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Part I
Political contexts and colonialism
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1Interpreting and its politics
Interpreters in the early Sino-British contacts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Binhua Wang and Fang Tang
Introduction
“The historiography of interpreting is encumbered by some fundamental problems” (Pöchhacker 2004: 159), mainly because of the evanescent nature of the activity of interpreting. Due to the scarcity of historical records, it is often an arduous task for researchers to locate the marginal and sparse references to interpreters and their activity. In spite of the difficulties in collecting scarce historical records, this chapter presents a depiction of interpreters at the time of the early Sino-British contacts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on historical archives from various sources. Interpreters who were involved in a number of major historical events were discovered and their roles are analyzed. These events include:
1“The Flint Affair” (1757–1759), in which James Flint, the first Chinese interpreter of the East India Company and the first such individual in British history, broke the court protocol of the Qing Empire by making a direct complaint to Emperor Qianlong. This triggered the thorough implementation of Qing Empire state policy on foreign trade known as the “Single Port Trading System”, whereby trading ships from overseas were barred from all Chinese ports except Canton.
2“The Thirteen Hongs” (1757–1842), also known as the Canton System of foreign trade in China, where compradors (native agents of foreign firms in China) and tongshi (通事, a term referring to communicators of affairs or linguists in China) acted as interpreters for foreign traders at that time.
3“The Macartney Embassy” (1792–1794), whose mission was to convince Emperor Qianlong to ease restrictions on trade.
4“The First Opium War” (1839–1842), where interpreters on the British side not only collected military intelligence but also manipulated the translation of articles in the Treaty of Nanking. At the same time, interpreters on the Chinese side were treated as “hanjian” (漢奸, traitors), and condemned for having any connection with foreigners.
The Flint Affair (1757–1759), in which the interpreter petitioned the Emperor of the Celestial Empire
Trade between Britain and China began in 1672 with the establishment of a trading post in Taiwan by the East India Company (hereinafter referred to as “the Company”). From 1684, Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Empire allowed foreigners to trade with China in four regions, including Canton (廣州), Quanzhou (泉州), Zhangzhou (漳州) and Yuntai Mountain (雲臺山). By 1686, foreigners were permitted to live in the commercial houses in Canton, located on the Pearl River estuary.
In 1741, the Company, now operating out of Canton, employed James Flint as its Chinese interpreter, who was also the first such individual in British history to take on this role (Hamann 2004: 3). In 1736, as a teenage boy, he had been left in China by a Captain Rigby of the Company ship Normanton (Morse 1926: 276) in order to learn Chinese, as Rigby recognized the need for the Company to have its own interpreters. Flint grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese (Stifler 1938: 56-82) and adopted a Chinese name Hóng Rènhuī (洪任輝). He rose to the rank of “supercargo” in the Company, a very well-paid position, and also undertook interpreting duties.
By the mid-1750s the British wanted to expand their activities beyond the port of Canton. Therefore, from 1755 onwards, Flint headed delegations of businessmen who began trading in Ningbo in the Zhejiang province.
Initially, they were welcomed by the local officials. Moreover, because the tariffs and other charges in Ningbo were lower than Canton, more and more trade was conducted there. However, the booming trade was soon opposed by both Canton and Zhejiang. For one thing, there were concerns that it might spoil the monopoly and the related corruption and extortion enjoyed by Canton; further, it might create additional administrative responsibility for the local officials in Zhejiang. For these reasons, the governors-general of Min-Zhe and Canton made efforts to lobby senior officials to forbid foreign trade in Ningbo, which finally led to Emperor Qianlong’s announcement of the Single Port Trading System (一口通商) in 1757. According to this system, trading ships from overseas were barred from all Chinese ports except the port of Canton (Gao and Feng 2003: 141).
Being reluctant to acquiesce in this new trade policy, the Company sent Flint to try trading at Ningbo again. He was also instructed that if such an attempt failed, he should sail directly to Tianjin and petition Emperor Qianlong. In 1759, Flint pretended to sail back to Britain, yet actually headed north to Ningbo. His plan was discovered upon arrival in Dinghai. A contingent of the Qing army was waiting for him there and advised him to leave Ningbo. After this failure, Flint headed straight for Tianjin. This time he claimed to be an English official equivalent to the fourth grade, which was approximately at the mid-point of the hierarchy of Chinese officialdom (Hucker 1958: 38). He mentioned that he had to come to Ningbo because his complaint about the Canton merchant, Li Guanghua (黎光華), who refused to pay him back silver owed, had been ignored by Li Yongbiao (李永標), the Guangdong customs supervisor (粵海關部監督), and Li Shiyao (李侍堯), the governor-general of Liangguang (Guangdong and Guangxi). Since the complaint had not been resolved at Ningbo, he, at the behest of British officials, had come to Tianjing, where he wanted to petition the emperor.
Upon arriving at Tianjing, Flint succeeded in persuading the governor-general of Zhili, whose jurisdiction extended over Tianjin, to present his complaint to Emperor Qianlong. In his seven-page petition, Flint filed several grievances, including the repudiation of Li Guanghua, the extortion of Li Yongbiao, Canton officials’ neglect of foreigners, as well as defects in the “Security Merchant System” (保商制度, or Local Merchant Guarantee System).1
Emperor Qianlong, on reading Flint’s petition, raged with anger. He responded by saying: “This matter concerns foreigners and the State. It must be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the laws of the Celestial Empire” (Anonymous 1 1759: 551). After the investigation, several officials were punished. Flint, who had attempted to break the Single Port Trading System, was confined (圈禁) in Macau for three years. While Flint could have been released on payment of $1,250, the Company chose not to do so in order to curb further exactions from Chinese officials (Lindsay 1957: 583). This incident also affected a Sichuan merchant, Liu Yabian (劉亞匾), and a translator, Lin Huai (林懷), employed by the Company’s office in Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), as they were involved in the writing and editing of Flint’s written petition. Referred to as Chinese “scoundrels” by the emperor, they were sentenced to death and beheaded in public to inform other Chinese citizens of the serious consequences of assisting “barbarians” (夷人, a term commonly used to refer to foreigners in China during this period).
After three years’ confinement, Flint went back to England on the Company ship Horsenden (see Davis 1836: 64). Contrary to Flint’s intended purpose, his action made no change to the Single Port Trading System. Worse still, in a bid to impose stricter regulation, the Qing Court introduced the “Vigilance Towards Foreign Barbarian Regulations” (防範外夷規條), known literally as “Five counter-measures against the foreign barbarians” (防夷五事), which forbade foreign traders from staying in Canton in winter, required Chinese traders to tighten control over their foreign counterparts, forbade Chinese traders to raise any loan from their foreign counterparts, reinforced the security control over the port, and forbade foreign merchants from hiring Chinese people to deliver any information on their part. The Flint Affair thus marks the Qing Court’s thorough implementation of the Single Port Trading System.
The Flint Affair draws attention to two aspects of interpreting and translation that recur down the ages. First, the interpreter/translator is viewed with suspicion by the authorities in the country where they work, and may even forfeit their lives as a result of their translation activity. One of the reasons why interpreters have been viewed with suspicion is because, like Flint’s Chinese translators, they live in two (or more) cultures and monolinguals feel they cannot trust them completely.
Second, interpreters often play multiple roles: Flint was a highly paid employee in the East India Company and, because of his language background, was also employed as an interpreter in China. Interpreting has never been solely the remit of professionals but is carried out in a very wide range of social, business, tourist, journalistic, legal and political contexts, and “is arguably the most widespread form of translation activity in the world today and has been for tens of thousands of years” (Cronin 2002: 387).
The Thirteen Hongs (1757-1842), for which compradors and tongshi acted as interpreters
As we have seen, in 1757 Emperor Qianlong limited trade with foreigners to the port of Canton. The area where foreigners were allowed to live and to conduct business and trade there was referred to as the “Thirteen Hongs” (十三行) or the “Canton Factories”. Each Hong included three or four houses one hundred yards from the river. Each house had two or three floors with the first floors as warehouses and the second and third floors as apartments. In addition, the square in front of the factories was reserved and enclosed with fences. The street immediately north of the factories was named the Thirteen Factory Street.
As a result of the Single Port Trading System, the Thirteen Hongs enjoyed a nationwide monopoly in foreign trade and produced several business magnates. According to the list of “the world’s top 50 richest men in the past 1000 years” published by The Wall Street Journal in 2001, a merchant based in the Thirteen Hongs, Wu Bingjian (伍...
