The Perils of Interpreting

The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire

Henrietta Harrison

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691225470
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

A fascinating history of China's relations with the West—told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translators The 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West. In The Perils of Interpreting, Henrietta Harrison presents a more nuanced picture, ingeniously shifting the historical lens to focus on Macartney's two interpreters at that meeting—Li Zibiao and George Thomas Staunton. Who were these two men? How did they intervene in the exchanges that they mediated? And what did these exchanges mean for them? From Galway to Chengde, and from political intrigues to personal encounters, Harrison reassesses a pivotal moment in relations between China and Britain. She shows that there were Chinese who were familiar with the West, but growing tensions endangered those who embraced both cultures and would eventually culminate in the Opium Wars.Harrison demonstrates that the Qing court's ignorance about the British did not simply happen, but was manufactured through the repression of cultural go-betweens like Li and Staunton. She traces Li's influence as Macartney's interpreter, the pressures Li faced in China as a result, and his later years in hiding. Staunton interpreted successfully for the British East India Company in Canton, but as Chinese anger grew against British imperial expansion in South Asia, he was compelled to flee to England. Harrison contends that in silencing expert voices, the Qing court missed an opportunity to gain insights that might have prevented a losing conflict with Britain.Uncovering the lives of two overlooked figures, The Perils of Interpreting offers an empathic argument for cross-cultural understanding in a connected world.

PART I

Lives That Crossed the World

CHAPTER ONE

The Li Family of Liangzhou

THIRTY-THREE YEARS BEFORE the Macartney embassy, in the twenty-fifth year of the reign of the Qianlong emperor, a younger son was born into a large family in the north-western Chinese frontier town of Liangzhou.¹ The family was called Li, and they gave their new son the name Zibiao. Since they were Catholics, they also gave their new son the Christian name of Jacobus (James). Many years later George Leonard Staunton commented that Li Zibiao “was a native of a part of Tartary annexed to China, and had not those features which denote a perfect Chinese origin.”² Presumably the idea came from Li himself. By presenting his background in this way, he emphasized the aspects of life in Liangzhou that would lead to his role as interpreter: the recent rapid expansion of the Qing empire westward and the long history of contact between cultures in this frontier town.

Liangzhou, now known as Wuwei, is one of the towns on the ancient Silk Road. It lies on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau where water from the snow melting in the mountains flows out across a flat fertile plain before disappearing into the sands of the Gobi Desert that stretches across to the Mongolian steppe. Because of its location the town’s history is a story of the shifting balance of power between Chinese, Mongol, and Tibetan states over the centuries. In the eighteenth century its mainly Chinese inhabitants looked back to the glories of the Tang dynasty (618–907), when a powerful and expansive Chinese state controlled the western trade routes and Wang Han wrote his Liangzhou Song:

Fine grape wine in a jade cup that shines in the moonlight,

I long to drink, but the music of the sitar player on his horse rouses me.

When I lie drunk on the sand, do not laugh at me, sir,

Since ancient times how few of those who go out to war have returned!³

The poem is one of the most famous in Chinese literature, but the grapes, the music, and the jade cup were exotic to Tang readers, and beyond the city walls lies the desert. This is a place where Chinese culture was felt and expressed intensely precisely because it was on the frontier of the Chinese world.

The ancestor of the Li family had arrived in Liangzhou sometime in the seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty collapsed in a series of destructive wars and was replaced by the Qing, whose Manchu rulers came from the frontier cultures of the northeast. The Li family came originally from Ningxia, another trading town with a long history of interaction between Chinese and central Asian peoples. They might have been merchants or soldiers or simply people fleeing from the fighting. All we know is that they identified as Chinese and that at some point members of the family joined a newly arrived religious sect and became Christians.⁴

Christianity reached this area as part of the expanding Qing state and with prestigious European missionaries whose scholarship ranged from astronomy to ancient Chinese texts, who worked on translating the Bible into Chinese, and who were also part of the imperial court. In 1697 the French Jesuits Antoine Thomas and Jean-François Gerbillon passed through Ningxia accompanying the Kangxi emperor on campaign. The Jesuits had already provided up-to-date European models for the armaments that were being manufactured for the war. Now in Ningxia Thomas predicted a partial solar eclipse. Kangxi had an official announcement sent out and called Thomas to his side to watch the eclipse and demonstrate the scientific instruments he had used.⁵

Just a few years later there was already a small group of Christian families in Liangzhou and in 1708 missionaries arrived there too. They were French Jesuits who also came on the emperor’s orders: Pierre Jartoux and Jean-Baptiste Régis were mapmakers for Kangxi. As they travelled they measured the distances they covered and made frequent observations of the sun’s meridian. They carried an unusually accurate clock, and by timing these observations, they could calculate their location in terms of longitude and latitude. In Liangzhou they observed a lunar eclipse, which they correlated with observations of the same eclipse made in Europe as a check on the coordinates they had established for the city, and on which they would base their map. They were also impressive scholars in Chinese: Jartoux wrote Chinese-language works on geometry and corresponded with the great German philosopher Leibniz, while Régis was known for having translated the ancient Chinese Classic of Changes into Latin.⁶

The Jesuits stayed only a few months in Liangzhou and were replaced by Italian Franciscans, under whom Christian conversions briefly boomed. Giovanni Maoletti made several visits and claimed to have baptised nearly a thousand people.⁷ Francesco Jovino from Naples then took over and remained in the town for many years. He was a man of few words, who combined strong spirituality and unwavering obedience to his superiors with a gift for languages and distinctly scholarly interests. All this won him the support of the local Christians even after the death of Kangxi, when the practice of their religion became increasingly dangerous. That year there was a drought, and officials in the town made strongly worded announcements against Christianity, but Jovino was protected by an unnamed Christian prince passing through the town on his way back from the wars. The new Yongzheng emperor who came to power in 1723 condemned Christianity as a heterodox sect and expelled all missionaries who were not working for the court, but nevertheless Jovino was able to remain in the town under the protection of the provincial governor. Eventually he was forced to move to Canton, where he focussed on his studies of Chinese books, but it was not long before he returned to Liangzhou.⁸

Back in Liangzhou Jovino had to live secretly in the houses of the most devoted Christians, very likely the Li family. He wrote home to his family that only his converts’ affection kept him going though badly cooked food, sleepless nights, terrible journeys, and even having to pull his beard with tweezers and cover his nose with paste in order to pass as a mule driver. Out of doors he was sometimes taken for one of the local Muslims (with their central Asian looks) and was terrified if anyone asked who he was. Most of the time, though, he was shut up in the house, “more closely enclosed than a nun,” working on the massive task of making the first ever translation of the Old Testament into Chinese. No doubt he also spent much time in prayer since he wrote a Chinese manual on Christian meditation.⁹ When Jovino died in 1737 he was buried in the Li family graveyard.¹⁰ No further missionary came, and the Christian community quickly declined. In 1746 a crackdown by the provincial governor netted twenty-eight Christians, five of them in Liangzhou. They told him that the foreign missionaries were gone and there had been no recent conversions. In time the total number of Christians in the town dropped from over a thousand to around a hundred.¹¹

Meanwhile Liangzhou was booming. As Qing forces then moved further out west, they needed to be provisioned, and much of the business passed through the town. The stability the Qing created also allowed the old Silk Road trade route to be reopened and the irrigation system to be expanded.¹² The townspeople looked back to the glories of the Tang dynasty, but when a sophisticated official from the Chinese heartlands was posted there in the 1740s, he was horrified by the vulgar extravagance of the new rich:

Today when a Liangzhou association invites friends and relatives, the guests arrive and find milk tea, sesame cakes, and deep fried dough sticks in great dishes piled high on the table, so that they are full even before the drinking starts. When the tea is finished, the table is set again this time with savoury dishes, huge wine jugs and large cups, spread all over it in confusion, so that even before the food is eaten the guests are also drunk. Then they put out five main dishes accompanied by four more plates, and a vast amount of food is left over, so that in the end the guest is drunk and stuffed so full that he throws down his chopsticks and longs to leave.¹³

FIGURE 1.1. Liangzhou in 1910 after the wars of the late nineteenth century had destroyed much of its eighteenth-century glory.

Despite this prosperity, it was more than twenty years before another Catholic priest visited Liangzhou. The man who eventually came in 1758 was suited to the times and a very different type from the quiet and ascetic Jovino. He was a colourful character: charismatic, intensely devout, massively ambitious, a big eater, and a smart dresser. But probably the most notable thing about him for the Liangzhou Christians was that he was Chinese. Guo Yuanxing was in fact from Shanxi, the home province of many of the merchants trading in Liangzhou. He had been born into a wealthy family (one uncle was a county magistrate) but orphaned early in life. At the age of seventeen he had converted to Christianity, and for nearly ten years he worked as an assistant to one of the European missionaries, who was hugely impressed and decided to send him to Naples, where a college had recently been established to train Chinese as priests. There he was an outstanding student and was complimented by the pope on his final examination, leaving him with a very high opinion of himself that was not always easy for later colleagues.¹⁴

The Li family had remained leaders of the small Christian community and welcomed Guo Yuanxing as they had Jovino. When he came again in 1761 he was able to baptise Li Fangji’s new son Li Zibiao, who had born a year earlier.¹⁵ It is possible that it was at this moment that Li Fangji first considered the idea of sending the child to train for the priesthood in Europe. This was a large family, so dedicating Li Zibiao to the church would not deprive Li Fangji of an heir. An older son, Li Zichang, already in his mid-twenties, had joined the Green Standard forces based in the town as a regular soldier and embarked on a military career. Li Zichang would have been married by this age, so his son Li Jiong was probably around the same age as Li Zibiao. So Li Fangji already had a grandson as well as, very likely, other sons born in the years since Li Zichang’s birth.¹⁶

Li Fangji’s plans for this youngest son were no doubt linked to renewed hopes for the church. The Christian community in Liangzhou had begun to grow again and even acquired a new building to use as a church. It was still easy to get up a riot against the Christians, and the number of conversions was nothing like in the glory days of the 1720s, but nevertheless the church was growing: between the 1760s and 1790s the number of Christians in the town more than doubled.¹⁷ The only problem was that it was so difficult for priests to get so far out west.

Although Li Fangji’s ambitious plans were for the church, they reflected the atmosphere in the town at this time. Wealthy merchants in Liangzhou were also funding schools and scholarship through which they hoped to promote their sons to the highest levels of the national government. In the whole of the Ming dynasty only a single man from Liangzhou ...