn24–25, 181–184, 186, 188 Shi Hongbao  287n73 Shi Jinbo  34nn19–20 Shibata Hajime  149n5 Shim Jae-ryong  41n50 Shimizu Masaaki  105, 107 Shirane, Haruo  7, 11–13, 43n60, 129–147, 149 Sĩ Nhiếp (or King Sĩ, Shi Xie  137– 226)  115–116, 115n56 Guide to Collected Works (Chỉ nam phẩm vị)  121–122, 121n70

320 Sĩ Nhiếp (cont.) Poems and Songs in the Kingdom’s Speech  121, 121n70 Sim Chaegwŏn  61n13 Sino-script: de-Sinification challenges to hegemonic dominance of  7, 12, 17, 22, 221n5 and the anti-kanji movement  17, 221–223, 230–231, 236 graphocentrism in Korea  61–63 hegemonic dominance of  284, 291–295 as the language of Buddhism  48 and p’iltam (lit., “brush talk”; written conversations)  81–82, 81n84 and regional phonologies  262, 266, 276–277, 288–289 appropriation and modification of  48, 266n31 and terms for kanji, kanbun, and kangaku  221n5 See also Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi); commensurability; kanji characters; Literary Sinitic; semantosyllabicity Sin Sukchu (1417–1475)  76, 76n64 Skilling, Peter  45n72 Skinner, G. William  283 social mobility: and the civil examination system  25, 58, 206, 210–217 and classical literacy  16, 24–25, 80, 206–215 and exclusive access to language  80, 87, 206, 209–210 privileging of written over spoken language in the diplomatic record  59, 80–86 of secondary sons in Korea’s social system  79n77, 80n80 social obscurity of interpreters  58, 80–81 Söderblom Saarela, Mårten  6, 7, 15, 169–197 sodoku (“raw reading”): instruction  232–233, 232nn36-39 and proper posture  231, 232–233 and kundoku reading  233, 235–236 and Meiji script phoneticization reforms  236, 248 sodoku ginmi (examinations)  233–234, 235

Index Sŏ Kŏjŏng (1420–1488)  72–73 Sŏkpo sangjŏl  40n47 Sŏl Changsu (1341–1399)  67–68, 67nn32,34-35 Solomon, Richard  30n2 Sommer, Matthew  284n68 Song Ch’ungyong  68n37, 70n43, 78–79n72 Song Kijung  71n46, 72n50, 74nn54–58, 89n101 Song Lian (1310–1381)  62–63, 63n19, 67 Sŏng Paegin  181n32, 183n34 Song shi  35n24, 39n40, 42n55 Sørensen, Henrik H., 40n45 Sparks, H.F.D., 31n9 spoken language: Chinese pronunciation and the Korean alphabet  61–62, 62n16, 89 standardization  20, 21, 269–270, 284–285, 296 and clerical writing both required in diplomacy  68–71 disparity between danwa (spoken) and bunshō (written) language criticized by Maejima Hisoka  221, 229–230, 235–236 oral transmission of Buddhist texts  29 oral transmission of medicine  14, 158–159 and Peking opera  277–278 separate diglossic spaces of “vernacular” (Korean) and “literary/classical” (Chinese)  22, 59–60, 60n6, 75, 292 “spoken Chinese” (hanŏ or hwaŏ) contrasted with literary or classical writing in Chosŏn references  59n3 yulu (oral records)  59n3, 274–276 See also baihua (lit., “plain speech”); dialects; interpreters in the Chosŏn; Mandarin; oral performance; oral reading; phonetics; pronunciation; semantosyllabicity; sodoku (“raw reading”); vocalization; wenyan (“written speech”) Stalin, J.V., 265 Stein, Aurel  33 Sugimoto Tsutomu  160n51, 161nn53–55, 162nn56,58 Suh, Soyoung  162n57

Index Sun Weiguo  87n95 Sungsen  186n45 Sutra of the Buddha‘s Teaching on the Profound Grace of Parents. See Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh Suzhou: baihua mixed with diction from Suzhou in Feng Menglong’s Mountain Songs  272 baihua newspapers in  271 Suzuki Sadahiro  153, 157 Tachibana Tō, preface to Minagawa  157n41 Taira Yasuyori  135, 135n12 Takai Hiroshi  231n35, 232n49 Tale of Genji (Kogetsusho): commentaries on  134, 137, 143–144 and other “authoritative classics”  134– 135, 136, 142, 144 transcription of spoken Japanese in  129, 131 vernacular parodies on  139 vernacular translation of  139, 141 and the Wakan rōeishū  132 Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiếu) of Nguyễn Du  96, 97, 110, 111 Tale of the Heike  135–136, 136n15 heikyoku (musical performance) of  137– 138 Tales of Ise  131, 136, 137 Tanaka Kaidō  42n54 Tanaka Katsuhiko  226n20 Tanaka Kōji  141n24 Tanaka Mikiko  132n3 Tangut Empire (1032–1227): about  32 Buddhism as the state religion of  34 printing technology  6, 34–35 Tangut script  32–34, 47–48 vernacular translation of Sinitic texts  6–8 Tanii Toshihito  44n67 Tao, Jing-shen  45n69 Tateno Masami  149n6 Taylor, Keith  103n23, 104, 108, 109–110, 115, 123, 124 theatrical performance. See oral performance; Peking opera; plays

321 Tibet: Buddhist canon written in  6, 46–47 and classical Chinese language  24, 26 Tibetan script  6, 7, 22, 33–34, 60, 72 Tillman, Hoyt  200n6 Tōdō Sukenori  43n61 Tokugawa Mitsukuni (1628–1701)  150– 151n13, 159 Tokuno, Kyoku  31n6 Tong Yonggong  181n32 T’ongmun’gwan chi [Compendium of the Interpreter’s Bureau]  75n59, 84n89 Tongyin zhihui  188n51 Topik, Steven  4n5 Trambalolo, Daniel  13–15, 147–168 Trần Ngạc (?–1391)  101 Trần Nhân Tông (Trần Khâm  1258– 1308)  100 vernacular poetry of  99, 102 Trần Trọng Kim  98–99n5 Trần Xuâ Ngọ Lan  117n61 transformation texts. See bianwen translation, “circumlocutionary translationese”  22 Tranter, Nicholas  48n83 Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc (Lê empress)  112 Tsuchiya Michio  223n12 Tsujimoto Masahi  231n35, 232n36, 233, 240n63 Tsukamoto Manabu  147n1, 149n7, 159n45 Tsukamoto Zenryū  45n70 Ueda Akinari (1734–1809)  142, 239n58 Ueda, Atsuko  13, 16–18, 21, 22, 220–253, 263n23 Ueda Kazutoshi (1867–1937)  220, 249 Ueno Masuzō  149n7 Uighur script  6, 7, 33, 46, 147 Vande Walle, W.F., 161n52, 161n52 Varo, Francisco (1627–1687)  258n9 Vermeersch, Sem  38n38, 39n43, 40n46, 49n86 vernacular explication: Cho’oe Sejin’s Comprehensive Explanation of the Four Tones  74, 74n56 and the cultivation of classical learning  61, 74

322 vernacular explication (cont.): Hồ Quý Ly’s Vernacular Explication of the [Book of] Songs  103, 104 and Korean Buddhism  40, 42, 74 Pak Che-ga’s criticism of  89 Pak T’ongsa ŏnhae [Vernacular Explication of Interpreter Pak]  73–75, 73n53 See also Chỉ nam phẩm ngọc âm gải nghĩa (Explication of the Guide to the Jeweled Sounds); kundoku (reading conventions) vernacular fiction: baihua novels translated into vernacular Japanese  141 and bianwen (transformation texts)  261–262, 263, 265, 273, 273–274n45 gesaku (Japanese “playful” literature)  142 mix of baihua and literary Chinese found in  19, 21 mix of spoken Japanese and earlier, classical forms of the vernacular in Edo period forms of  129 Saikaku’s Kōshoku ichidai otoko (Life of an Amorous Man)  137 zhanghui xiaoshuo (“vernacular novels”)  254–255 vernacularization: of Buddhist texts in Korea  36, 37, 40–41 and the spread of Buddhism  29–32 in the Tangut and Khitan Empires  33–35, 36 in Vietnam  36–37, 104–108, 110, 125 and ethnic identity  265, 280–282 and European essentialist assumptions linking tongue and blood  279– 281, 291, 296 inter-vernacular translation  130, 131, 139, 141–145 and national identity  6–8, 21–22, 25–26 and baihua  19–20, 259–261, 266– 267, 295–296, 295n88 genbun’itchi movement of Meiji Japan  220, 220n1, 230, 243, 262–263, 293

Index in Vietnam  98–99n5, 99, 103–104, 125 as other than gradual and inevitable  61 and the separation of writing and speech in Chinese  255–256, 256n7, 259 textualization of vernacular medicine  14–15, 147, 153–159 vernacular translation into non-Chinese script by the Tanguts  6–7, 33–35 See also hybridized literature; language reform vernacular language: Japanese types of kobun (“high classical language”)  129, 229 wakan-konkōbun (mixed Sino-Japanese vernacular style)  130, 131, 134, 136, 136n15, 139 zokugo (lit., “vulgar”)  129, 140, 142– 143, 153 Nogŏltae; Nogŏltae Ŏnhae [Nogŏltae; Vernacular explication of Nogŏltae] (14th–17th cents)  73, 74, 74nn54,58, 75 See also classical/vernacular dichotomy; demotic vernacular vernacular writing systems: in Japan hiragana  129 kokubun (“Japanese” writing)  221n5 man’yōgana  130–131 wakan-konkōbun (mixed Sino-Japanese vernacular style)  129–130, 131, 134, 136, 136n15, 139, 139 See also alphabetization; baihua; Nôm script; script invention; script reform; scripts; writing systems Verschuer, Charlotte von  42nn55–56 vocalization: of Chinese without being able to speak Chinese  291, 291–292n81 native oral renditions of written Chinese  256n7, 291–292 See also spoken language wabun (Japanese classical prose style)  14, 134 waka (classical Japanese poetry)  132, 136, 139–140, 142, 143

323

Index verse summaries of materia medica  149 wakan-konkōbun (mixed Sino-Japanese vernacular style)  129–130, 131, 134, 136, 136n15, 139, 139 See also vernacular writing systems Wakan rōeishū (Collection of Japanese and Chinese Poems to Sing)  11, 131–133, 141–142, 143 Wakan rōeishū shichū (Wakan rōeishū Private Commentary or Shichū Commentary)  133, 133n8, 134 Walraven, Boudewijn  59n4 Walravens, Hartmut  47n79 Wan Runming  170nn6-8 Wang Bi (226–249)  118–119n64, 118–119 Wang Chen  287n73 Wang Hui  264n27 Wang Sixiang  2, 7, 8–10, 58–95 Wang Yangming (1472–1528)  202–203 Wang Zhen-ping  42n55 Watanabe Shūjirō  237n52 Way Learning (Daoxue) tradition  199– 200 See also Neo-Confucianism Weber, Max  280 Wells, W. Scott  59n4 wendu (literary pronunciation)  271n40, 279, 279n55, 288, 288–290, 289–290n78 See also pronunciation Wentong  187n49 wenyan (“written speech”): as a modern term  271, 271nn40–42 and “classical writing”  258, 271, 278 and the May Fourth baihua writing movement  257, 260–261 See also dead languages of the past; Literary Sinitic; p’iltam (lit., “brush talk”; written conversations); spoken language; wendu West, Stephen  276n51 Whitman, John  292n82 Whitmore, J.K., 102n19 women: classical literacy of the elite  213, 215 educated in Buddhist temples  124, 198 exclusion from the civil examination system of  210, 213 Kōken (r. 749–758)  42

nüshu syllabary used to represent Southern Xiang  124 reference to a female author in the Chỉ nam  122n71 and the role of gender in linguistic/ inscription practices in Chosŏn society  87n94, 88 1654 commentary on the Heart Sūtra printed by a Vietnamese nun  36 spoken language of illiterate women in China viewed as similar to literary language by Chosŏn scholar Pak Chega  89 vernacular writing embraced by  88, 101, 103, 124, 139 Woodside, Alexander  98n5, 200n5 writing systems: localized forms of  291n80, 291–293, 292–293n83 See also alphabetization; baihua; script invention; script reform; scripts; vernacular writing systems; wenyan Wu Jingzi (1701–1754)  201 Wu, Shengqing  19n16 Xi Lin  188nn51–52 Xiao Qiqing  67nn33–34 xiaoshuo: as an elusive concept  254–255, 255n3 zhanghui xiaoshuo (“vernacular novels”)  19, 21, 254–255 See also baihua; vernacular fiction Xikao daquan [A Comprehensive collection of Peking opera]  277n53 xing-sheng (picto-phonetic)  289n77 Xiong Shibo  179n27 Xixia: Chinese origins of the term  32 See also Tangut Empire Xuezheng quanshu [Comprehensive documents on education and governance]  286n72, 289n75 Yakazu Dōmei  156n38 Yamada Keiji  160n51 Yamamoto Masahide  220n1, 230n31, 247n78 Yamawaki Tōyō  148n3 Yamazaki Makoto  132n2, 133n8

324 Yang, Han-Sung  57n38 Yang Ojin  75n59 Yang Ruisong  22n21 Yasuda Toshiaki  220nn1,3 Ye Quanhong  62n17, 64nn20–21 Yi Saek (1328–1396)  64–65, 67 Yi Sŏkhyŏng (1415–1477)  76–77 Yi Kibaek  61n10 Yi-xing (1747–1809)  184, 184n40, 186 Yokota Fuyuhiko  149n4, 151n15, 154n26, 155n33, 155n37 Yu Hŭich’un (1513–1577)  69, 76n63, 82–83 Yu Hyŏngwŏn (1622–1673)  88 Yu, Li  176n21 Yu, Pauline  200n5 Yu Sun (1441–1517)  68–70, 69n39 yulu (oral records)  59n3, 274–276 See also spoken language Yun Hyŏngdu  40nn48–49 Yūrin (fourteenth century monk-doctor)  151 Zamenhof, L.L., 270

Index zhanghui xiaoshuo (“vernacular novels”)  19, 21, 254–255 See also vernacular fiction Zhang Meilan  269n35 Zhang Ning (1426–1496)  81n84, 82, 86n92 Zhang Shilu  278 Zhao Yuanren [Chao Yuen Ren]  261 Zhikuan and Peikuan, Qingwen zhonghui (Comprehensive collection of Qing writing)  169n1, 186 Zhou, Gang  259n12, 269n36, 272n43 Zhu Xi (1130–1200)  103, 199, 274–276 zi (characters): as general term for Manchu writing  178, 180–181 See also Chinese characters (Ch. hanzi); Manchu script; Sino-script Zi, Etienne  200n5, 216n30 zokugo (lit., “vulgar language”): contrasted with, kobun (“high classical language”)  129 use of  140, 142–143, 153 See also vernacular language