Linguistics in Action

China, for us non-Asians, has always been the end of the world: “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China,” that sort of thing. So short of romance, what are we doing here?

We’re googling our fingers off for pronunciations and geography, that’s what. The book at hand is China: A History by John Keay, and it is an estimable work. The author’s stated intent is to treat each period of the nation’s history equally, and thereby to avoid backloading the story, unduly weighting current events just because we’re close to them. (A man who understands that approach makes my heart sing.) Keay’s writing style is conversational and engaging with only a bit of snark…which, dare one say, is a tone not unlike that to which we aspire on this site. Keay has the clout of real scholarship behind him, of course. Figures and maps are sparse but excellent throughout, and the end matter gives references for further reading.

In addition to geographically distant, you also grow up knowing China is old…really old.

Which it is, although just how old is a matter of some debate, sprinkled with a bit of national pride. China enters the written record at about 1400 B.C.; we believe their prehistory to be much older, and that, of course, is where the debate comes in. Ancient China was roughly contemporary with ancient Egypt, so about 5000 B.C. for its origin, although our author does not actually commit. The Chinese creation myth is interesting: in it, the universe first existed as a mass of undifferentiated matter, which separated into the heavens and earth. The analogy the author uses is an egg, with the clear white rising to form the sky and all above it, while the yolk sank and formed the Earth. Notably absent is any sort of creator or higher power driving the action, no god separating land and water; rather, the elements organized themselves into a more harmonious pattern. The ancient Chinese name for China is zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, “middle” referring to the land’s geographic location…like all of us they thought they were the center of the Earth. There was also the sense that theirs was the land who embodied the natural “order” of the universe, the part of the earthly world that had organized itself correctly, just as the elements had at Creation. The Chinese started studying their own history early on and interpreted both historic events and planned actions in terms of their harmony with the universe. If, like me, you grew up on Charlie Chan talking about “auspicious signs” and “propitious moments,” that’s where it came from.

It was under the pre-imperial Chinese kingdom of the Shang that we uncover the first examples of written Chinese…on turtles.

The Shang (1600 – 1046 B.C.) attempted to understand the present and divine the future by heaving the thin underbelly shell of a turtle into a fire, pulling it out, and reading the cracks that result for information. Plucky researchers have tried the process and find it trickier than it appears. But having successfully gotten the shell to crack, the Shang not only read the portents implied by the cracks, they then scratched into the shell the Chinese characters for whatever signs one had divined from the fissures. These early historic writings are still legible today and their characters are understandable by modern Chinese. There have been enough dynastic changes and interruption of rule in the nation’s long history that Keay believes our notion of China as a single, old entity is based as much on a consistent language as it is on dynastic inheritance.

If you grew up with Peking and wonder where it went, read on.

The difficulties of transliterating Chinese into Western, alphabetic language are numerous. Spoken Chinese is tonal, five tones in their case, and part of the question is whether and how to capture that tonal information in written language. Additionally, written Chinese is expressed in pictograms, and you can have two very different characters that are pronounced the same way (homophones of a sort, or a classic “hash clash” for computer types). And then there’s the matter of who’s listening: early contacts with China were from a ragtag group of explorers and traders of various nationalities. Marco Polo (in China A.D. 1271-1295) comes to mind. And of course, how those guys transliterated the Chinese they learned depended on their own language rules: for example, the sound we think of as ch in English (“church”) would be rendered by a single c in Italian (“Ciao!”).

An attempt was made to standardize the transliteration of Chinese in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the resultant Wade-Giles system was widely adopted. Uptake was far from universal however…Americans used a different system, as did several other countries. Wade-Giles attempted to capture tonality, and as a result was as much about diacritical marks as it was phonetic information. (It really was terrible, even worse than French.) By the 1950s there was a desire for a better, universal system. China was politically aligned with the Soviet Union at the time, so a project was begun to transliterate Chinese into…Cyrillic. A massive project that dragged on while politics moved on…cooling Sino-Soviet relations and a bid for U.N. membership led to the decision to take the transliteration intended for the Cyrillic alphabet and now cast it in Roman letters. Sheesh. The resulting system, Pinyin, became the world standard with the admission to the United Nations in 1971…welcome to Beijing!

For much of its history, China had a very inward focus: like the United States in the nineteenth century, they found themselves with a large land mass (China is roughly the same size and has the same climates as the U.S.) in which to expand. Unlike the Japanese, they never had a period of official closure, but they were focused on expansion and contending with their land-based neighbors, less so on plying the waters. Plus, if you know your land to be All Under Heaven, why leave? Import and some costal trade developed early on, but significant commercial contact with the West was delayed until the European voyages of discovery in the early Renaissance.

With commerce comes contention, and it was balance of trade that led to the Opium Wars with the British in the nineteenth century.

Keay’s telling of the First Opium War (1839-1842) actually opens with one George Viscount Macartney of Dervock. (Presumably he carried cards.) Macartney was the first British ambassador to the Chinese, and he was presented to the Qianlong emperor of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty in 1793. Macartney, we are told, dressed for the occasion in a suit of embroidered white velvet over which he wore the white and crimson taffeta cape of the Order of the Bath, replete with large Bath brooch and chains. No, I can’t tell you about Macartney’s social life, but I got a hunch about his tailor. He accessorized with a hat topped by egret plumes. Macartney’s mission, however, was serious: the British had developed a love of tea (nobody could explain it then, either) and with it a trade imbalance. The Chinese sold the tea for hard currency, specifically silver, but imported little. Macartney’s mission was to get the Chinese to buy British and even out the trade.

It didn’t go well.

In essence, the imperial response was that they were quite happy with the tea trade and really appreciated the silver. As to importing more British goods, the Chinese found they had no need of them, as Chinese artisans and engineers were every bit the British equal. Which at that point, they were. However, events rapidly advanced. Back in Britain, the Industrial Revolution was gaining traction. And the British traders, ever savvy, began to pick up some coastal trade along southeast Asia, moving goods from country to country to fill up those empty outbound holds and goose the returns. (There’s always a fortune to be made in import/export.) The ships began carrying opium, which proved as popular in China as tea had been in England. Better margins, too…so in short order the trade imbalance was in the other direction, with “specie” flowing to England, and the Chinese government writing to Queen Victoria asking her to knock off the trade. Fat chance…we know from other sources that Victoria used, used recreationally, and like most things, was unapologetic about it. Whether that influenced official policy or not, Victoria found that she herself quite appreciated the silver, and before long British warships were blockading the Pearl River. It was at that point that the Chinese realized that while they had technical mastery of weaponry, an economy geared for workshop production could not keep up with the volume of weapons from the now-industrialized Brits.

Once stripped of linguistic difficulties, Chinese history begins to look pretty familiar. There are certainly many novelties on offer (the big eunuch war comes to mind, as do monk certificates), but civilization led to kingdom, and kingdom to empire; and empire was plagued by familiar problems of neighbors and succession. Keay does a near-miraculous job of condensing one of the oldest civilizations on record to a manageable, single volume. For comparison, China: A History's nearest competitor is an eleven-volume behemoth, the Cambridge History of China.

Not that linguistic difficulties are unimportant. As we’ve seen there was bad blood between the Chinese and the British before the onset of the Opium Wars. But actual events were triggered by the simple word, yi. In writing to Victoria, the Chinese referred to the British as yi, which could mean either “easterners” ...or, equally, “barbarians.”

Oops.