English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing, 1811–1911: A Postcolonial Perspective 9789811375712

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Xiaojia Huang

English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911 A Postcolonial Perspective

English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911

Xiaojia Huang

English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911 A Postcolonial Perspective

Xiaojia Huang School of Foreign Studies South China Normal University Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

This research has been supported by Guangdong Province Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project (广东省哲学社会科学规划项目) [Grant No. GD18WXZ15]. ISBN 978-981-13-7571-2    ISBN 978-981-13-7572-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7572-9 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

First of all, I am profoundly indebted to Professor Wang Yougui. As the usher of my entrance into the threshold of the studies of translation history, he perfectly showed me how to locate a joint point connecting Western translation theories and the treasure of Chinese history. His pioneering research on Fanyijia Lu Xun (Lu Xun as a Translator) has greatly inspired the writing of this book and contributed considerably to its theoretical framework. Without his erudition, insight, encouragement, criticism and patience, this book would never have been accomplished. My special thanks go to Professor Wang Dongfeng who not only inspired me with his series of treatises on postcolonial translation studies but also gave this book many constructive comments. I have benefited a great deal from Professor Ping Hong and Professor Feng Zhilin who have both left their imprint on this book by pointing out many errors and providing with plenty of invaluable advice for improvement and Professor Yu Dong and Professor Mo Aiping who made their contributions to the formation of the final version. I also owe my thanks to Dr. Xiong Tao at Kyushu University who sent me the materials that were badly needed for my research but seriously absent in the home libraries and Dr. Liu Wenjun who never scrupled to share with me his abundant collection of books and interesting academic ideas and Dr. Fu Linling who had lent me a couple of precious monographs that enabled me to track on the Hong Kong scholars’ research on postcolonial translation. Particularly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the editor Ms. Rebecca and her colleagues, as well as the anonymous reviewers. Without their patience, guidance and assistance, the publication of this book may have ended up a total failure.

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Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Why the Late Qing 1811–1911? ������������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 Why a Postcolonial Perspective?������������������������������������������������������    1 1.3 Conquest, Resistance and Translation as Conquest and Resistance����������������������������������������������������������������������������������    3 1.3.1 Conquest and Translation as Conquest ��������������������������������    3 1.3.2 Resistance as an Established Term of Translation Studies ����������������������������������������������������������    4 1.3.3 Redefining Resistance����������������������������������������������������������    6 1.3.4 Translation as Resistance������������������������������������������������������    6 1.4 Translation as Conquest and Resistance: An Analytical Model ������    7 1.4.1 The Causes of Translation History����������������������������������������    7 1.4.2 Aristotle’s Four Causes ��������������������������������������������������������    8 1.4.3 An Analytical Model Based on Aristotle’s Four Causes������    8 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   10 2 Translation as Conquest and Resistance: A Historical Overview ������   11 2.1 Research on Translation as Conquest ����������������������������������������������   11 2.2 Research on Translation as Resistance ��������������������������������������������   14 2.3 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   16 3 E-C Translation as Conquest in the Late Qing 1811–1911������������������   19 3.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 3.2 Bible Translation������������������������������������������������������������������������������   22 3.2.1 Bible: “The Word of God”����������������������������������������������������   22 3.2.2 “Preach the Gospel to Every Creature”��������������������������������   25 3.2.3 Terms of God: Tianzhu, Shangdi or Shen? ��������������������������   29 3.2.4 Competitive Style������������������������������������������������������������������   39 3.3 Translation of Unequal Treaties 1842–1860������������������������������������   41 3.3.1 Unequal Treaties: Covenants Between “Conqueror and Vanquished”������������������������������������������������   41 vii

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Contents

3.3.2 Translating Tributary System into Treaty System����������������   44 3.3.3 Deceiving Translation of the Sino-British Unequal Treaties ������������������������������������������������������������������   47 3.4 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   66 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   67 4 E-C Translation as Resistance in the Late Qing 1811–1911����������������   73 4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 4.2 Translation of Western Humanities��������������������������������������������������   75 4.2.1 Western Humanities: Key to China’s “Wealth and Power”��������������������������������������������������������������   75 4.2.2 Tianyanlun: Towards “Self-Strengthening and Race Preservation” ��������������������������������������������������������   76 4.2.3 Yan Fu’s Strategy: Making Shifts ����������������������������������������   78 4.2.4 Elegant Style ������������������������������������������������������������������������   85 4.3 Translation of Western Fiction����������������������������������������������������������   86 4.3.1 Fiction: “An Incredible Power to Dominate the Way of Man” ������������������������������������������������������������������   86 4.3.2 Rendering Uncle Tom’s Cabin for “Our Race is on the Verge of being Slaved” ������������������������������������������   88 4.3.3 Lin Shu’s Strategies: De-Christianization and Subjectivation����������������������������������������������������������������   90 4.3.4 Gracious Style����������������������������������������������������������������������   96 4.4 Summary ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99 5 Conclusions����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  103 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  105

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1  Why the Late Qing 1811–1911? With the rapid advances of capitalism, the nineteenth century witnessed a great surge in European colonialism. As an increasing number of countries and regions were becoming colonies during the colonial expansion, China, the sleeping giant, was unavoidably brought onto the ambitious agenda of the Western conquerors. In 1811, a religious book was rendered and published by Robert Morrison, the earliest pioneer missionary sent by London Missionary Society (LMS) to China. The very first English-to-Chinese rendition ever found at the start of the nineteenth century (Xiong 1994, p. 7) signifies the first Western attempt in a series of ideological conquests of China. In the following 100  years, from 1811 till 1911 when the Qing Dynasty was overthrown, a great number of Western books in English were translated and published in China, ushering an interesting question under the observation of this study: what are the roles played by these translations in this period? To answer this question, a proper perspective is demanded that preferably recognizes translation more than a sheer inter-textual transformation.

1.2  Why a Postcolonial Perspective? During the time-honored translation history, translation was long defined as a textual code-switching process, thus the challenges of translation research did not go beyond pondering over such questions as to how to decide in the word-for-word and sense-for-sense dilemma, or how to achieve the illusionary equivalence. As a result, the attention was mostly confined to the intra-textual linguistic variations that affect the process of translating. It was not until the 1970s that some translation researchers, led by Susan Bassnett and Andre Lefereve, commenced to realize that the focus on texts alone would not © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 X. Huang, English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7572-9_1

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solve all the problems relevant to translation. Therefore, some of them decided that translation should be studied in relation to cultural settings, thus triggering the landmark “cultural turn” in Translation Studies. Starting from the later years of the 1980s, some translation scholars who were not satisfied with the solutions to translation problems offered by cultural studies, sought to expand their research to include more peripheral factors that had long been neglected—politics, power and empire. Among them, Eric Cheyfitz, Tejaswini Niranjana, Vince Rafael, Lawrence Venuti, Haroldo de Campos display exclusive interest in the investigation of the roles that translations play within the colonial and postcolonial contexts. Their insightful researches have won them titles of postcolonial translation theorists, and their brilliant contributions have inevitably evoked a “postcolonial turn” in Translation Studies. According to Robinson (2014), postcolonial studies are traditionally defined in two ways: The study of Europe’s former colonies since independence; how they have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome the cultural legacy of colonialism during independence. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to cultures after the end of colonialism. The historical period covered is roughly the second half of the twentieth century. The study of Europe’s former colonies since they were colonized; how they have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome the cultural legacy of colonialism since its inception. ‘Postcolonial’ here refers to cultures after the beginning of colonialism. The historical period covered is roughly the modern era, beginning in the sixteenth century.1 (pp. 13–14)

It is understandable, therefore, that China, which, as a whole has not been formally and fully colonized by the Western powers since the rise of European colonialism, seems a missing link or has vanished in these so called “post-independence” (Robinson 2014, p.15) or “post-European” (Robinson 2014, p. 15) studies. However, postcolonial studies should not necessarily be confined to the periods after a country is colonized. It may include “the study of all cultures/societies/countries/nations in terms of their power relations with other cultures/etc.” (Robinson 2014, p. 14), in the context of which, postcolonialism refers to “our late-twentieth-­ century perspective on political and cultural power relations” (Robinson 2014, p. 14), or more specifically, on “how conqueror cultures have bent conquered cultures to their will; how conquered cultures have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome that coercion” (Robinson 2014, p. 14). This book adopts postcolonialism in its broadest sense, the historical period covered being “all human history” (Robinson 2014, p. 14). From this perspective, translation is recognized as endowed with a role of duality: both as an instrument of conquest and a weapon of resistance throughout the human history. In this sense, translation history does not remain archives of dull translation events and figures, but rather, the cheering truth that reveals how translation has served as a device by the vanquishers to overpower the vanquished, and how the vanquished has used translation for resistance.

 Italics in the original

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1.3  Conquest, Resistance and Translation as Conquest and Resistance

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1.3  C  onquest, Resistance and Translation as Conquest and Resistance In this book, translation is defined “not as an innocent, transparent activity” (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999, p. 2), but rather, as an instrument of conquest and a channel of resistance. Being one of the perpetual themes of postcolonial studies (Ashcroft et al. 1995), conquest and resistance, however, are unexpectedly absent from the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (2001) edited by John C.  Hawley probably because the two terms are assumed to be so self-evident that the scholars of postcolonial studies do not bother to agree upon them. However, as they frequently show up in this study as two key postcolonial concepts, a clearer distinction will undoubtedly posit this book on a safer foundation.

1.3.1  Conquest and Translation as Conquest In the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary (Extended Fourth Edition), conquest is interpreted as: “1. conquering (eg of a country and its people); defeat 2. thing got by conquering or person whose admiration or (esp) love has been gained” (Hornby 2002, p. 561). As a key word of the postcolonial studies, conquest is apparently more often known for its first definition, namely, conquering or defeating of a country and its people. In Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (2014) written by Dogalas Robinsion to review the latest findings of the postcolonial translation studies, conquest, unfortunately, is undefined, notwithstanding that it is frequently used in relation to such words as empire, imperialism, colonization, etc. In fact, “how conqueror cultures have bent conquered cultures to their will” (Robinson 2014, p. 14) in Robinson’s third categorization and description of postcolonial studies (see Sect. 1.2) has provided a cue as to how to define conquest properly, though it is not explicated in greater detail. On the other hand, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was probably the first one to initiate the concept of “translaton as conquest”. In the Gay Science published in 1882, he thinks highly of the Roman’s appropriation of Greek literature to the extent that he even envisages translation as “a form of conquest” (Nietzsche 2014, p. 262): Indeed, translation was a form of conquest. Not only did one omit what was historical; one also added allusions to the present and, above all, struck out the name of the poet and replaced it with one’s own – not with any sense of theft but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.2 (Nietzsche 2014, p. 262)

“Translation as conquest” suggests that the translator should not be bound to source text but should instead render in a way to bring his own will into full play (Zhong and Fang 2001, p. 23), which is more literarily or culturally oriented than  Italics in the original

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territorially, economically or politically related. In Translation and Empire (2014), Robinson applies such expressions as “the imperial use of translation” (Robinson 2014, p.  50), “translator-as-conqueror” (Robinson 2014, p.  59), “translation has indeed been used as a tool of colonial dominance” (Robinson 2014, p. 88), or “translation has served in many ways as a channel of empire” (Robinson 2014, p. 88) to assert the conquering or subjugating nature of translation, despite that he has never officially adopted “translation as conquest”. Inspired by Robinson’s and Nietzsche’s discussions, this book chooses to define conquest as “the processes or results of conqueror cultures/nations benting conquered cultures/nations to their will, which can be territorial, political, economic, cultural, religious, etc.”. In accordance with such a definition, “translation as conquest” in this study will be used to mean what Robinson implies—translation as an instrument of conquest.

1.3.2  Resistance as an Established Term of Translation Studies Nowadays resistance as a key word of postcolonial translation studies has been closely related to Lawrence Venuti. In the Dictionary of Translation Studies (2014) edited by Mark Shuttleworth and Moira Cowie, resistance3 is defined as follows: A term used by Venuti (1995) to refer to the strategy of translating a literary text so that it retains something of its foreignness; as such it is broadly synonymous with FOREIGNIZNG TRANSLATION. According to Venuti, the approach was conceived as a way of challenging the assumption prevalent in Anglo-American culture that the only valid way of translating is to produce a TT which reads fluently in TL and is so “transparent” that it could be mistaken for product of the target culture.4 (Shuttleworth and Cowie 2014, p. 144)

Venuti’s theory, as can be seen, has been so influential that resistance is even “broadly synonymous with FOREIGNIZNG TRANSLATION”—a strategy also recognized as initiated by himself. Therefore, it is impossible to attempt to interrogate “translation as a channel of resistance” (Robinson 2014, p. 94) or clarify resistance as a tricky and paradoxical postcolonial term without looking into Venuti’s “resistant translation”. In fact, Venuti’s resistant theory is based upon a wide spectrum of assumptions, one of which being “most of the English-language translations that have seen print since World War II, furthermore, implement fluent strategies” (Venuti 1992, p. 6). From the point of view of postcolonialism, “fluent strategies” are problematic in that A fluent strategy performs a labor of acculturation which domesticates the foreign text, making it intelligible and even familiar to the target-language reader, providing him or her with the narcissistic experience of recognizing his or her own culture in a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends the dominion of transparency with other ideological discourses over a different culture. (Venuti 1992, p. 5)  Also known as resistancy  Capital letters in the original

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By tracing and criticizing the fluency/transparency of translation that dominated the Western translation theory and practice for centuries, Venuti (1992) recognizes the strategy of acculturation or domestication as an imperial device that constructs and reinforces cultural egotism and even “cultural and economic hegemony” (p. 5) by effacing the heterogeneity in the foreign text. A remedy to this situation, according to Venuti (1992), is to apply the so called “resistant strategies” (p. 13) that facilitate in maintaining difference and diversity by holding onto the “foreignness” (p. 13) of the source text: Resistant strategies can help to preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text by producing translations which are strange and estranging, which mark the limits of dominant values in the target-language culture and hinder those values from enacting an imperialistic domestication of a cultural other. (p. 13)

For Venuti, the object to be resisted is nothing but the “dominant values in the target-­language culture”. To this end, he advocates the strategies to “help to preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text by producing translations which are strange and estranging”, namely, the foreignizing translation. It is worth mentioning that in Shuttleworth and Cowie’s Dictionary of Translation Studies (2014), foreignizing translation is also strongly associated with Venuti: Foreginizing Translation (or Minoritizing Translation) A term used by Venuti (1995) to designate the type of translation in which a TT is produced which deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original. Venuti sees the origin of such a concept in Schleiermacher, who discusses the type of translation in which “the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him”…. (Shuttleworth and Cowie 2014, p. 59)

However, this entry is considered as being oversimplified and thus a failure to communicate authentically what foreignizing translation is meant by Venuti (Wang 2008, pp.  6–7). In his founding work the Translator’s Invisibility (1995), Venuti expounds the connotations of foreignization in this way: The search for alternatives to the domesticating tradition in English-language translation leads to various foreignizing practices both in the choice of foreign texts and in the invention of translation discourses. A translator can signal the foreignness of the foreign text, not only by using a discursive strategy that deviates from the prevailing hierarchy of domestic discourse (e.g. dense archaism as opposed to fluent transparency), but also by choosing to translate a text that challenges the contemporary canon of foreign literature in the target language.5 (Venuti 1995, p. 148)

Foreignizing translation, one of the “alternatives to the domesticating tradition in English-language translation”, as noted in this statement, consists practically of two processes that are deployed on the planes of both text selection and adoption of discursive strategy. Under such circumstances, it is validated insofar as either of the processes is aimed at resisting the dominant values of the target-language culture (Wang 2008, pp. 6–7).

 Italics in this book, unless otherwise noted, are all mine.

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1.3.3  Redefining Resistance It should be noted, however, that not every researcher in postcolonial translation studies would accept Venuti’s foreignizing translation as the default meaning of resistance shown in the afore-mentioned dictionary co-edited by Shuttleworth and Cowie. Douglas Robinson, in Chap. Five “Resistance, Redirection and Retranslation” of Translation and Empire (2014), does not talk even a word about Venuti and his resistant translation—his first mention of this Italian American scholar is unexpectedly seen in the concluding chapter “Criticisms”, where he questions the legitimacy of Venuti’s resistant translation in many ways, the primary being: Whether there is only one truly ‘radical’ mode of translation that can be effective in the decolonizing process, namely a neoliteralism or foreignism coming out of the German Romantic tradition from the Schlegel brothers, Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt to Benjamin, as Niranjana and Venuti insist…. (Robinson 2014, p. 108)

On the other hand, the term “resistance” used a few times by Robinson in this book, notwithstanding that it is neither defined nor included in the attached “Glossary”, also seems irrelevant to Venuti as it points vaguely and merely to “fight[ting] oppression” (Robinson 2014, p. 88), or “resistance to colonial power” (Robinson 2014, p.  94). Anyway, Robinson’s reluctance to discuss resistance as “broadly synonymous with FOREIGNIZNG TRANSLATION” defined in the Dictionary of Translation Studies (2014) has created some room for this study to free resistance from being bound to foreignization. Given Robinson’s definitions of postcolonial translation studies, postcolonialism as well as his usages of “resistance”, this study chooses to redefine this term as “the endeavor to resist against being bullied, invaded, annexed, enslaved, colonized, or conquered as a nation whose aim is closely linked to self-strengthening and survival of a nation”. The differentials between this concept and Venuti’s are obvious: the target for resistance, from Venuti’s vantage point, is the prevailing values of the target language and culture, whereas in this study, resistance, or more specifically, national resistance, consists in defending a nation from being devoured/enslaved/vanquished, etc. For Venuti, resistance means the preference of foreignizing translation to domesticating translation, whereas from the perspective of national resistance, foreignization remains only one of the alternative strategies to assist the self-­ strengthening/preservation/salvation/revival of a nation.

1.3.4  Translation as Resistance Therefore, “translation as resistance”, or, to be more accurate, “translation as national resistance” in this book does not suggest the use of foreignizing translation for the purpose of defying the dominant values of the target-language culture, but

1.4  Translation as Conquest and Resistance: An Analytical Model

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rather, consists simply in the historical facts in which translation is exploited as a weapon to facilitate the self-strengthening/preservation/salvation/revival of a nation and oppose coercion/bully/invasion/annexation/enslavement/colonization, etc. from outside the nation. Interestingly, the usage of “resistance” as confronting foreign coercion/invasion, etc. in a nationalist stance is also seen in Venuti’s own works, notwithstanding that it is not in the least differentiated from his “resistant translation” by definition. For instance, in recognizing the translation practice by the Late Qing “scholar-­ translators” (Venuti 1998, p.  179) as “thoroughly domesticating” (Venuti 1998, p. 179), he affirms nevertheless that their aim of doing so was “to emulate and resist their foreign invaders” (p. 180).

1.4  T  ranslation as Conquest and Resistance: An Analytical Model 1.4.1  The Causes of Translation History Pym (2014) divides the research on translation history into three subareas: translation archaeology, historical criticism and explanation. Translation archaeology aims at describing the historical episodes with six “Ws”: what was translated by whom for whom, when, where with what effects, and one “H”: how. Historical criticism deals with the appraisal of the extent to which progress was prompted or handicapped, and explanation focuses on the causation of the translation events and their connections to the social changes (pp. 5–6). Given that translation history “should explain why translations were produced in a particular social time and place” (Pym 2014, p. ix), explanation should be deemed as the central question in the research of translation history, notwithstanding that it remains the only subarea “seriously absent from the Holmes map” (Pym 2014, p. 6). Explanation in the studies of translation history even “properly addresses processes of change” (Pym 2014, p. 6)—a history with no elucidation of causes will be impossible to recognize the social changes brought about by translation. The question of causes, however, fails to attract sufficient attention within the translation academia. The approaches that seek to provide a satisfactory solution, including empiricism, tend to adhere to “a controlled approach to causation” (Pym 2014, p. 146) rather than resort to a multi-dimensional model of causes. As causation is invariably more complex and dimensional than expected in most cases, Pym (2014) recommends the four causes initiated by Aristotle to embrace more ­probabilities (pp. 148–149), so that the research of translation history can be posited on a more secure cornerstone.

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1.4.2  Aristotle’s Four Causes According to Aristotle, the four causes can be observed and distinguished in the process of producing a statue: In the creation of a statue the marble is the ‘material cause’, the creation of a beautiful object is the ‘final cause’, the creation of an object with the defining characteristics of a statue is the ‘formal cause’, and the sculptor is the ‘efficient cause’. (as cited in Pym 2014, pp. 148)

Pym (2014) holds that in terms of translation, material cause can be anything needed for the making of translation, such as technology and the source text, whereas final cause refers unquestionably to the purpose for the completion of translation. Formal cause, which indicates the idea of what a translation should be like, is constantly mirrored in the characteristics of translation, and efficient cause— the translator (p. 149). The theory of four causes may “give the picture more dimensions than it has from most empiricist perspectives” (Pym 2014, p. 149). On the other hand, Pym (2014) warns that in applying the four causes to the research of translation history, two unfavorable tendencies should be eschewed: (1) to explain everything with one cause only; (2) to pay extremely equal attention to every possible cause (pp. 158–159).

1.4.3  An Analytical Model Based on Aristotle’s Four Causes This book aims at exploring the roles played by translation in the Western conquest of China during the Late Qing 1811–1911, with speical attention paid to the translation that served as an instrument of conquest and a weapon of resistance in the meantime. As postcolonialism provides more a broad perspective than a solid solution to the research questions in this study, an analytical model needs to be established for a closer observation. Inspired by Pym’s emphasis on exploring the causes of translation history and Aristotle’s dcotrine of four causes, an analytical model for the research of translation history has been formulated in this book, as illustrated in Fig. 1.1:

Analytical Model

Translators

Stylistic Choices

Translation Purpose

Text Selection

(Efficient Cause)

(Formal Cause)

(Final Cause)

(Material Cause)

Fig. 1.1  Analytical model based on Aristotle’s four causes

1.4  Translation as Conquest and Resistance: An Analytical Model

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Table 1.1  Translation as conquest & translation as resistance Translation as conquest Texts with the function of conquest are selected for translation Translation Translations are produced for purpose conquest Stylistic choices Stylistic choices facilitate conquest Translators’ Translation strategies faciliate strategies conquest

Text selection

Translation as resistance Texts with the function of resistance are selected for translation Translations are produced for resistance Stylistic choices facilitate resistance Translation strategies facilitate resistance

In interrogating the power use of translation, this model may help the researchers who wish to explore whether translation facilitates in conquest/resistance by deciding what source texts are selected and rendered by whom to serve what purpose, with what stylistic features, as manifested in Table 1.1. Lu Xun, who published an anthology of translations in 1909  in collaboration with his brother Zou Zuoren (周作人), chose to translate, in awkward Chinese with Europeanized lexical and syntactical features, the short stories from the peripheral or subordinating cultures/nations that almost all had boasted brilliant, time-honored civilizations but sadly lagged behind in modern times and were colonized by the European powers (Wang 2003, pp. 74–76), thus “deviating from late Qing practices in the selection of Western texts” (Venuti 1998, p. 184) as well as in stylistic choices. If this analytical model is used to observe Lu Xun and his brother’s renditions, questions may arise such as “how could clumsy Europeanized Chinese at the cost of fluency be envisioned as being directed for resistance?” The truth is that Lu Xun and his brother rendered in this way indeed with a political agenda, as their translated texts aimed immediately at “convey[ing] the unsettling strangeness of modern ideas and forms” (Wang 2008, p.  9), “enriching the Chinese language” (Wang 2008, p. 9), and “build[ing] a vernacular literature that was modern, not simply Westernized, earning the acceptance and esteem of modern writers in Western literatures” (Venuti 1998, p. 185), all undeniably pointing to one single destination: “ziqiang” (自强 self-strengthening) (Wang 2008, p. 9). Looked at from this perspective, it is safe to argue that the translations respectively by Lu Xun/Zou Zuoren and the old-school translators such as Yan Fu (严复) and Lin Shu (林纾) actually shared one thing in common: they were both made an instrument of resistance, when resistance is defined as “the endeavor to resist against being bullied, invaded, annexed, enslaved, colonized, or conquered as a nation whose aim is closely linked to self-strengthening and survival of a nation”, despite their distinctions in text selection, translation strategies and stylistic choices. Under such circumstances, three rules pertinent to the relations between translation purpose as the final cause and the other three constituents of the analytical model have loomed in the scene: • Selection of different texts may serve the same translation purpose • Different stylistic choices may be made for the same translation purpose • Different translation strategies may be taken for the same translation purpose

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In investigating the roles played by translation in the Late Qing, this model might offer multifarious dimensions to explore more causes, be it translation as conquest or translation as resistance.

References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (Eds.). (1995). Post-colonial studies reader. London/New York: Routledge. Bassnett, S., & Trivedi, H. (Eds.). (1999). Postcolonial theory and practice. London/New York: Routledge. Hornby, A. S. (2002). Oxford advanced learner’s English-Chinese dictionary (Extended 4th ed.). Beijing: The Commercial Press. Nietzsche, W. F. (2014). Translation as conquest. In D. Robinson (Ed.), Western translation theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche (3rd ed.) (W.  Kaufmann, Trans.) (p.  262). London/New York: Routledge. Pym, A. (2014). Method in translation history (2nd ed.). London/New York: Routledge. Robinson, D. (2014). Translation and empire: Postcolonial theories explained (3rd ed.). London/ New York: Routledge. Shuttleworth, M., & Cowie, M. (Eds.). (2014). Dictionary of translation studies (2nd ed.). London/ New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (Ed.). (1992). Rethinking translation: Discourse, subjectivity, ideology. London/New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1995). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. London/New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998). The scandals of translation: Towards an ethics of difference. London/New York: Routledge. Wang, Y. G. (2003). Lu Xun de fanyi moshi yu fanyi zhengzhi [Lu Xun’s translation mode and his translation politics]. Shangdong waiyu jiaoxue [Shandong Foreign Languages Teaching Journal], 2003(2), 74–77. Wang, D. F. (2008). Weinudi yu Lu Xun yihua fanyiguan bijiao [Lu Xun’s and Venuti’s conception of foreiginizing translation: A comparison]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 29(2), 5–10. Xiong, Y. Z. (1994). Xiyue dongjian yu wanqing shehui [The dissemination of Western learning in China and the Chinese society in the late Qing]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Zhong, W. H., & Fang, K. R. (2001). Fanyi jiushi zhengfu—Nicai de fanyi zhexue [Translation as conquest—Nietzsche’s philosophy of translation]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 22(1), 21–23.

Chapter 2

Translation as Conquest and Resistance: A Historical Overview

2.1  Research on Translation as Conquest In this book, conquest is defined as “the processes or results of conqueror cultures/ nations benting conquered cultures/nations to their will, which can be territorial, political, economic, cultural, religious, etc.” (see Sect. 1.3.1), and translation as conquest, in turn, as “translation as an instrument of conquest”, or in Robinson’s term, “a channel of empire” (Robinson 2014, p. 88). The earliest record of translation serving an empire can be traced back to the ancient Pharaonic Egypt, two millennia prior to the times of the first well-known translation theorist Cicero. However, because translation, traditionally, was not concerned with “political issues of domination and submission, assimilation and resistance” (Robinson 2014, p. 50), the imperial use of translation, especially before the so called “high Middle age” (Robinson 2014, p. 50) and the “Spanish reconquest and the age of European imperialism” (Robinson 2014, p.  50), thus had long remained beyond the vision of the translation theorists. Nevertheless, some researches show that in the ancient times of Europe, translation manifestly served as a pivotal channel of conquest. Robinson (2014) observes that Greek culture, literature, philosophy, law, etc. were appropriated through mass translation by the Romans as part of the venture to construct a glorious Roman Empire (pp.  51–52). He holds that the Roman appropriation of Greece, which emphasized the originality of the Latin language and culture, was structured not on the conception of inheriting the Greek tradition, but rather, on “the desire to displace that culture” (Copeland 1991, p.30) or on “an agenda of conquest” (Robinson 2014, p. 52). The strategies of “free translation” or “sense-for-sense translation” prevailing throughout the times of Roman Empire, likewise, noticeably stemmed from cultural appropriation, assimilation or conquest as such. The practice of appropriating the peripheral cultures through translation for the purpose of conquest was later brought into the Christian Middle Ages, whereas the focus was shifted to how to make the pre-Christian or pre-Jesus classics (including © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 X. Huang, English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7572-9_2

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the Old Testament) an integrated constituent of the Christian tradition (Robinson 2014, p. 53). Starting from the late fifteenth century, Europe saw the pervasion of the so called “empire fever” (Robinson 2014, p.  60), featuring an explicitly close connection between translation and empire. Translators were even likened to sailors and businessmen in facilitating empire in its conquest of other states: The translator’s work was an act of patriotism. He, too, as well as the voyager and merchant, could do some good for his country: he believed that foreign books were just as important for England’s destiny as the discoveries of the seamen, and he brought them into his native speech with all the enthusiasm of a conquest. (Matthiessen 1931, p. 3)

The empire fever, catalyzed by the progress of capitalism, transformed a couple of European powers into colonizers in the sixteenth century, which, in the following eras, extended their empires far beyond Europe to America, Africa, Asia and even the far-reaching Oceania. As a result of the colonial expansion, a multitude of formal colonies on these continents have become the subject matters for an overall investigation of translation as an instrument of empire. Eric Cheyfitz, an Americanist with postcolonial vision, reveals in the Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from the Tempest to Tarzan (1991) how translation was abused by the European colonizers to steal the land and appropriate the property of the natives in the New World. In this book, Cheyfitz (1991) defines translation in a broad sense: a transportation of property, a transfer of real estate, and thus “the central act of European colonization and imperialism in America” (p. 104). Tejaswini Niranjana, an American postcolonial scholar originally from India, in her illuminative book Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (1992), affirms the roles of translation in the British rule over India in the following facets: (1) created a need for the Indians to be educated or civilized by the British colonizers through translation of European literature into their languages (pp. 21, 30); (2) consolidated Britons’ “indirect rule” (p. 74) in India through translation of the ancient sanskrit laws, and “idealize[d] their own violence” (Robinson 2014, p. 81) by convincing the natives that they were ruled by their own people rather than by the British colonizers; (3) produced a bad need for European lifestyle in India via translation of European literature, thus creating a colossal market for European commodities (Niranjana 1992, p. 21). Niranjana’s work “provides many insights” (Gentzler 2001, p. 182) for any research that seeks to “show the role translation plays in the evolution of history” (Gentzler 2001 p. 182). One of the inspirations that Niranjana has brought to this book is the notion of historicity, which means that the historical complicity in the growth and expansion of European colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries consists in interrogating the “effective history” (Niranjana 1992, p. 37) of the text, encompassing questions about who uses/interprets the text, how it is used, and for what purposes, or, as Niranjana (1992) articulates, about “how the translation/re-translation worked/ works, why the text was/is translated, and who did/does the translating” (p. 37). In his Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1988), Vicente L. Rafael, another dis-

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tinguished American scholar of Tagalog Filipino origin, examines how the Spanish colonizers employed translation to conquer and convert the Tagalogs in Philippines. A great contribution that Rafael makes in this book is his unique multi-dimensional perspective on conversion and conquest: territorial, religious, cultural and even emotional. Since conquest is more than a territorial occupation, it requires the collaboration of Christian conversion that is realized primarily through translating Christian texts into the native languages. Rafael in this book has opened more possibilities both for the postcolonial translation research and practice, as he has actually initiated a postcolonial project that demands us to think historically, theoretically and methodically of the power use of translation in our own communities, a project that is “still very much in its infancy” (Robinson 2014, p. 101). In contrast to the clear progress of postcolonial translation studies abroad, the ideas of translation as conquest did not seem to draw much attention in China until the beginning of the twenty-first century when some publications began to touch on this question. In “Fanyi jiushi zhengfu—Nicai de fanyi zhexue” (Translation as Conquest— Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Translation) (2001) by Zhong Weihe (仲伟合) and Fang Kairui (方开瑞), Nietzsche’s unique conception of translation as conquest was for the first time introduced to China. “Fanyi yanjiu de houzhimin shijiao” (Postcolonial Perspective of Translation Studies) (2003) by Wang Dongfeng (王东风) is another publication that introduces translation as related to conquest to the Chinese translation academia. Wang (2003) quotes considerably from Douglas Robinson to clarify the definition of postcolonialism—a concept that proves increasingly blurry and bewildering over the decades, and agrees with Robinson in the conviction that postcolonialism introduces a perspective to envisage translation as a conspirator of colonialism, imperialism and hegemony. However, the introduction of postcolonial translation theories as such were not followed by extensive research within the domestic translation community ever since. It should be admitted that the research of translation as conquest in China is still in its infancy, the reasons of which can be outlined as follows: • The dominant ideology and discourses at home tend not to deem China as an empire, not even in its most powerful epochs in history. • Very few historical records have been left due to the long-standing marginalization of translators and translation in Chinese history. • The imperial use of translation has never been a topic in China historically, in contrast to the West that, according to Robinson (2014), boasts its first postcolonial translation theorist as early as in the times of ancient Greece. • China suffered colonial and imperial oppressions in modern times, thus the Chinese translation scholars, starting from their standpoint, justifiably tend to give more weight to translation as resistance than to translation as conquest. • The postcolonial translation theories, as Robinson (2014) argues, are “too new” (p. 104) or “two marginal” (p. 104) to provide sufficient theoretical support for the research of translation as conquest in the Chinese context.

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2.2  Research on Translation as Resistance The previous review of translation as a tool of empire in the colonial times manifests that translation remains indeed “a form of colonial violence” (Robinson 2014, p. 105). One of the virtues of postcolonial approaches to translation, as Robinson (2014) articulates, lies in recognizing the power use of translation in various communities, and, more importantly, fighting back when the power use of translation is “unjust or tyrannical” (p. 88). One is tempted to assume, therefore, that when translation is used as violence in the process of conquest, resistance may inevitably become the most immediate and natural response. Thus, the study of translation as resistance constitutes the other side of the coin. In this study, resistance has been redefined as “the endeavor to resist against being bullied, invaded, annexed, enslaved, colonized, or conquered as a nation whose aim is closely linked to self-strengthening and survival of a nation”, and “translation as resistance”, subsequently, refers to translation being exploited as a weapon to facilitate the self-strengthening/preservation/salvation/revival/survival of a nation and oppose coercion/bully/invasion/annexation/enslavement/colonization, etc. from outside the nation (see Sect. 1.3.1). As part of the attempts to Christianize the natives, some Christian terms, like Dios (God) and Jesucristo (Jesus Christ), were forced into the indigenous linguistic system during the Spanish rule over the Philippines. However, interpreted as signs of invasion, these heterogeneous words apparently were not hilariously embraced, but instead were mistranslated, wittingly and unwittingly, by the locals in many cases. Thus, mistranslation, perceived by the Spanish colonizers as symbols of stupidity, is instead identified as a special form of strategic resistance to preclude the natives from “feeling of being overwhelmed or engulfed with alienness” (Robinson 2014, p. 100). Niranjana (1992) observes that the words and history of the colonized were frequently reread, rewritten by the colonizers to restructure the colonized culture. As a result of the discourse manipulation, Hindi people were instituted as inferior and doomed to colonial dominance. She asserts that the processes of rereading, rewriting, or, in another word, retranslating, could likewise be used for decolonization (pp. 172–173). By “retranslation”, Niranjana virtually advocates a form of literalism initiated by Walter Benjamin who insists on words rather than sentences as the unit of translation, and the strategy of “holding back from communicating” (Robinson 2014, p. 93). However, this strategy, as Robinson (2014) comments, does not seem effective in exerting influence on a culture, given that communication is critical for the dissemination of influence (p. 93). In order to deconstruct the cultural imperialism reinforced by fluent translation, Venuti (1992, 1995) formulates the innovative resistance theory with foreignizing translation and abusive fidelity posited at the center. Foreignizing translation, by definition, refers to any translation strategy that defies fluency, transparency or “the Anglo-American tradition of domestication” (Venuti 1995, p.  23) in translation, whereas abusive fidelity encourages “abusing”, or challenging the dominant norms and values in the target culture by preserving the “foreignness” (Venuti 1995, p.99) i.e. the exotic elements of the foreign text. Venuti’s resistance theory has found

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notable popularity worldwide, and enormous resonances exclusively in the formal European colonies, since it is deemed as providing a valid solution to the difficult task of decolonization. Developed by the brilliant Brazilian translator Haroldo de Campos, Cannibalism (Antropofagia) as “a poetics of translation” (Vieira 1999, p. 95) has drawn increasing attention within the international translation academia over the decades. Originally referring to devouring the human body and drinking blood from it, Cannibalism has evolved into a metaphor of any action of absorbing the vigor of the source text or the source culture to nourish, renew and revitalize the target culture. By Cannibalism, an approach has been formulated with which translation as resistance is deployed in assimilating the advantages of the foreign texts and cultures to fortify the native strength for resistance. Self-translation, i.e. translating a source text by its writer into a target text, is examined in the European multilingual contexts also as “resistance practices” (Castro et al. 2017, p. 4) or “an act of resistance” (Gentzler 2017, p. vii) against hegemony, with a focus on “strategies of resistance adopted by self-translators” (Gentzler 2017, p. vii). It is argued that self-translation from the minority languages into the majority ones within Europe may serve as an instrument for the minority language groups to fight against the hegemonic norms, values or discourses by “interjecting their own worldviews and politics into their work” (Gentzler 2002, p.  197) or “inserting the minority language viewpoint into the paradigm of the majority language speakers” (Gentzler 2017, p. vii). In China, the research of translation as resistance has remarkably converged in one landmark translator: Lu Xun. In his series of publications, “Lu Xun de fanyi moshi yu fanyi zhengzhi” (Lu Xun’s Translation Mode and his Translation Politics) (2003a), “Yishi xingtai yu 20 shiji zhongguo fanyi wenxueshi 1899-1979” (Ideology and the History of Literary Translation in 20th Century China) (2003b) as well as Fanyijia Lu Xun (Lu Xun as a Translator) (2005), Wang Yougui recognizes Lu Xun as a translator with the strongest consciousness of resistance since the early twentieth century. He observes that Lu Xun’s awareness of translation as resistance is displayed on two levels: firstly, in terms of text selection, he renders exclusively the literary works of the feeble nations that suffered humiliation and oppression from the imperial powers (Wang 2003a, p. 76; 2003b, p. 13; 2005, p. 141); secondly, he adheres to a rigidly literal translation strategy that is applied at the expense of fluency (Wang 2003a, p. 76; 2005, pp. 163–164). In his article “Weinudi yu Lu Xun yihua fanyi guan bijiao” (Venuti’s and Lu Xun’s Conception of Foreignizing Translation: A Comparison) (2008), Wang Dongfeng draws on the similarities between Lu Xun and Laurence Venuti in reference to their ideas of translation as resistance on three spheres: (1) anti-fluency; (2) use of archaism as a foreignizing strategy; (3) literate elite as the target readership of translation that adopts the strategy of foreignization (Wang 2008, pp.  8–9). Despite the “surprising” similarities, one underlying distinction remains noticeable: Lu Xun applies foreignization chiefly for self-salvation, whereas Venuti, a scholar brought up in hegemonic cultures, preferably envisages this very strategy as an underlying agent for self-oppression (Wang 2008, p. 9).

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2.3  Summary The previous literature review has revisited the major achievements made at home and abroad in the studies of translation as conquest and resistance over the decades, among which two most significant ones can be hereby outlined as follows: • Historicization and contextualization of translation both as conquest and resistance, thus presenting a picture as to how translation serves both ends. • Recognization of the dual role of translation both as a tool of empire and a conduit of resistance in some formal colonies of Europe. Meanwhile, some problems remain intact, which hopefully will be solved by this book, partially or wholly: • The picture of translation as conquest and resistance, albeit clear enough, is not complete, as many former European colonies, quasi-colonies, semi-colonies and countries that characterize the power use of translation remain in silence or have yet to make adequate utterances (e.g. China). • The research on translation as conquest is outweighed by the research on translation as resistance, especially in China. • Lack of a systematic theoretical framework to scrutinize the causes of translation as conquest and resistance.

References Castro, O., Mainer, S., & Page, S. (2017). Introduction: Self-translating, from minorisation to empowerment. In O.  Castro, S.  Mainer, & S.  Page (Eds.), Self-translation and power: Negotiating identities in European multilingual contexts (pp.  1–22). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cheyfitz, E. (1991). The poetics of imperialism: Translation and colonization from the tempest to tarzan. New York: Oxford University Press. Copeland, R. (1991). Rhetoric, hermeneutics, and translation in the middle ages: Academic traditions and vernacular texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gentzler, E. (2001). Contemporary translation theories. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gentzler, E. (2002). Translation, poststructualism and power. In M.  Tymoczko & E.  Gentzler (Eds.), Translation and power (pp. 195–218). Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Gentzler, E. (2017). Forword. In O.  Castro, S.  Mainer, & S.  Page (Eds.), Self-translation and power: Negotiating identities in European multilingual contexts (pp. v–viii). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Matthiessen, F.  O. (1931). Translation, an Elizabethan art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niranjana, T. (1992). Sitting translation: History, post-structuralism, and the colonial context. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Rafael, V. L. (1988/1993). Contracting colonialism: Translation and Christian conversion in tagalog society under early Spanish rule (Rev), Durham: Duke University Press. Robinson, D. (2014). Translation and empire: Postcolonial theories explained (3rd ed.). London/ New York: Routledge.

References

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Venuti, L. (Ed.). (1992). Rethinking translation: Discourse, subjectivity, ideology. London/New York: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. London/New York: Routledge. Vieira, E. R. P. (1999). Liberating calibans: Readings of antropofagia and haroldo de Campos’poetics of transcreation. In S. Bassnett & T. Harish (Eds.), Post-colonial translation: Theory and practice (pp. 95–109). London/New York: Pinter. Wang, D.  F. (2003). Fanyi yanjiu de houzhimin shijiao [Postcolonial perspective of translation studies]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 24(4), 3–8. Wang, Y. G. (2003a). Lu Xun de fanyi Moshi yu fanyi zhengzhi [Lu Xun’s translation mode and his translation politics]. Shangdong waiyu jiaoxue [Shandong Foreign Languages Teaching Journal], 2003(2), 74–77. Wang, Y. G. (2003b). Yishi Xingtai yu 20 shiji zhongguo fanyi wenxueshi 1899–1979 [Ideology and the history of literary translation in twentieth century China]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 21(5), 11–15. Wang, Y. G. (2005). Fanyijia Lu Xun [Lu Xun as a translator]. Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe. Wang, D. F. (2008). Weinudi yu Lu Xun yiihua fanyiguan bijiao [Lu Xun’s and Venuti’s conception of foreiginizing translation: A comparison]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 29(2), 5–10. Zhong, W. H., & Fang, K. R. (2001). Fanyi jiushi zhengfu—Nicai de fanyi zhexue [Translation as conquest—Nietzsche’s philosophy of translation]. Zhongguo fanyi [Chinese Translators Journal], 22(1), 21–23.

Chapter 3

E-C Translation as Conquest in the Late Qing 1811–1911

3.1  Introduction The wealth and prosperity of the Orient, particularly of the Middle Kingdom portrayed in Marco Polo’s adventures had been such an enduring stimulator to the Occident that when the distance between the East and West was drastically bridged by the advances of navigation technology in the sixteenth century, the Westerners commenced to transcend their own continent to seek their fortune in the rest of the world—Africa, America, Oceania and Asia, thus creating the new era of colonization. The Portuguese ascended as the earliest Western plunderers to take possession of Macau by means of bribes and made it a trade base and military outpost, followed by the Hollanders who seized hold of Taiwan in the year 1624. Being the most invincible ocean lord at the end of sixteenth century, Spain, after the seizure of the Philippines, forced incursion into the Middle Kingdom onto its ambitious agenda in 1586, though it was not executed eventually due to Spain’s being stuck in the Anglo–Spanish War (Zhang 2003, pp. 101–121). Then the Britons came upon the stage. In 1583, Queen Elizabeth I made her first attempt to build trade ties with the Celestial Empire by sending a merchant with a letter to Emperor Wanli (万历) of Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). This messenger, named John Newberry, unfortunately was arrested by the Portuguese in Hormoz and failed to reach China in the long run (Zhang 2003, p. 131). In 1637, a British fleet led by Captain Weddell intruded Canton to impose trade to the locals, which has been envisioned as the very first effective British operation that “initiated the establishment of Sino-British connection”1 (Hu 2010, p.  30). During the war between the Manchus and the Ming Loyalists across the Taiwan Strait in the mid-­ seventeenth century, King James I sold ammunitions to both sides, exultantly and 1  Citations from sources in Chinese in this book, unless otherwise noted, are translated all by the author.

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unscrupulously, in exchange for ships of tea, porcelain, as well as silver that filled the British Exchequer. When Emperor Kangxi (康熙) in 1684 removed the ban on maritime trade imposed since the previous dynasty, British merchants were for the first time permitted to set up trade firms in Canton. By the end of the eighteenth century when Britain had amounted to an economic, military, artistic and technological height not seen in the Occident perhaps since Suetonius’ Rome, it decided to send diplomatic missions to build treaty relations with China—the biggest potential material provider and commodity consumer in the world. In 1793, a huge British delegation headed by a seasoned diplomat George Macartney arrived at the coast of China, with over 600 fancy gifts epitomizing the pinnacle of British technology and civilization, and a tough mission of signing a “friendly” treaty of alliance to open the door of this self-sufficient empire to the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the requests submitted by Macartney to Emperor Qianlong (乾隆) turned out not in the least “friendly”, especially the intolerable cession of a small isle as the base for British merchants that was repudiated by the emperor as “exclusively unacceptable” (Hu 2010, p.  35). For the first time, the Celestial Empire was confronted with an envoy that arrived not as a tribute bearer, or “a vassal paying tribute to the overlord of a superior civilization” (Hanes & Sanello 2002, p. 15), but as a covetous conquistador. In the following years prior to the outbreak of the first Opium War 1840–1842, the embassies that came with the same purpose, without exception, returned empty-­ handed. Since then, Canton remained the only port open to the “barbarians”, where foreign trade was dominated unchangeably by the so called “Canton System” (Fairbank 1978, p.  163) —a regime that rigidly implemented the “restriction of Sino-foreign trade to Canton” (Fairbank 1978, p. 213) in contrast to the spirit of free trade advocated by the burgeoning colonialist countries, before it was ultimately replaced by what is known as the “Treaty System” (Fairbank 1978, p. 211) after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking2 in 1842. In his book Other Cultures: Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology (1964), John Beattie recognizes administration, trade, as well as religious missions as “three significant branches of the colonial enterprise” (Niranjana 1992, p. 72). It is indeed true that since the rise of European colonization, Christianity, as the most dominant faith in the West, had been widely promulgated in many parts of the world, with overt intentions to convert the indigenous lands and peoples. In the New Testament, the “Kingdom of God” is compared to leaven—“which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (LaTourette 1937, p. ix), and more vividly, to a mustard seed—“which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds of the earth; but when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs” (LaTourette 1937, p. ix). These metaphors unveil the expansionary and subjugating nature of Christianity seen as “the only religion fitted for universal adoption and the only one capable of conducting the kingdoms of the world to immortal felicity” (“The Bible,” 1835, p. 298).  Also known as the Treaty of Nanjing

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Christianity as an aggressive religion could as well be best revealed in the confession by the American social activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton: The Christian, in his love to all mankind, wait for the majority of the benighted heathen to ask him for the gospel? No; unasked and unwelcomed, he crosses the trackless ocean, rolls off the mountain of superstition that oppresses the human mind, proclaims the immortality of the soul, the dignity of manhood, the right of all to be free and happy. (1854, as cited in Liu 2004, p. 157)

Nothwithstanding the ostensibly obscure and even “controversial” (Cox 2008, p. 3) connection between religion and empire, Christianity in the era of colonization indeed played a role so picturesque and thought-provoking in an anonymous story popular in South Africa: “When the white man came to our country, he had the Bible and we had the land. The white man said, ‘Let us pray.’ After the prayer, the white man had the land and we had the Bible” (Mofokeng 1988, p. 34). In fact, the complicity of Christianity in colonial expansion has even been unexpectedly acknowledged from within the missionary communities: The rapid development of the nations in Europe, with their wide programme of discovery and occupation, was shared in by the Roman Catholic Church. When Catholic nations like France, Spain, and Portugal undertook schemes of colonisation it was inevitable that the Church should share in the enterprise. (Mcneur 1935, p. 73)

It is well established nowadays that the earliest Christian operations in China occurred in the seventh century when the first messengers were sent from the Nestorian Church, and recurred in the thirteenth century, when the Middle Kingdom was under the reign of Mongols. In the mid-sixteenth century, Francis Xavier sent by the Jesuit Society, a faction of the Roman Catholic, became the first herald to set foot on the coast of China since the age of European expansion. He was followed by more peers, including Matteo Ricci who even obtained the permission to preach the gospel to the learned scholars and high-ranking officials in the court of Ming Dynasty. During this period, the Christian missions as part of the colonial enterprise can be evidenced by the fact that the Jesuits who arrived in the Celestial Empire were practically “aided by the Portuguese colony in Macao” (LaTourette 1961, p. 433). Christianity was disseminated rapidly “under the friendly eye of the Manchu emperor” (LaTourette 1961, p. 433) to the extent that by the outset of the eighteenth century it had boasted approximately 200, 000– 300,000 converts that scattered almost all over the Celestial Empire. Christianity in the eighteenth century thus witnessed an unprecedented opportunity for spiritual conquest of China. However, this “gold opportunity” (Mcneur 1935, p. 77) desperately wildered away when the Celestial Empire, irritated by Pope Clement XI’s decree to challenge Emperor Kangxi’s royal interpretation of Tian (天 heaven) as “the True God”, decided to shut its door to Christianity. It was not until 1844 when the Qing Dynasty, trounced by Great Britain in the first Opium War, was forced to enact a “tolerance edict” (Mcneur 1935, p. 80) in the name of Emperor Daoguang (道光) that Christianity gained readmission into China. Despite that Britain brought the renewal of Christianity in China, the Protestant countries as a whole had not been remarkably involved in the “earlier discoveries

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and conquests by European nations” (Mcneur 1935, p. 83) by then. It was not until its entrance into China that Protestantism suddenly “made more rapid progress and touched the life of the country through a greater variety of channels” (LaTourette 1961, p. 436). The channels, or the so called “Protestant approach [es]” (LaTourette 1961, p.  439) included education, introduction of Western medicine and surgery, importation of Western learning, and most importantly, the translation of the Bible that was initiated by Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary sent to China.

3.2  Bible Translation 3.2.1  Bible: “The Word of God” The word Bible, a transliteration from the Greek word biblia, meaning the books, broadly refer to the collections of the sacred scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity (Rogerson 2005, p.  1). This study restricts its investigation to the Christian Bible3 that is divided into Old Testament containing 39 books of Hebrew Scriptures, and New Testament consisting of 27 books central to the Christian faith. To the apostles of Christianity, however, the Bible means far more than the mere compilation of the texts and books that communicate Christian information in general; it is God’s instructions, oracles, revelations, or more specifically, “the Word of God” (Barr 1977, p. 72), which implies “Bible inerrancy”—an underlying Christian conception that primarily emphasizes the infallibility of the Bible as it “was verbally inspired by God” (Rogerson 2005, p. 126), the almighty and omniscient God. Besides, God’s Word also indicates that the Bible transcends any production of knowledge by human beings: What human strength could not do, God has accomplished; and in giving to his creatures a revelation of his holy will, has opened before them a world of eternal glory. Compared with the pages of God’s living oracles, the greatest productions of uninspired poets, historians, and philosophers, are as the light of the glowworm before the noonday sun. No mortal tongue can adequately describe the excellency of the divine word! (“Chinese Version,” 1835, p. 249)

Generally, although the Bible as God’s Word is institutionalized within Christianity, not all Churches consider it as the mere infallible source of Christian doctrine. For the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, the Bible remains but one of three authorities for God’s revelation, the other two being the Sacred Tradition and episcopacy (Mathison 2001, pp. 209–235). In other words, from the perspective of the non-Protestant Christians, the Bible has to “be interpreted in and by the church” (Mathison 2001, p. 267), with the latter being regarded as the sole authority to interprete the Sacred Scriptures and even decide which books are in conformity with the biblical canon through its tradition.  Also known as the Holy Bible

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In contrast, with no radical defiance of the significance of Christian history and tradition as well as the annotations by the priests, the Protestants seek to envision the Bible as the ultimate authority in terms of both faith and practice, as explicated in Smalcald Articles by Martin Luther: “The true rule is this: God’s Word shall establish articles of faith, and no one else, not even an angel can do so” (Luther 1921, p. 467). An anonymous Protestant missionary that served in China also illustrates the Bible as the exclusive source of the faith of all human beings: The Bible contains the only system of faith and practice, which is in all respects adapted to the wants of the whole human family. The declarations of its Author, and the whole tenor of its doctrines, precepts, and ritual, all unite to prove its suitableness both to the internal character and external circumstances of man, in every state of society and in every part of the earth. (“The Bible,” 1835, p. 297)

The adherence to the Bible as the sole authority, exclusive of the involvement of other texts either from the legacy of the Christian tradition or from the clergy, is now identified as Sola Scriptura,4 a doctrine followed by the Protestants by virtue of the five biblical characteristics: inspiration, authority, clarity, efficacy, and sufficiency: • Inspiration: The Bible is conceived not as God’s own handwriting, but as elaborated by the Holy Spirit inspired by God who spoke through the prophets. The Holy Spirit and prophets as authors of the Bible secure its authenticity because they are inspired by God, whereas the apocryphal books, whose authors are not the Holy Spirit or the prophets, are erroneous and thus must be excluded from the Bible. As a result, “every part of the entire of Scripture was given by inspiration of God, so that the whole of Scripture is the very Word of God” (Mathison 2001, p. 261). • Authority: As a divine carrier of the word of God, the Bible should be acknowledged as “the sole source of revelation” (Mathison 2001, p.  255) and thus accepted as the “sole basis of authority” (Ryrie 1986, p. 22). Every doctrine of the Bible is the edification of God and hence should be unconditionally acceded to; every rule of the Bible is the command of God himself, thus requiring unreserved subordination. • Clarity: Also known as “perspicurity” (Mathison 2001, p. 279), which means all doctrines and commands of the Christian faith are clearly stated in the Bible to ensure its easy accessibility for every reader and worshiper who is needless of any exceptional training and teaching. In other words, no other texts are demanded to facilitate in elucidating God’s Word, nor the Church, clergymen or ecumenical council should be involved in construing the revelation from God. • Efficacy: Referring to the effectiveness of the Bible, efficacy suggests that the Scriptures, endowed with the power of the Holy Spirit, will inevitably exert its influence on human beings, thus generating faith and submission among them. The consent to its doctrine is not enforced through logical argumentation, but rather through the creation of the accord of faith (Graebner 1910, pp. 11–12).

 Latin for “by scriptures alone”

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• Sufficiency: The Bible remains a piece of “inherently infallible” (Mathison 2001, p.  262) work from the day it was born, as it provides any divinely revealed knowledge that suffices for one’s salvation or leading a Christian life; the Bible is unblemished to the extent that it requires no extension by tradition, interpretation by the authorities of the Church, or rejuvenation with any latest revelation or modern advance of doctrine. The Protestants’ impulse to render the Bible into various vernacular languages and distribute it worldwide, visibly, is highly motivated by the singular authority of the Scriptures, based on which they assert that each Christian should read the Bible for him/herself and evaluate what s/he has been taught with the Bible. Similarly, the hypothesis of this study that the Bible conveys every element for spiritual conquest through its textualization in the Chinese language is also largely grounded on the five biblical characteristics that constitute Sola Scriptura: Firstly, the Bible as the divine source of inspirations of God, or more specifically, the Word of God, arbitrarily denies the validity of the texts from other religions, such as the Buddhist sutras or Islamic scriptures that are popular in a huge number of so called “heathen” nations and religions, and relentlessly reduces the legitimacy of the traditional non-biblical texts within Christianity. Secondly, by its divine authority, absolute obedience is grimly demanded among the converts that scatter all over the world, which means that every decree from God must be fully executed with no violation of a single dogma. Thirdly, the clarity of the Bible guarantees its easy access even by lower-class votaries who do not speak the archaic and abstruse Latin, thus enhancing the efficiency of its global dissemination. Fourthly, The Bible, as the mere divinely inspired book and the only source of divinely revealed knowledge, is earnestly trusted as the missionaries’ sheer incontestable means for world salvation, the efficacy of which is effusively expounded by Martin Luther: “a simple layman armed with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without it” (as cited in Jaggard 2011, p. xxiii). Lastly, the idea of sufficiency, which suggests that the Scripture contains everything needed by the converts and demands no extension or substitution, drastically accelerates the dispersion of Christianity by excluding the intricate, time-consuming procedures of inter-textual verification and ecclesiastical interpretation. The five biblical features detected and embraced by the Protestants, therefore, have combined to contribute to creating a miracle in the history of religious expansion: by the mid-twentieth century, the Bible, according to Nida (1959), had been partially or wholly rendered into at least 1109 languages internationally, most of which, astoundingly, were accomplished during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century (p.  11)—a period in which “European colonialism grew and flourished” (Niranjana 1992, p.  63) and also a period that overlaps the Late Qing. Meanwhile, translation, as a process of colonial interpretation, may have proved the most effective colonial instrument, and probably the most efficient way to “preach the gospel to every creature” (Morrison 1839, p. 68) since the collapse of the Babel Tower.

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3.2.2  “Preach the Gospel to Every Creature” The Bible in precolonial era were basically circulated and utilized beyond the populace in restricted numbers. Things did not change significantly from the rise of colonialism to the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS)5 in 1804, during which the translation of the Bible was not encouraged primarily due to the Roman Catholic’s “linguistic conservativism” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 47) that disdained the linguistic competence of the European vernaculars in conveying “the pristine purity of God’s Word” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 46): As it is manifest by experience, that if the use of the holy writers is permitted in the vulgar tongue, more evil than good will arise, because of the temerity of man; it is for this reason all Bibles are prohibited, with all their parts, whether they be printed or written, in whatever vulgar language so ever; as also are prohibited all summaries or abridgement of the Bibles, or of any books of the holy writings, although they should be only historical, and that in whatever vulgar tongue they may be written. (Religious Tract Society 1854, pp. 93–94)

On the other hand, The Catholic Church held tightly onto the tradition in which the Latin Vulgate as the sole authentic version of the Bible was accessible only to the priests, thus the laities had to listen to God through the interpretation by the clergy rather than through direct exposure to the Bible. Under such circumstances, Biblical translation was not encouraged among the Catholics as it was envisaged as bringing about the hazard of undermining the Church’s authority for the interpretation of the truth revealed by God. It is understandable, therefore, that Bible translation in China under the reign of the Ming Dynasty was missing on the schedule of the Jesuits who were preferably engaged in rendering the indigenous texts into European languages or rewriting biblical stories to exhibit to the Chinese literati the conceptual and philosophical likeness between Christian and Chinese traditions. Historically, spiritual conquest with the translation of the Bible originated with the Protestants. At odds with the conservative Catholics, the Protestants seem far more open-minded and ambitious: they acknowledge the sufficiency of the Scriptures, respect its authority over tradition, premise it as the incorruptible doctrine against human sins, encourage private reading over institutional teaching, and most prominently, seriously follow the tenet that “Protestants without Bibles are soldiers without weapons, ready neither for conquest nor for defence” (Religious Tract Society 1854, p. 141). When the British and Foreign Bible Society as the “largest and most ambitious of the great pan-evangelical organizations” (Martin 1983, p.  91) was founded, it decided to make dissemination of the Bible among all nations in the world its sole purpose, as stated by John Owen, the Society’s first General Secretary: A Society shall be formed, with this designation, The British and Foreign Bible Society; of which the sole object shall be to encourage a wider dispersion of the Holy Scriptures. This Society shall add its endeavours to those employed by other Societies for circulating the  Also known as the Bible Society

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3  E-C Translation as Conquest in the Late Qing 1811–1911 Scriptures through the British dominions, and shall also, according to its ability, extend its influence to other countries, whether Christian, Mahomedan, or Pagan. (as cited in Browne 1859, p. 10)

To a large degree, the Bible Society made the circulation of the Bible its solemn mission in that it envisioned itself as “the chosen agent of God” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 56) and even the “Monarch” designated by God, as claimed in its 1902 Annual Report: May we not even say that, equally, our own revered Society stands as a monarch among the agencies to which God has entrusted the spreading of the truth. She is girded with His sword, and year by year, as her organization grows more perfect, she is able to wield the weapon to better advantage. She goes forth in the strength of the Lord…. (British and Foreign Bible Society 1902, p. 11)

On some occasions, the Bible Society even likened itself to the British Empire, proclaiming its own role as even more influential: The work of our Society is indeed far more extensive even than that extensive Empire. For we serve the Lord Christ, and He alone is King of Kings, Lord of Lords. When He sends forth the Book of His Word upon earth, He alone can make good the claim of that Book that its leaves are for the healing of the nations without any exception whatever. (BFBS 1902, p. 7)

In order to maintain and expand the “Kingdom of God”, the Bible Society set the goal of biblical circulation; in order to achieve this goal in the post-Babel era, what it had to resort to was nothing but translation. In contrast to the Roman Church that discouraged the textualization of Bible in vulgar languages with a stern adherence to the clergy’s interpretation of the Latin Vulgate and a strong prejudice against the potential of other vernaculars in transliterating the revelation of God, the Bible Society was established with a solid principle to “supply every man with the Holy Scriptures in his own mother-tongue” (BFBS 1906, p. 104), as unequivocally stated by one of its reports: Thus the Roman Church reads it in Latin, the Greek Churches in ancient Greek, the Russian Church in Slavonic, and the Abyssinian Church in Ethiopic. But the Churches of the Reformation insist boldly that in their worship every man shall hear the Scripture in the tongue in which he was born. (BFBS 1913, p. 38)

On the other hand, the fact that biblical circulation takes precedence over the Church’s interpretation is by virtue of “textualization”—a legacy that has been left by the Protestant Reformation, suggesting that any votary has to personally read and scrutinize the written form of God’s Word that serves as the mediator for God’s revelation (Sugirtharajah 2001, p.  68). In other words, text is looked upon as “a prime transmitter of divine revelation” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 69) as well as “the ultimate measure of the Christian gospel” (Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 68) and even the only way to lead the converts to the threshold of Christianity, without which any religious indoctrination would become worthless. The Popular Report released by the BFBS (1933) made this point crystal-clear: Yet the missionary alone is not sufficient to establish the worldwide Kingdom of Christ. To the spoken must be added the written Word. The missionary who takes the Gospel to Africa,

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India, or China soon discovers that he cannot make progress beyond a certain point without putting that Gospel in a written form into the hands of the people. The converts must learn to read the sacred record as well as hear it expounded. (as cited in Sugirtharajah 2001, p. 68)

This proclamation reveals remarkably from within the Bible Society the explicit intent of making translation a must of religious expansion, thus substantially reinforcing the assertion made by Niranjana (1992): “Translation…has been an essential to the maintenance of religion…by the colonial violence of the Gospel applied to ‘various societies’” (p. 63). What’s more, translation of the Bible is even envisioned as a special weapon to overcome the pagan countries, paralleled to steamers and ordnance in the modern wars and conflicts: Success in modern warfare, so far as it depends on second causes, is now made to depend very much on the machinery and weapons employed. By the use of steam vessels and the improvements in gunnery, &c., conflicts between contending nations are brought to a speedy close. Something analogous to this is doubtless to be witnessed in the Christian conflict. The modern champion has, in his armory, a great advantage over those who lived when months and years of toil were required to produce a single copy of the Bible. The truth, including the whole revealed word of God, is the grand ordnance by which “the prince of this world” and “the powers of the darkness” are to be overcome. (“Revision,” 1846, p. 161)

When the Bible Society was established, the dream of conquering China with the God’s Word had been held by its founders, who initially considered borrowing the manuscript version of the New Testament from the British Museum rendered by a Jesuit—the only Chinese Bible available at that time—and had it printed and promulgated (Morrison 1839, p. 67). However, this plan was not executed in the end probably because they had a better choice—Robert Morrison, who, as the very first Protestant missionary sent from the Christian world to the Middle Kingdom, was supposed to acquire the language of Chinese and apply it to the textualization of the God’s Word. Joseph Hardcastle and Joseph Reyner, two of the Directors of the London Missionary Society and also the chief patrons in rendering the Bible into Chinese, set such an object for Morrison: The specific object is thus stated: to acquire the Chinese language, and translate the Sacred Scriptures. To teach and to preach were not in its immediate contemplation. The plan, if a plan it could be called, was to go to China, and if permitted to remain, quietly to acquire a knowledge of the language; and from that to proceed to a translation of the Sacred Scriptures. What should next be done, could not then be foreseen. (Morrison 1839, pp. 67–68)

The London Missionary Society had propounded three missions: entrance into China, acquisition of the Chinese language, as well as the priority of biblical translation to Christian teaching and preaching. As for what should be done upon the completion of these three missions, even the Directors remained reticent and uncertain. Contrastively, Robert Morrison’s perception of their instruction seemed as explicit as his fellow Dr. Milne: A version of the Word of God appeared to them in all its importance. They thought they saw in that (should Providence crown their efforts with success) the basis of every thing requisite to the conversion of the Chinese nation; and had the distant hope that, by the time that

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The London Missionary Society manifestly had every reason to stay conservative: firstly, the task of rendering the Sacred Scriptures into Chinese remained a huge challenge. Before Morrison’s sail to China, the British Empire had been pervaded with skepticism about “the practicability of acquiring the Chinese language to any tolerable degree, and of expressing in it, with precision and force, the great truths of divine revelation” (Morrison 1839, pp. 66–67); secondly, the vast population of the Celestial Empire, as well as the haunting frustrations suffered by the early vanguards from the Roman Church had exerted adverse influence, at least psychologically: The population of China makes at least one-third of the entire population of the globe. Christianity, in even its early triumphs, never gained much footing amongst them. Roman Catholic missionaries had persevered, amidst almost unparalleled difficulties and cruel oppressions, and had but partially succeeded in imposing popery upon China. Protestantism had not before thought of evangelizing the vast empire, and all the instruments it could command would necessarily be few. (Morrison 1839, p. 66)

Almost facing the same “unparalleled difficulties and cruel oppressions” that the Roman Catholic missionaries had faced and the great unpredictability of the future operations in China, Morrison nevertheless responded to the missions in an unexpectedly positive way, which, according to his wife and also the author of his biography, was by virtue of his “one ruling object” (Morrison 1839, p.  66)—“the conversion of China to the faith of Jesus” (Morrison 1839, p. 66), since “every thing he thought, and said, and did, henceforward tended, directly or indirectly, to the same end” (Morrison 1839, p. 66). To some extent, Morrison was even exulted with appointing him as the herald to a distant, unknown land, and contemplated it the will of Jesus Christ and his duty to the God: I do not consider it as good and laudable only, but as my duty. Knowing that Jesus wills that his ‘gospel’ should be ‘preached in all the world,’ and that ‘the redeemed of the Lord’ are to be gathered out of every kindred, and tongue, and people; recollecting moreover the command of Jesus to ‘go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature,’ I conceive it my duty, as a candidate for the holy ministry, to stand candidate for a station where labourers are most wanted. (Morrison 1839, p. 54)

Then, China, as “a part of the Saviour’s appointed dominion” (Morrison 1839, p. 66), inescapably became the claim of the Kingdom of God. Seen from Morrison’s vantage point, it was also the God’s revelation through the Bible: “The pen of the prophet has said, ‘behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinain’ (Isa.xlix.12.)” (Morrison 1839, p. 66), and what he had to do was simply following God’s revelation: “May it not be said there was joy in heaven, when the church on earth said to Morrison, Go to China” (Morrison 1839, p. 66).

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3.2.3  Terms of God: Tianzhu, Shangdi or Shen? In rendering the Word of God as an agent for the expansion of the Kingdom of God into a vast empire that had been dominated with miscellaneous religions, it would not have been possible without appropriately translating the core Christian concepts, as is underlined by an anonymous Bible translator: Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God; and this word must be in a language that is intelligible, otherwise it cannot be expected to have its full and legitimate effect. In the Chinese version, as in every other, great pains ought to be taken to express correctly the cardinal doctrines of the gospel, and to convey the essential terms which involve the eternal welfare of immortal souls. (as cited in “Revision,” 1846, p. 162)

Among the key conceptions of Christianity, God remains probably the most problematic and controversial term in Biblical translation. Broadly, God is a divine being in theistic and deistic religions, epitomized as either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism, such as the Buddhist Sakyamuni, Sanskrit Ishvara and Deva, or Arabic Allah. In Christianity, God boasts a great variety of attributes that make Himself the singular Creator of the world and Overseer of the universe, some of which can be summarized as follows: • Divine Oneness: There is only one God in the world that is in three distinct persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. • Omnipotence: God boasts unlimited power to the extent that he is able to do anything that He chooses to do and anything that corresponds with His omniscience, even the logically impossible. • Omniscience: God as the Creator of all knowledge in the universe possesses boundless capability to discern everything infinitely or at least everything that can be learned, be it the natural world, the supernatural world, or the sensation and feeling of a human being. • Omnipresence: God is everywhere and possesses the ability to be present everywhere at the same time. God is present in every aspect of the natural order, in every moment and episode of history. Most importantly, God is present to those who worship Him and pray earnestly for mercy. • Omnibenevolence: God is perfectly righteous and fully merciful, whose infinite love and benevolence could be felt exclusively by His converts. • Incorporeality: God is a non-physical, immaterial being and also the First Cause of an incorporeal or intelligible realm that transcends both space and time. (Swinburne 1995, pp. 314–315) An accurate representation of God in the heterogeneous languages and vernaculars such as Chinese, on the other hand, was difficult yet exceptionally important because it was believed that the speakers of these languages and vernaculars, having long lost their perception and awareness of the true God, became foolish heathens that were obsessed with polytheistic idols, as illustrated by Medhurst (1847a): …God has not left himself without witness in this eastern world; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible

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3  E-C Translation as Conquest in the Late Qing 1811–1911 things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead; so that they are without excuse. Because that when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise they became fools; and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God, into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things; changing the truth of God into a lie, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. (p. 2)

For this reason, the missionary translators of the Scriptures felt a strong obligation to help the pagants, which subsumed the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, to return to the Kingdom of God by shifting their reverence from the creatures to the Creator, in which a precise translation of God’s own title played a siginificant role, as recognized by Legge (1852): May God be pleased to regard with favour this attempt to illustrate the knowledge of Himself possessed by a large portion of His human family, and the terms by which His servants may best express His own name, and the second person in His triune nature, in translating His revealed word! (p. iv)

Additionally, the Protestant Bible translators who arrived in China under the reign of the Late Qing placed much weight on the denomination of God for two special reasons: (1) They had to endeavor to avoid following the footsteps of the Catholics who, as discussed at the start of this chapter, were expulsed for the Term Question6 as part of the renowned “Rites Controversy”7 between the Roman Church and Emperor Kangxi; (2) When the missionary translators agreed with King James I, the patron of the monumental King James Version, that the margin of any translation of the Bible should not be “charged with any notes” (“Chinese Version,” 1835, p. 250) for interpretation or explanation, the urgent need to select the most accurate and appropriate equivalents for the most essential Christian notions, with God posited at the core, remained self-evident. Prior to looking into how the Protestant producers of the Chinese Bible decided on the most proper Chinese term for God in the initial years of the nineteenth century, however, it would be advantageous to revisit the efforts of their precursors in introducing and establishing God as the most central Christian concept, chiefly the Nestorians and the Jesuits, whose solutions may have exerted some influence on the Protestants’ decisions, explicitly or implicitly. The Nestorian Stele as one of the latest archeological findings with respect to the early Christian operations in China discloses that the earliest Biblical translation into the Chinese language dates back to the seventh century, when the Persia-based 6  The question concerning how to term or express the various appellations of the Christian God in the Chinese language. 7  Also known as “Chinese Rites Controversy”, it refers to the debates among the Roman Catholic missionaries that encompassed mainly the religiosity of Chinese rituals practices during the 17th and 18th centuries, concerning the questions such as whether the Chinese worship of ancestors should be considered as religious. Many people were involved in the Rites Controversy, including the Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans, and even several popes and Emperor Kangxi in the Qing dynasty (Augustyn et al. 2006).

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Nestorian Church sent their missionaries to China ruled by the Tang Dynasty (618– 907) in an attempt to preach the gospel through the linguistic indigenization of the Scriptures (Foley 2009, pp. 5–7). This Nestorian Stele, together with a few ancient Nestorian documents of the eighth century, further reveals that the Nestorian missionaries borrowed universally from both Buddhism, a foreign religion that accessed China in the first century, and Taoism, the most influential indigenous faith at home. The Nestorians’ “innovative ways” (Foley 2009, p. 10) to domesticate God as the Supreme Being include: Huangfu Aluohe (皇父阿罗诃 Imperial-Father Alaha), found on the Nestorian Stele and the Diptychs of the eighth century to specify —the Syrian word to render God (‫ ;)םיהלא‬Fo (佛 Buddha), utilized frequently by Bishop Alopên in the Hsü-T’ing Messiah Sûtra or the Jesus-Messiah Sûtra in the beginning of the seventh century, Tiānzūn (天尊 celestial being or heavenly-­ reverend), a Taoist term to denominate the Heavenly Father initiated also by Bishop Alopên, and Zhenzhu (真主 true lord), another Taoist term discovered on the Nestorian Stele to refer to the Almighty (Foley 2009, p. 10–12). The Nestorians’ religious operations in China, unfortunately, were cracked down in the wake of the enactment of an imperial edict, and the influence of Christianity, with no imperial protection by the emperor, came to a close by the end of the tenth century. Some researchers have ascribed the Nestorians’ failure to their lack of leadership by Chinese natives and deviation from the mainstream Church (Foley 2009, p. 15). The Protestants’ enormous success in China one millennium later, however, reveals a simple piece of truth: the Nestorians failed probably because at that time the Celestial Empire, which was right at its apogee and gained upper hand over the Occident in their power relations, could readily say no to God, notwithstanding that it was rendered with the most indigenous and culturally accessible terms. Nevertheless, although the Nestorians’ various terms for God were not adopted by the later missionaries and Bible translators, their strategies to relate it to the Chinese tradition were rapturously resonated by Matteo Ricci, who, dressed in the prestigious silk gown of Chinese literati years after setting foot on China, insisted that the Chinese’s ancestors had perception of the true God and that Shangdi, specified by Confucius classics as the Supreme ruler of the universe, be used as the Chinese counterpart for the Christian Creator. However, Ricci’s proposition was accepted neither by his successor Niccolo Longobardi who objected to his assertion of the knowledge of God by Chinese, nor by the Dominicans who, mostly coming to China all the way through the Philippines with their tabula rasa principle that had been successfully applied in the Spanish colonies, rejected any adaptation to local customs and the usage of Shangdi as the equivalent of God (Mantienne 1999, p. 178). In the wake of such a controversy, three main points of contention were submitted to the Roman Church, the first of which revealed for the first time to the Pope the very fact that in China multiple words were actually used to render the Christian God, including Tian (Heaven 天), Shangdi (上帝 Lord of Above/Supreme Emperor) as well as the already-well-established Tianzhu (天主 Lord of Heaven) (Mantienne 1999, p. 178).

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Pope Clement XI, in response to such a disputation, issued an unprecedented Papal bull on March 19, 1715 to ban on the use of other Chinese terms than Tianzhu as the denomination for Deus: The West calls Deus [God] the creator of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. Since the word Deus does not sound right in the Chinese language, the Westerners in China and Chinese converts to Catholicism have used the term “Heavenly Lord” (Tianzhu) for many years. From now on such terms as “Heaven” and “Shangdi” should not be used: Deus should be addressed as the Lord of Heaven, Earth, and everything in the universe. The tablet that bears the Chinese words “Reverence for Heaven” should not be allowed to hang inside a Catholic church and should be immediately taken down if already there. (Li 1969, p. 23)

Unfortunately, this stubborn, obtrusive proclamation, condemned by the Celestial Empire as “incredible” (Li 1969, p. 22), “ridiculous” (Li 1969, p. 22) or even “nonsense” (Li 1969, p. 22), instead of earning the legitimacy of Tianzhu as the translation of Deus, eventually infuriated Emperor Kangxi who enacted a “zero tolerance” decree to crack down Christianity, thus suspending all relevant disputes, including the debates on the most proper rendering of the Supreme Being. It was not until the onset of the nineteenth century when the Protestants embarked on the Biblical translation in Chinese that the Term Question was brought back to the attention of the Christians. Robert Morrison, one of the earliest producers of the full-length Chinese version of the Scriptures and also the first Protestant missionary who had delved into the Term Question, however, doubted the existence of a sole Chinese term to cover all the connotations of God in his treatise titled “Some Remarks on the Chinese Terms to Express Deity” (1838) co-authored with Dr. Milne. His skepticism was primarily cast to Tianzhu that had long been adhered to by the Roman Church: M. Rémusat, and who insist that teën choo [tianzhu] alone must be used, had they made more use of the Sacred Scriptures, would have found a uniform adherence to one term extremely embarrassing. Would they have rendered all the several names or titles of the deity, in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, by one Chinese term only? If they had done so, would it have been judicious? (Morrison and Milne 1838, p. 314)

Morrison & Milne (1838) proceeded to suggest that besides teën choo (tianzhu), shin (shen), and Shangdi, such words as teën (天 heaven), shang teën (上天 the heavens above), shin teën (神天 the divine heavens), hwang teën (皇天 the imperial heavens) could as well be considered as Chinese appellations for the deity (p. 315). In their Chinese Biblical version known as Shentian shengshu (Sacred Scripture of the Divine Heavens), Morrison and Milne used a full array of terms, which included but were not limited to Shen, to translate the various denominations of the Supreme Being of Christianity, e.g. choo shin (主神 Lord of gods) for Jehovah, Shin teën (神 天 Devine Heavens) for Lord God, and Shin teën Shangdi (神天上帝 Supreme Emperor of Devine Heavens) for God exclusively found in the table of contents. Morrison’s reason for the utilization of multiple terms, if any, was simple: As to the dispute about the Chinese words Teen; Shang-Te, &c. our opinion is, that there is a portion of truth on both sides of the question; and the best way would have been to let the words go on to be employed, till they acquired a definite and correct meaning, according to

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Christian acceptation, from usage; as the Greek Quos, and the Latin Deus, and perhaps the Saxon Woden, became Christian terms.8 (Morrison 1825, p. 45)

His multi-term approach, interestingly, was inherited neither by his British followers who stuck obstinately to the sole use of Shangdi, nor by the American Protestants that held tightly onto Shen. The decisions made differently between Morrison and his successors, however, should be understood in relation to the diverse historical settings in which they were situated: when Morrison arrived in Canton as the only Chinese port open to the foreigners in the pre-treaty period, he found himself posited in an exceedingly harsh environment fomented by the hostility between the Roman Church and the Middle Kingdom. The Catholics’ being miserably expelled for their uncompromising attitudes towards Chinese rituals and the Term Question might have had a huge impact on his decision-making in Biblical translation, at least psychologically. At a time when the ban on Christianity remained intact, it ought not be considered as unwise to demarcate Protestantism from it by replacing Tianzhu—an appellation of strong Catholic exclusionism—with multifarious terms, of which the most ideal one was left with the later generations to choose. In other words, when the different Protestant sects debated frenziedly and openly on the validity of Shangdi or Shen as the term of God decades later, Christianity had safely retrieved its legitimacy in many parts of China under the protection of the British fleet—a scenario Morrison might not have dared to conjure up. During the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond, the Protestants that followed Morrison in rendering the Scriptures into Chinese, therefore, were basically divided into two opposing camps along the lines of nation that both excluded Tianzhu as the appellation of God and narrowed down their debates to the binary Shangdi/Shen, with the British supporting the former, and the Americans favoring the latter. Dr. Milne, Morrison’s collaborator in Biblical translation, was probably the first missionary translator to challenge the legitimacy of Tianzhu as the title of God. His arguments include: (1) Tianzhu was an emerging term compared to Shangdi/Shen, and has never been revered in the same way as the latter since it was introduced to China; (2) Tianzhu in polytheistic nations might frequently correspond merely to one of the deities. For instance, in China Tianzhu was easily associated with the Lord of Heavens, which was conceptually parallel to the other two deities that presided respectively over the earth and the human world, thus drastically contrasting God as the sole Ruler of the universe; (3) Considering the dissimilarities between Catholicism and Protestantism in terms of their doctrines and ceremonies and many other essential points in faith and practice, and the fact that no concession could possibly be achieved in between, it would not be unusual for the latter to adopt different terms, especially in “the present state of China” (Morrison and Milne 1838, p.  318) from which many “inconveniencies” (Morrison and Milne 1838, p.  318) might emerge.  Italics in the original

8

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Milne did not elaborate what was meant by “the present state of China”, and what precisely constituted the so called “inconveniencies”. However, given the complicated circumstances in which he worked with Morrison to render the Bible into Chinese, the former may have referred to the severe status quo in which the crackdown on Catholicism had yet to be removed, while the latter may have suggested the Protestants’ fears of being connected with the Catholics once they followed suit. Conspicuously, in contrast to Morrison who preferred terms of a great variety, Milne did not mask his strong proclivity to the sole adoption of Shangdi, for which he listed nine reasons that can be summarized as follows: • Shangdi has been invariably used as ‘the supreme ruler’ since the antiquity. • Looked upon as higher than the celestial and terrestrial gods, Shangdi enjoys more dignity and authority. • Shangdi always receives sacrifices of solemnity according to the ancient records. • Shangdi holds a deep love and compassion for his people. • The three most influential sects in China have made Shangdi a term of supremacy well known to the Chinese. • Shangdi constantly arouses remarkable reverence by the Chinese people. • Shangdi is alone with no companions around, distinguishing himself from the rest of Chinese deities. • Shangdi is not seen as a deity of duality, notwithstanding that he is not explicitly attributed with unity, an essential character of the Christian God. • Even if such terms as Tian and Shen may acquire a couple of the above qualities, they are not accredited in the same extent as to Shangdi (Morrison and Milne 1838, pp. 319–320). Although Milne’s preference to Shangdi was not seen in the Scriptures in collaboration with Morrison, it was loyally honored and exultantly embraced by the later British revisers of the Chinese Bible, with Walter Henry Medhurst being the most articulate representative. In his fiery debates with the American Protestants in the treaty period, Medhurst untiringly searched for the clues of Shangdi being Christian God Himself or the counterpart of God worshiped by the monotheistic ancestors of Chinese in an array of ancient documents, including Daxue (Great Learning), Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean), Lunyu (Analects of Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius) known as Four Books, and Shijing (Classic of Poetry), Shangshu (Classic of History), Liji (Classic of Rites), Yijing (Classic of Changes) and Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn Annals) known as Five Classics. As an erudite sinologist that had delved into the Chinese theology and literature, Medhurst sought to spot Shangdi in the classical writings as the conception of God long held by the Chinese progenitors. Meanwhile, he emphasized uniqueness and supremacy as essentials for his insistence on Shangdi: Dear Sir,—You ask if we must no give up the use of Shángti 上帝? I answer, no: until we can find a better. It is not the name of the chief idol among the Chinese, as your correspondent argues, but (when standing alone without any prefix) always and invariably, in every Chinese book of note and worth, means the Supreme Being and him only …and I consider it a great advantage that we have a term in the Chinese, sanctioned by the best and most

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ancient authority, so nearly applicable to our purpose, in expressing the name of the Supreme, and conveying with it to every Chinese cultivated mind ideas of so much reverence and awe. (Medhurst 1847b, pp. 34–35)

Gong (2009) observes that Medhurst frequently took cues from the Four Books to see Shangdi as the approximation of God, which include kepei Shangdi (克配上 帝 corresponding to the Supreme Ruler) from the Great Learning, Jiaoshe zhi li, suoyi shi Shangdi ye (郊社之礼,所以事上帝也 The ceremonies of the celestial and terrestrial sacrifices are those by which men serve the Supreme Ruler) from the Means of Doctrine, Zhaijie muyu, ze keyi shi Shangdi (斋戒沐浴,则可以事上帝 he who fasts and bathes may offer sacrifices to the Supreme Ruler) from Mencius, in which, Shangdi, as the shared core concept, was unexceptionally narrated as the “Supreme Ruler” (Medhurst 1847a, p.  127) or “chief over all the universe” (Medhurst 1847a, p. 204) that received the most dignified sacrifice and reverence from below (p. 122). Another clue of Shangdi as the sole Supreme Being held by Medhurst, on the other hand, came from the Chinese conviction that it was Shangdi, the so called “originating, overshadowing, protecting, and governing something” (Medhurst 1848b, p. 553) rather than Shen that created the universe and commanded all the things in the world (Medhurst 1848b, p. 499, 553). In contrast, Shen as the appellation of God, which was unexpectedly greeted by the American Protestants, was envisaged by their British counterparts as problematic on the grounds that in the Chinese theological system it invariably emerges as a deity that “conveys to the Chinese mind the idea of plurality” (Medhurst 1847b, p. 36), thus failing to be indicative of “the only living and true Jehovah, who made all things” (Medhurst 1847b, p. 36). In his treatise On the True Meaning of Shin (1849), Medhurst (1849) contended that as the synonym of Ling (i.e. spirit or ghost emerging from death), Shen was never a referent to the one and only God by adducing universally from the Chinese Imperial Thesaurus titled Peiwen yunfu (Rime Storehouse of Esteemed Phrases)9 and other Chinese classics: The advocates of Shin, in the sense of God, have also been in the habit of inculcating the sentiment, that “there is but one Shin.” We cannot conceive how any can persevere in this statement, in the face of the evidence adduced in the preceding pages, that every human spirit, both before and after death, with every description of invisible intelligence, is undoubtedly a Shin. To say that there is only one Shin, is equivalent to saying, that there is only one Ling; for Shin and Ling are synonymous, and what would be thought of a man, who, in any language, should affirm that there is only one spirit! (pp. 87–88)

Therefore, Shen in the hierarchy of the Chinese deities, according to Medhurst (1847b), could be somewhat inferior. The examples include Shanshen (山神 the mountain genii), Heshen (河神 the river genii) and Sanshishen (三尸神 the genii in charge of three major parts of the human body), parallel to the demigods of the Romans, the Djin of the Arabs, or the Genii of Western nations (p. 35). Owing to its comparatively low status, Shen did not arouse as much reverence as Shangdi among the Chinese populace. Most prominently, to adopt an unqualified term like Shen was 9  An official Chinese rime dictionary of literary allusions and poetic dictions compiled during the reign of Emperor Kangxi in Qing Dynasty.

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“to mislead” (Medhurst 1847b, p. 36), rather than to instruct the Chinese to reclaim their vanished tradition of worshiping the true God, since it “never conveys the idea of unity, or supremacy, or infinite excellence” (Medhurst 1847b, p.  35) in the Chinese literature and tradition. Predictably, the British adherence to Shangdi as the denomination of the Divine Being was fiercely attacked by the American Protestants led by William Jones Boone and Walter Macon Lowrie. In a series of treatises published in the Chinese Repository, the Americans manifested their objections to the effect that Shen was more eligible than Shangdi as the title of God in the Chinese Scriptures. Their key points include: (1) the Chinese people were polytheists, which suggested that they had no idea about the true God, the singular self-existent, eternal, almighty Being and the Creator of heaven and earth (Boone 1848, pp. 24, 50, 53); (2) it was inappropriate to displace the true God with any god in the Chinese polytheistic system, not even with the chief one, because the former was equated with the whole class of the latter: The True God claims the right to displace the whole class; and this is the reason that, in translating the Scriptures into the language of such a people, the generic term for God must be used. Jehovah claims the right—not, to be recognized in the place of the chief God of such a system but—to take the place of the whole class of gods…He claims to be “the all and in all” He says, I am the God of heaven and the God of the earth; the God of the hills and the God of the valleys; the God of fire and the God of wealth…We must, therefore, take for Jehovah the name of the whole class and affirm that it properly belongs to Him alone. (Boone 1848, pp. 22–23)

With respect to the Term Question, the American Protestants held that the attention should be focused on investigating what constituted the generic name of God in the Chinese language and the solution was what had already been applied in the Chinese Bible by Morrison—Shen. Shen was mostly suited as the generic name of God because it was of “the highest genus or class of beings to whom the Chinese offer religious worship” (Boone 1848, p. 24). In order to make this point clear and persuasive, Boone was also dedicated to searching the Chinese classics for the proofs to ascertain Shen as the most revered Being in the Chinese theological system. One convincing clue for the high esteem of Shen was Li yi shi shen wei zhu (礼 以事神为主 The national rites serve Shen as Lords) from Shujing (the Book of History), in which, the purpose of the national rites was “to serve the gods (shin) as Lords” (Boone 1848, p. 29). The Book of History also reveals that in the national rites of the Zhou Dynasty (1046 B. C.–249 A.D.), two categories of objects were worshiped: Shen (神 celestial gods) and Qi (祗 terrestrial gods), with the former being offered with the most solemn sacrifice and reverence (Boone 1848, pp. 29–30). For this reason, Shen was affirmed as “the most honorable Beings in the universe” (Boone 1848, p. 33) on the grounds that “the highest Being known to the Chinese would be included among the class of Beings called Shin” (Boone 1848, p. 33). In the wake of the controversies on the Chinese denomination of God, there appeared two conflicting versions of the Scriptures—the so called Shangdi Version and Shen Version accomplished respectively by the British and American mission-

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ary translators. Meanwhile, the relevant debates inside the Protestant communities were not suspended, but instead popped up from time to time in almost the same way: reproaching the idolatry and lowliness of the Chinese people, demonizing the other religions such as Buddhism and Taoism, romanticizing the superiority of Christian faith and the soleness and supremacy of God, as well as challenging or defending the legitimacy of Shangdi/Shen as the title of God by unearthing evidence from the Chinese classics. This book has no intention of participating in the debates encompassing which term is more appropriate than the other; rather, it seeks to unveil the correlations between this centuries-old conundrum and Biblical translation as an agent of religious or ideological conquest in the Late Qing. Given the booming European expansion, asymmetrical Sino-western power relations and the tangled socio-political milieu in the nineteenth century China, the Term Question has manifestly transcended the linguistic and cultural boundaries to be included as part of the colonial enterprise. In fact, the focus of the debates on the Term Question by the two parties, despite the multitude and diversity of the clues excavated from the treasure of Chinese theology and literature, was laid upon which term, Shangdi or Shen, was of higher ranking: the British Protestants preferred Shangdi to Shen on the grounds that the former, as the Ruler of the Heaven, was at the top of the edifice of Chinese deities, whereas their American counterparts deliberately chose Shen because they held it to have connoted a whole category of most revered and honored gods superior to those in charge of the earth and human beings. The Protestant Bible translators sought to accentuate God as the Supreme Being because if not so, how could they have convinced the Chinese that the Scriptures, as God’s Word, convey all truth and revelation from the uppermost authority? How could Christianity have competed with and even substituted Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism or any other “heathenism” (Lowrie 1846b, p.  593) that had long been embedded in Chinese culture? How could they have bowed the Chinese pagans to Christianity ultimately? On the other hand, whether the Oneness of God could be retained in the Chinese Bible to receive the votaries’ reverence was also a great concern of both the British and American alliances in their debates. The British adopted Shangdi on the premise that it symbolized the Chinese ancestors’ perception of the one and only true God, whereas the Americans selected Shen in the conviction that it, as a generic term, could ensure God as the sole Divine Being worshiped by Chinese, exclusive of any heathen idol or false god: Now in reference to the question, which term is the proper one to be used as a translation of ‘God’ in the Bible, it should be borne in mind that, Jehovah does not merely claim to be the highest deity acknowledged by a people, nor will he be satisfied with the name of their highest gods, but he claims to be God alone, to concentrate in himself all that ought to be worshiped. (Lowrie 1846a, p. 316)

Despite their distinctive perspectives on the Chinese awareness of the Divine Being, the British and American Protestants shared one thing in common: in searching the most proper Chinese appellation of God and tracing the tradition of the

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Chinese theology and literature to justify their arguments, they endeavored untiringly to make sure that the Oneness of the Creator would not be contaminated in the target language and culture. To this end, some of them even went so far as to consider modifying the elements of the Chinese culture. For instance, Boone, in order to tailor Shen as an unambiguous denomination of God, astoundingly suggested a “remodeling” (as cited in Medhurst 1848c, p. 645) of the Chinese literature and a prohibition of using Shen as the human soul. Lowrie (1846b), one of Boone’s unwavering proponents, was even ridiculously convinced that the Chinese could be “educated” to accept the terms intended by the Bible translators: It is not common to bring the heathen in as arbiters to decide for Christians by what terms they must worship the true God. We do not admit their authority, especially when we have apostolic authority for our guide…The people can be taught to use the word Shin, and connect with it the idea we wish to teach respecting the true God, far earlier than they can divest their own minds of their heathenish associations with the word Shangti and make that word the representative of the true and living God. (pp. 600–601)

However, in underlining God as the sole Deity worthy of reverence and in forbidding Him to be presented in multiple names, the missionary translators who assumed the monotheistic nature of the Bible seemed to have forgotten that God in the Old Testament is also denominated with the wide-ranging appellations such as El Olam, El Elyon, El Shaddai, Adonai, YHWH and Elohim that originated in Hebrew polytheism. In addition, the practice of adhering to one term and rejecting the possibility of rendering God with any alternatives likewise suggested an aggressive attempt to convert China into a one-faith nation in which no deity other than the Christian one could be worshiped, regardless of the time-honored plurality of religious traditions in the Middle Kingdom. It should be noted, on the other hand, that by highlighting God as the one Supreme Being of the universe, the Protestant Bible translators were practically running the risk of imposing the Christian coercion upon, and thus exasperating the emperors of the Celestial Empire: It has been said, that Taou-kwang10 is as much a Te or Ruler, as Shang-te is, though he rules in a much smaller space; and if we were to tell the Chinese that they must have no other Tes besides Jehovah, Taou-kwang might complain of our interfering with his sovereignty, and forbid the propagation of our religion in his dominations. (Medhurst 1848a, p. 234)

In contrast to their Catholic forerunners who were relentlessly expelled just because Emperor Kangxi was infuriated by their Pope’s imperious decree on the Term Question, the Protestants were noticeably blessed with more luck since they were bestowed with unprecedented freedom, with little intervention from China in the process of debating and deciding on the best appellation of God. The silence of the Chinese pagans and the tolerance from the throne, however, was not accidental, given the vulnerability of the Celestial Empire in the face of the superiority of the Western powers accumulated through an array of political, economic and religious deployments as well as military operations in China. 10

 Emperor Daoguang of the Qing Dynasty

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The Term Question that proceeded through the entire nineteenth century thus has become a phenomenal legacy of the Christian conquest of China by means of subverting China’s native faiths and other foreign religions both labeled by the Protestant missionaries as “paganism” on one hand and appropriating their indigenous names to serve the intended purpose of Christianity on the other. Suffice it to say that the enterprise of making the most populous nation in the world a domain of the Kingdom of God, which started a millennium beyond and succeeded a century ago, was awfully victorious to the extent that Shangdi and Shen, both originally known as titles of Taoist or Buddhist deities, have been appropriated exclusively as the appellations of the Christian God.

3.2.4  Competitive Style The nineteenth century witnessed the Protestants’ unceasing pursuit of the most appropriate literary style to render the Scriptures into Chinese. Interestingly, the great gravity posited on style was partially ascribed to the Protestant assertion that a lack of competitive literary finesse in Biblical translation might had led to the previous failures of disseminating Christianity in China: Christianity in China has thus far failed to produce a literature that can compete for effectiveness of style with the works of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. This is a serious handicap in a country where literary finesse means so much among the cultured classes. (Mcneur 1935, pp. 60–61)

The first Chinese Bible translator to worry about which literary style could be more competitive for Bible translation is probably Robert Morrison who was for some time rather shilly-shally in choosing among the so called “high,” “middle,” and “low” styles. The high style, prevailing in the Four Books and Five Classics, became the first one to be ruled out as a handicap for the non-literati to grasp the Bible. For some time, Morrison almost decided to apply the “low” style of Shengyu (圣谕)—the imperial edicts to be announced to the public, in his translation of the Bible for the following reasons: (1) it is more accessible to the masses of people; (2) it is more intelligible than the high and middle styles in oral communications; (3) it could be quoted on the word-for-word basis and apprehended by the people without commentaries or interpretations (Milne 1820, pp. 89–90). However, his obsession with the exceedingly plain style was in no time shifted to the middle one that conveyed “something of the gravity and dignity of the ancient classical books, without that extreme conciseness which renders them so hard to be understood” (“The Bible,” 1835, p. 300) on the one hand and was “intelligible to all who can read to any tolerable extent, without sinking into colloquial coarseness” (“The Bible,” 1835, p. 300) on the other. Accoridng to Morrison, the most obvious middle style could be seen through the combination of the commentaries on the Chinese classics such as those given by Zhuxi, an eminent scholar in Song Dynasty (960–1279), and the well-renowned

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literary masterpiece San Guo (Three Kingdoms), given that the former could withhold the dignity of divine scripts, including the Bible and the general theological writings, and the latter could help to create fluent and highly accessible expressions (Milne 1820, p. 90). On the other hand, the high style was supplanted with the middle one not only because the Protestant translators intended to warrant an easier access of the middle and lower classes to the Scriptures, but also because they demanded that the translation “be faithful to the original” (Milne 1820, p. 291) through “the most common and less complicated characters” (Milne 1820, p. 291) that they believed to better render the sense. Noticeably, the need for the Chinese Scriptures to be stylistically “equal” to the original could be best illustrated by the following comments on the translations done by Morrison, Milne and Marshman as three earliest Protestant producers of the Chinese Holy Scriptures: We are sure that it was the earnest desire of the translators, Morrison, Milne, and Marshman, that their successors to render the word of God more easy to be understood by those for whom it was translated. And the same desire will, we fondly hope, be cherished by every friend of this nation, and especially by those who are in immediate contact with its inhabitants, until the Chinese version of the sacred Scriptures shall, in point of style, equal, if not surpass, the best native works extant. (“Chinese Version,” 1835, p. 261)

In their article titled “Revision of the Chinese Version of the Bible” on the Chinese Repository, the revisers of the Scriptures rendered respectively by Morrison/ Milne and Marshman gave some pointers for the Chinese Bible to be stylistically equivalent to the original, one of which being that the translators must not be Chinese because they as non-Christians could neither fully peruse or grasp the spirit and soul of the sacred texts nor “express the new ideas with facility and accuracy” (“Revision,” 1836, p.  395). Nevertheless,  to  ensure that the Scriptures were rendered in a manner perspicuous and idiomatic enough to the Chinese readership, some Chinese scholars were also involved in the revision, notwithstanding that the extent to which the original style and meaning were reproduced rested ultimately with the Protestant translators. In addition, the revisers held that although the Biblical doctrines, by virtue of their sublimity, could be hugely mysterious and obscure, the Bible was, by and large, written in a contrastively simple and perspicuous manner, thus no excuses could be spared in achieving an equally simple style in the Chinese version (“Revision,” 1836, p. 394). In order to guarantee the stylistic resemblance between the Biblical source texts and its Chinese versions, some revisers even insisted that the latter, in accordance with “Biblical infallibility”, should not be embellished to pander to the Chinese literati: Let it not be supposed, however, from what we have here advanced that we wish to embellish the Sacred Oracles in order to gratify the vain fancy or fastidious taste of men. The word of God is perfect: it needs no embellishment; it can receive none. We protest against the use of fine words and phrases when used to the detriment of the sense, as we do also against a rendering of the original so close and literal as to create disgust for what would otherwise be perused with pleasure and advantage. (“Revision,” 1836, pp. 396–397)

Morrison’s translation, in the wake of its debut in the 1820s as one of the earliest Chinese versions of the Holy Bible, became so stylistically contentious that contras-

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tive remarks arose among the critics: although Samuel Wells Williams, a celebrated American sinologist and also a Bible translator, extolled his work as being grammatical and intelligible to the Chinese reading public (Williams 1848, p. 328), Liu Zichuan (柳子川) and Zhu Diliang (朱迪亮), both as Medhurst’s assistants in Biblical translation, accused his version of being filled with “redundant particles— inverted expressions—unidiomatic phrases” (Kidd 1839, pp. 73), notwithstanding that “redundancies and tautologies” (Kidd 1839, pp.  73) remain what “a faithful translator could not avoid” (Kidd 1839, pp. 73). Such Criticisms, consequently, resulted in the constant revision of the Chinese bible during the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, what the revisers intended to achieve in the Biblical revision was nothing but a balance, or the so called “golden medium” (“Revision,” 1836, p. 395) between the two extremes of sacrificing accuracy for intelligibility and ensuring fidelity at the cost of accessibility: A faithful translation must express the sense of the original perspicuously by corresponding words and phrases. The meaning of the text cannot be sacrificed to elegant expressions, nor a paraphrase substituted for a translation, nor the spirit of the original lost or altered, without gross departures from the rules which ought to regulate the translation of the Sacred Scriptures. On the other hand, if we undertake to render everything literally, and disregard the idioms of the language into which we translate, we shall produce a version as unacceptable as it will be unintelligible to native readers, and they will become disgusted with the work, and the great object of translation will be lost. Between these two extremes, however, there is a golden medium. (“Revision,” 1836, p. 395)

However, when the missionaries spared no efforts to emphasize faithfulness as an indispensable characteristic of Biblical translation to the extent that the words and phrases could not be arbitrarily displaced, and idealistically expected its style to be exceedingly agreeable and accessible to the bulk of Chinese populace, they seemed to have satirically been engaged in the game of tug-of-war, in which, the slightest inclination to either might affect the performance of the other, thus evoking the decades-old disputes both inside and outside the Protestant communities.

3.3  Translation of Unequal Treaties 1842–1860 3.3.1  U  nequal Treaties: Covenants Between “Conqueror and Vanquished” A treaty, which means an “agreement made between two or more countries” (Hornby 2002, p. 3047), is invariably shaped by certain social, political and historical dimensions and reflects, as Dennis McCarthy voices, “the background of society and ideas which governed [the] formation” (as cited in Bederman 2004, p. 139) of the agreements. A treaty also epitomizes the specific relationships between the countries involved, which are not always equal or reciprocal. One of the typical instances is the treaty

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signed more than 4000 years ago between Naram-Sin, the fourth king of the Akkad dynasty, and the ruler of Elam who was a vassal of the Akkadian emperor. This treaty, as one of the most time-honored covenants that have ever been found in history, features some provisions to which the predominant signatory did not need to be bound, and is therefore recognized as a typically unequal agreement “made between a master and inferior, conqueror and vanquished” (Bederman 2004, p. 140). Interestingly, some treaties made for the purpose of achieving “universal peace and order” (Bederman 2004, p. 158), such as those signed in the ancient Greece, turned out contradictory to what they had claimed to be in practice. These so called “peace treaties” (Bederman 2004, p.  158), which were found to have been frequently coerced upon “a vanquished polity” (Bederman 2004, p. 140), remained practically the outcomes of “the political hegemony and supremacy of the victor” (Bederman 2004, p. 158). Since the close of the seventeenth century, a common practice aimed at regulating the interrelationships among the European countries through treaties was seen with Great Britain being one of the chief promoters and practitioners (Chen 2004, p. 83). However, due to the growing colonial confrontations between a sovereign European state and a “non-European society” (Anghie 2004, p. 5), an increasing number of treaties were endorsed to adjust the relationships not only between the colonial powers, but also between the colonizers and the colonized, particularly in the nineteenth century—the so called “Age of Empire” (Anghie 2004, p. 32) when the conquest of non-European countries for economic and political purposes reached its apogee. The earliest British attempt to enter into treaty relations with the Celestial Empire could be traced back to 1672 when the East India Company initiated a commercial agreement with the remnants of Ming Dynasty in Taiwan, considered as “foreshadowing the Britain’s colonial permeation and incursion into China” (Guo 2003, p.  144). In 1787, 5  years before the launching of the well-known “Macartney Embassy”, the British government sent an envoy to China who unexpectedly failed to make it to the end, leaving behind a long-held dream of “basing the Sino-British relations on the treaties” (Liu and Du 1996, p. 256). The mission of establishing treaty connections with China was resumed by George Macartney, who, as the first British envoy to successfully set foot on China and call on the emperor, was instructed by his home government to “explore the possibility of signing a friendly Anglo-Chinese alliance treaty” (Hu 2010, p. 35) by forwarding the following requests: • To allow the English merchants to trade to Chusan, Ningpo, and Tientsin. • To allow them to have a warehouse at Peking for the sale of their goods, as the Russians had formerly. • To allow them some small, detached, unfortified island in the neighbourhood of Chusan as a magazine for their unsold goods, and as a residence for their people to take care of them. • To allow them a similar privilege near Canton, and some other trifling indulgences. • To abolish the transit duties between Macao and Canton, or at least to reduce them to the standard of 1782.

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• To prohibit the exactions of any duties from English merchants, over and above those settled by the emperor’s diploma, a copy of which was requested to be given them, as they had never yet been able to see it for their unequivocal direction. (Morse 1926a, p. 225) Macartney’s proposal for making a treaty to “discuss arrangements for conducting the trade in future to the advantage of the two countries” (Morse 1926a, p. 214), albeit with utmost politeness and etiquette, sounded exceedingly absurd to Emperor Qianlong, who, like his predecessors, never considered grounding China’s relations with the barbarians on treaties. Essentially, Macartney’s failure could be ascribed to the differences between China and the West in dealing with diplomatic relations. In contrast to the maritime Western powers that tended to see each other as “sovereign state[s]” (Fairbank 1969, p. 231; 1978, p. 405), China, literally known as “the Middle Kingdom”, had long envisaged itself as the center of the whole world in which the emperor, as the one and only ruler, must be paid tribute by the peripheral nations recognized as barbaric and subordinate. Suffice it to say, in China’s hierarchical worldview, none of the other nations could be regarded as a commensurate power, or the so-called sovereign state defined by the Western countries. Under such circumstances, it should not be surprising that the Qing imperial court vetoed the practice of treating the visiting countries as equal entities and refused to be committed to the ostensibly ridiculous treaty relations. More significantly, Macartney’s treaty proposal was not accepted by the Qing government because it was not as friendly as it was claimed to be—it contained some clauses that may have seriously encroached on the sovereignty and territories of China, such as the plea for tax exemption for commodities imported from Britain into China, and particularly, the request for the cession of a small island as a settlement for the British merchants. Macartney’s visit to China, however, was not entirely unrewarding: according to his observations, the Chinese dragon was not in the least invincible. In the following decades till the outbreak of the Opium War, the Britons came to realize that there stood three approaches ahead to the Anglo-Chinese relations: to give up the idea of opening trade with China, to unconditionally abide by any rule or regulation made by China, or to compel China to enter into treaty relations with the Western countries (Hu 2010, p. 43). The United Kingdom, apparently, chose the third one without hesitation by bringing the feeble empire into a war that lasted for 2  years and resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, thus heralding the advent of a special phase in which the centuries-old tributary system was entirely supplanted by the practice of governing Sino-foreign relations with a series of treaties, as pointed out by Fairbank (1969): The modern invasion of China by the Western world really began in the middle of the nineteenth century, after the first Anglo-Chinese treaty was signed at Nanking in 1842. Until that time relations with the West had been based upon the ancient Chinese tribute system; after that time they were based upon the “unequal” foreign treaties. (p. 3)

Fairbank’s contention suggests that there exists some connection between the Western conquest of China and the unequal treaties signed between the Late Qing

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and the Western powers. To a large extent, the unequal treaties mirrored the unsymmetrical power relationships between the West as the colonizer/conqueror and China in the Late Qing as the colonized/conquered, especially given that during 1840–1911 when China was gradually molded into a so called “semi-feudal and semi-colonial nation”, it was forced to sign over one thousand treaties with more than twenty foreign countries, with at least one third being the unequal ones. Therefore, when the West began to get the upper hand with its military advantages in its encounters or clashes with China, the unequal treaties, which were key to the “treaty system” in the treaty period, remained an instrument for the Western intruders to obtain their “privileged position in China not unlike that of earlier barbarian conquerors” (Fairbank 1969, p. 3) and constituted “the power structure of the Chinese state” (Fairbank 1969, p. 467) that facilitated and underpinned the so called “Sino-Western rule over China” (Fairbank 1969, p. 467), thus becoming “the symbol of the recent century of Western superiority in the East” (Fairbank 1969, p. 4) where “the great Empire of China dominated the Far Eastern Scene” (Fairbank 1969, p. 4).

3.3.2  Translating Tributary System into Treaty System The Middle Kingdom had long envisaged itself as posited at the heart of the world, with power and wealth unrivalled, and its emperors as the sons of heaven with devine right to rule over their subjects in the ways they intended. On the other hand, prior to 1500 A.D., China’s formal relations with the outside world were basically limited to its tributary states or “client states” (Sitaraman 2009, p. 224) that were obliged to knee down and pay tribute to the Chinese emperors. Thus, when China’s contacts with the West were on the rise, their relations were habitually intended by the Chinese side to be handled within the framework of the millennia-old tributary system, in which the Western countries were expected to show the same deference as China’s traditional tributaries in accordance with the chronic “superior–inferior relationship” (Sitaraman 2009, p. 224). The trade between the foreign merchants and the Chinese, under such circumstances, was viewed by the Manchu government not as a mutually beneficial operation, but rather as a reward bestowed by the Celestial Empire in return for the tribute it received—a practice considered as the “variation” (Sitaraman 2009, p. 224) of the tributary system. Consequently, the foreigners in Canton, most of whom were businessmen, were forbidden to settle in the inland cities to reside with the locals, and most significantly, the transactions had to be executed exclusively through the designated trading guilds named cohong (Grasso et al. 2004, p. 29). The practice of mandating the trade to the authorized firms and restricting it to certain areas, nowadays known as “Canton system” (Fairbank 1978, p. 163), is even envisioned as a compromise made by the Manchu government to “appease” (Fairbank 1978, p. 218) the Western “barbarians” (Fairbank 1978, p. 218).

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China’s insistence on the tributary system as a tool to regulate its relations with the Western powers was manifestly founded on two long-standing assumptions: its cultural superiority over other states, which was exhibited in its binary civilized/ barbarian world view formed since Han Dynasty (202  B.C.–220  A.D.), and its monopoly of the precious commodities such as porcelain, silk, tea, etc. that had bent the foreigners to the tributary system. These two assumptions, characterized by China’s early interactions with the external world, however, became problematic on the eve of the Opium War, especially the latter that was critiqued as “most out of date” (Fairbank 1978, p.  174), given that the European powers, after undergoing industrialization in the nineteenth century, began to envisage China, with its vast land and large population, more as a coveted market than a sheer exporter. When China was still indulged in its illusion of ruling the world with its cultural dominance and tributary system, the nineteenth century had already begun to witness the old colonial regime being devastated and Britain emerging as “an Empire of Free Trade” (Semmel 1970, p. 13) that featured industrialism and mercantilism driven by the middle class’ impetus to “translate their control of the new productive powers of the factories into greater political power within their country, and then, if possible, to extend their influence throughout the world” (Semmel 1970, p. 12). Under such circumstances, free trade did not remain simply the liberal transfer and exchange of merchandise between the underdeveloped countries and Great Britain as “the workshop of the world” (Semmel 1970, p. 157); it was a doctrine, or a beneficial principle by which Britain could colonize the foreign nations without assuming “the responsibility of governing them” (Semmel 1970, p. 8). It epitomized the national interest of Great Britain in an era when colonies and foreign trade were recognized by Adam Smith as “a necessary vent for surplus industrial production” (as cited in Semmel 1970, p. 9) and also a weapon used by “the great English manufacturers, who dreamt of making the economic conquest of the world” (Semmel 1970, p. 8). Therefore, when the British merchants animated by “profit, religion and pride of country” (Fairbank 1978, p. 174) successfully transformed free trade into a national appeal, “Mercantilism and nationalism had gone hand-in-hand” (Fairbank 1978, p. 174) to herald the onset of an epoch in which the free traders’ interests were taken as top priorities by the British government in dealing with its relations with other countries, including China as the most populous nation. In order to secure the accession and promulgation of the British free trade spirit, Britain’s major concern, in the case of China, was to remove the chief obstacle in the way—“the institutional structures of tribute system” (Fairbank 1978, p.  213) and “to establish by treaty law a system of rights which would facilitate British expansion in trade and contact generally” (Fairbank 1978, p. 221) that aimed immediately at the abolishment of the barriers of Sino-foreign trade and the inauguration of state-to-state diplomatic relations. Known as “the treaty system”, the new mechanism started with the signing of the Treaty of Nanking as the outcome of the 1840–1842 Opium War, took shape during 1842–1860, and saw its extension and consolidation in the following decades before it played a dominant part in the aftermath of the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War. Now the question is, what role did treaty translation play in the meantime?

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In order to answer this question, this book chooses to focus its attention to two treaties both signed between China and Britain during 1842–1860—the so called “formative decades of the treaty system” (Fairbank 1978, pp. 214–215) that marks “a new order in China’s new relations” (Fairbank 1978, p.  214) —the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin (1858).11 This investigation has been narrowed down to the translation of the treaties made between China and Britain primarily because the latter by 1840 had already evolved into the most influential European country, economically, militarily and culturally, the leader of the Western powers in the “opening of China” (Fairbank 1969, p. 73), as well as the most active participant in shaping the treaty system. As two agreements that contain a multitude of inequitable clauses drastically impinging on China’s economic interests and sovereignty, the Treaty of Nanking and the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin both epitomized the asymmetrical power relations between the signatories, and thus played an essential part in demolishing the tributary institution and forming the treaty system of the Celestial Empire. Recognized as beginning China’s long-term struggle with the foreign barbarians through negotiations, the Treaty of Nanking remarkably laid the foundation for “China’s century-long ‘unequal’ relations with the West” (Fairbank 1969, p. 57) as it provided a prototype for the other treaties to replicate in settling the Sino-foreign disputes during the “treaty century” (Fairbank 1978, p. 214). On the other hand, the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, which ended the first phase of the Second Opium War (1856–1860) and turned out more “punitive and intrusive” (Auslin 2004, p. 21) than the Treaty of Nanking, is even deemed as marking “the crucial change in Sino-­ Western relations” (Auslin 2004, p. 21). Generally, the role of the Treaty of Tientsin in constructing and boosting the treaty system in China and its resulting impact on China ought not be underestimated, as uttered by Fairbank (1969): The second group of unequal treaties, negotiated after fighting in 1858 and finally ratified after further fighting in 1860, became the perfected legal basis of this Sino-Western order. Thereafter, with superior force held in reserve, the treaty powers led by Britain sought to prolong the rule of Peking in full domestic sovereignty—except for those special privileges accorded Western commercial and evangelical enterprise. For two generations after 1860 China lay open to foreign exploitation both economically and spiritually, tied by the web of treaty rights—extraterritoriality, foreign settlements and concessions, the treaty tariff which after 1858 applied to opium as well as other goods, and foreign rights of inland navigation, of proselytism and eventually even of industrial enterprise. (p. 462)

All in all, in the wake of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, the tributary system began to be dismantled and replaced by the treaty system, with more and more unequal treaties being made and translated between China and the foreign powers. Meanwhile, in order to make sure that the unequal treaties were in line with the interests of their own countries, the “barbarian” translators even frequently resorted to what we term “deceiving translation” in this book.  Also known as the Treaty of Tianjin, it was signed between Late Qing China and several foreign powers, including the United Kingdom, France, Russian and the United States to end the first phase of the Second Opium War (1856–1860). The Treaty of Tientsin to be analysed in the later parts of this book refers specifically to the one signed between China and Great Britain.

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3.3.3  D  eceiving Translation of the Sino-British Unequal Treaties Approximately 15 percent of the ancient Greek treaties produced during 700– 300 B.C. have been found with one clause or another intended for the evasion of fraud or trickery (Bederman 2004, pp. 175–176). Such clauses, also known as “anti-­ deceit provisions” (Bederman 2004, p. 176), were even discovered in the so called “peace treaties”, in which the parties involved were demanded to view the treaties “without trick,” (Bederman 2004, p.  176) or “not with craft nor with stratagem” (Bederman 2004, p. 176). The anti-deceit clauses, generally, were devised to avoid the situation in which the parties concerned played “on some ambiguity of meaning to produce an interpretation contrary to that intended and obvious” (Bederman 2004, p. 176). The existence of the anti-deceit provisions, nevertheless, is indicative of the fact that “any written text was capable of ambiguity and disputed meaning” (Bederman 2004, p. 177) and that deceits or deceptions are also inevitable in the textualization of treaties. In contrast to those that emerged more as the consequences of unwitting misinterpretations in the antique Greek treaties, the deceits that arose in the textualization of the Sino-foreign unequal treaties were primarily ignited by deceiving translation, which, by definition, suggests that the treaty texts were rendered to help one side to deceive the other side (s). Of the factors that contributed to the occurrences of deceits in the translation of the Sino-Western unequal treaties, the foremost may have been the Qing court’s lack of qualified translators well versed in the Western tongues, including English as one of the most prevailing languages at that time. In fact, under the Canton system, there existed a number of Chinese serving as tongshi (通事 translator/interpreter) for the Manchu Government at various levels, whose proficiency in English and expertise in translation, however, were frequently questioned and challenged. William Hunter, an American merchant who resided in Canton since the outset of the nineteenth century, criticized the indigenous translators he worked with as “knowing nothing more than their own tongue” (as cited in Wong 2011, p. 20). On the other hand, the archive of the East India Company was surprisingly filled with complains about the incompetent Chinese translators, among which the most widespread one was like: “The difficulty in obtaining a faithful interpretation of a letter by means of the Merchants is almost insurmountable, it being only by general expressions that we can at any time render ourselves intelligible” (Morse 1926b, p. 7). The embarrassing situation did not change fundamentally on the eve of the signing of the Convention of Peking12 in 1860, when the Franco-Anglo allied army had advanced to threaten the capital, to whom the Manchu imperial court was obliged to ask Harry Parkes, a captured British counsellor, to write a letter for ceasefire negotiations. Ironically, this letter, which had been scribbled in English by Parkes him Also known as the First Convention of Peking, it includes three different unequal treaties, signed between Late Qing China and France, Russia and the United Kingdom.

12

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self, was not immediately delivered upon completion as it carried in its margin a few lines that were decipherable to no one in the Qing imperial court. The Manchu government must have been astounded by its ignorance of the Western tongues when these lines were recognized ultimately by a Cantonese English speaker as nothing more than the date and Parkes’ own signature in English (Xiong 1994, p. 302). Due to a severe lack of competent native translators, the Manchu government was finally compelled to resort to the foreigners in treaty translation, who, unfortunately, never seemed to have seriously considered the national interests of the Celestial Empire. As early as during the reign of Emperor Kangxi, many Western missionaries had resided in Beijing to serve the imperial court and some were even promoted to be high officials. However, the loyalty of these “European Turned Chinese” (Peyrefitte 1993, p. 157) to the Manchu government, if any, should not in any circumstance be overstated. The fact that Macartney’s diplomatic operations, which involved translation between various languages, were surreptitiously facilitated by the Europeans who worked for the Qing imperial court (Wong 2011, pp. 11–15) manifested that the foreigners hired by the Qing government failed to maintain a neutral and impersonal standing, not to mention serving their Chinese employers dutifully. They were, as Sir George Stanton pointed out, playing the role that was more like “the agents of their own countries in China” (as cited in Wong 2011, p. 13). Undoubtedly, the Qing government by then had yet to realize the importance of translation for foreign relations and the great power owned by translators who could even have an enormous impact on the course of history by manipulating the meaning in the process of translating. Bao Peng (鲍鹏), a notorious indigenous translator deeply involved in the First Opium War, delineated translator as being bestowed with the magic of either effortlessly bringing peace or igniting hostilities in his awkward Canton English: You thinkee my one smallo man? You thinkee my go buy on catty rice, on catty fowl? No! My largo man, my have catchee peace, my have catchee war my hand, suppose I opee he, makee peace, suppose I shutee he, must nakee fight. (Bingham 1843, pp. 40–41)

Therefore, when the Manchu government was obliged to rely upon the nonnatives to render the treaties into Chinese, it practically chose to renounce the power of translating and allow the deceits in translation just to take place. 3.3.3.1  Translation of the Treaty of Nanking In the case of the Treaty of Nanking, some exterior factors should be foremost taken into consideration as to how deceiving translation was evoked, the primary being the Chinese negotiators as the mediators between Britain and the Manchu imperial court. The Chinese negotiators, Qi Ying (耆英), Yi Libu (伊里布) and the local governor-general, Niu Jian (牛鉴), according to Fairbank (1978), practically served as the intermediaries between the British conquerors and the Qing government. These officials, whose chief concern was to “produce harmony by assuaging the

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fears and reassuring the pride of both sides” (Fairbank 1978, p. 210) instead of stubbornly adhering to Beijing’s decrees, were propelled to cooperate (or compromise) with the Britons on the one hand, and even “to manipulate and mislead their superiors in Peking” (Fairbank 1978, p. 211) on the other. A typical example to exhibit how they manipulated the Qing court to advance the treaty negotiations is that despite the imperial edict of “no talks” until the departure of the lingering British fleet, they managed to have both parties sit down at the table and get the treaty signed in order to remove the British warships as the most immediate menace (Fairbank 1978, p. 211). Under such circumstances, it was not beyond imagination to see the Qing minions turn a blind eye to the deceits in treaty translation just for the return of an early completion of negotiations. Munipulations can as well be seen in the textualization of the Treaty of Nanking, which was drafted in English before being transcribed into Chinese. Although “an equal raising of characters to give equality to England and China” (Fairbank 1978, p. 211) in the Chinese language remains intact in the English version kept by the British side, it is unexpectedly missing in the copy sent to the Chinese emperor. Whether it was an accident or not requires an extensive investigation. It should be realized, however, that such an unusual practice might have faciliated in winning ratification with the home governments of both sides by catering to the Britions’ needs of making contact with China on an equal footing and maintaining the Chinese illusion that the “celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms” (Lin et  al. 1840, p. 502), which might not have worked without the complicity of the Chinese negotiators. In the meantime, the occurrence of deceiving translation was tolerated probably because the treaty was initially not taken seriously and readily enforced by the Manchu government. The Celestial Empire’s foreign relations, as discussed earlier, had never been constructed on treaties within its time-honored tributary system. Thus, when the Treaty of Nanking was signed on board Pottinger’s vessel, HMS Cornwallis, on August 29, 1842, it was envisaged by China more as an expedient solution to the Opium War or part of its appeasement policy: …All in all it reflects quite clearly their principal aim at the time; to ingratiate themselves with the British invaders and get them out the Yangtze just as soon as possible. In their minds this was more important than the terms of the treaty settlement and they did not scruple to commit the empire on a few points to which the emperor himself had not agreed. (Fairbank 1969, pp. 101–102)

Nevertheless, with respect to the deceptions in treaty translation, the translators may have played a role more decisive than the Chinese negotiators because they were not only the full participants in the negotiations, but also the immediate possessors of the power of translating and the experts who were supposed to decide how the treaties should be rendered and what the translations should be like. Actually, before the treaty negotiations were launched, Commissioner Qi Ying, the highest royal representative in charge, had hired a Chinese translator named Chen Chao (陈巢) in response to the Emperor’s instruction that “anyone who could make himself understood by the barbarians, even with his gestures alone, must be

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employed to lobby the antagonists” (as cited in Wen et  al. 1964, p.  2318). Unfortunately, as this awkward Pidgin English speaker proved desperately ineligible for his job (Wen et al. 1964, p. 2215) and there were no other qualified indigenous translators available, Commissioner Qi had no choice but to accept the foreign translators to serve in the negotiations. Ironically, in one of his memorials to the throne, he unexpectedly looked upon hiring barbarian translators as a convenience to the Chinese side: “Since the three barbarians, Morrison, Gützlaff and Robert Thom, were all well versed in Chinese both in oral and written forms, inconvenience may occur if they are replaced by indigenous translators”13 (Wen et al. 1964, p. 2335). Commissioner Qi’s decision to hand over to his adversaries the rights to translate, a nightmare to China in the following decades, was undoubtedly good news for the British who had lamented “the want of an interpreter of their own nation, capable of conceiving and rendering the spirit of the letter, of carrying on with the advantage a conference both dedicate and important” (Staunton 1797, pp.  239–240). Observably, it was thanks to Qi’s munificence that the three “barbarians”—Robert Morrison, Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff and Robert Thom, could play an active role as translators in subordinating the Manchu government to its British counterpart during negotiations of the Treaty of Nanking. John Robert Morrison, the son of Robert Morrison who was the first Protestant missionary to China in modern times, had earlier served as a business translator for the East India Company and was later formally appointed as interpreter and Secretary of the British Business Superintendent during the First Opium War. As chief translator of the Treaty of Nanking, He succeeded in helping to impell the Manchu imperial court to accept the British conditions for ceasefire: On August 11 they were prepared to attack Nanking when Chinese emissaries dramatically reached the river bank at dawn and announced the imminent arrival of Ch’i-ying. The British attack was therefore called off, and Morrison sent a reply which was “not at all clear or smooth in style” but which stated that, since the emperor had sent a minister with “full powers” (ch’ üan-ch’ üan, the term used by the British), hostilities would cease. On August 14 Morrison examined and accepted the “imperial commission,” and on the eighteenth the English formally suspended hostilities. (Fairbank 1969, p. 98)

The fact that John Morrison, in the signing ceremony of the Treaty of Nanking, signed his name also as the British plenipotentiary on the treaty texts mainly drafted and rendered by himself, manifested how he was relied upon both as an envoy and translator. As a precursor and contributor to the British conquest of China, he received highest tributes from his superiors and peers for his untiring labors and strives for defending British interests and dignity. The British business superintendent Charles Elliot complimented him on providing as much aid to people around him as he could with his brilliant knowledge of China (Wong 2011, p. 42). William Dallas Bernard, John Morrison’s co-worker on the Nemesis, called him “the ­indefatigable interpreter” (Bernard 1846, p.  139), “the value of whose services  The original is “该夷马礼逊、罗布旦、郭世利均通汉文,兼习汉语,勿须传通事传语,反致隔 阂。”

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throughout the war it is impossible too highly to appreciate” (Bernard 1846, p. 139), making a special mention of his unselfishness and audacity during the Opium War: Not only on this, but on many other occasions, these gentlemen were personally exposed to the fire of the enemy, little less than either soldiers or tailors. They showed the utmost coolness and personal courage: and it is but justice to them to remark that their presence was always of the greatest value in every operation, even though unarmed, and, as non-­ belligerents, unnoticed. Their knowledge of the language and their good judgment frequently enlisted in our favour the people of the country, who might have offered great annoyance, and they were often able to mitigate the hardships even of war itself. (Bernard 1846, p. 139)

Therefore, when Morrison, who “played so large a part at Nanking” (Fairbank 1969, p. 121) and who “had combined an unusual knowledge of the Chinese language and people with an understanding of trade and diplomacy” (Fairbank 1969, p. 121) suddenly died of illness on August, 1843 at the age of 27, his family received the most profound condolences from his countrymen, among whom the first Governor of Hong Kong Sir Henry Pottinger lamented his decease as “an irreparable national calamity” (Pottinger 1856, p. 218). The mourners who had come all the way from Hong Kong to Macau to attend his funeral were so heart-broken that they even forgot to go home upon the completion of the ritual (Wong 2011, p.  42). Therefore, it is not surprising to see such a national hero of Britain, so profoundly involved in the military and diplomatic operations against China, did not allow the chances to slip away when treaty translation could be used to serve British national interests. In the following section, the English version of the Treaty of Nanking drafted chiefly by John Morrison will be analysed in comparison with the Chinese one translated by him and his colleagues to find out the discrepancies that might have contributed to the British conquest of the Chinese Empire. Queen vs. Junzhu (君主) Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and His Majesty the Emperor of China, being desirous of putting an end to the misunderstandings and consequent hostilities which have arisen between the two Countries, have resolved to conclude a Treaty for that purpose.14 (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

There shall henceforward be Peace and Friendship between Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and His Majesty the Emperor of China, and between their respective Subjects, who shall enjoy full security and protection for their persons and property within the Dominions of the other. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

14

 Underlines in this book, unless otherwise noted, are all mine.

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(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

The word “Queen”, used eight times in the English version of the Treaty of Nanking, without any exception, was rendered into Junzhu (君主 Monarch) whose gender remains somewhat ambiguous in the Chinese version, rather than the more equivalent Nühuang (女皇 Empress) or Nüwang (女王 Queen), either referring to a female sovereign in the Chinese language. In contrast to Great Britain that had embraced a couple of female imperial rulers by the end of the nineteenth century, the Celestial Empire, with a much longer history, had only one woman who had ever succeeded in succeeding to the throne and creating an imperial era entirely of her own. This contrast may have been ascribed primarily to China’s feudal tradition of considering females as inferior to males and thus excluding them from sociopolitical life most of the time. And then not surprisingly, prior to the treaty times there existed such a stipulation as “no yifu (夷妇 female barbarians) should be allowed access to China” (Mao 1995, p. 498). When the Manchu representatives met with their counterparts at the negotiations, one of their concerns was unexpectedly to preclude the British negotiators from being accompanied by their female families (Qi et al. 1954, p. 382). The contempt towards women was so pervasive among the Late Qing scholar-­bureaucrats that Li Xingyuan (李星沅), a high official of the Manchu government, when told of the progress of negotiations of the Treaty of Nanking, attacked the paralleling between Emperor Daoguang and Queen Victoria in the English treaty text as “most frustrating” (Li 1987, p. 428), seeing it as comparable to the humiliations such as releasing the Chinese traitors, compensating for the burned opium and redeeming the cities possessed by the British army (Li 1987, p. 428). Interestingly, the fact that the recurring Queen in the English treaty text had been safely neutralized into the genderless Junzhu in the Chinese version may have ­eventually helped to maintain the dignity of the Celestial Empire, notwithstanding that the bulk of the Chinese people at that time might not have been informed of Britain as a kingdom ruled by a woman. The Omission of “Establishments” Article II: His Majesty the Emperor of China agrees that British Subjects, with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their Mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint at the Cities and Towns of Canton[Guangzhou], Amoy[Xiamen], Foochow-fu[Fuzhou], Ningpo[Ningbo], and Shanghai, and Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., will appoint Superintendents or Consular Officers, to reside at each of the above-named Cities or Towns, to be the medium of communication between the Chinese Authorities and the said Merchants, and to see that the just Duties and other Dues of the Chinese Government is hereafter provided for, are duly discharged by Her Britannic Majesty’s Subjects. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

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(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

The British side, unsurprisingly, refused to consider the Chinese negotiators’ proposal for segregation of the “female barbarians” since living abroad with female families by then had become a common practice in the West, especially for the embassy personnel. As a result of fierce debates, Article II of the Treaty of Nanking was written out to allow the British people to reside in the five designated ports with their families. It should be noted, however, that this article, probably nothing unusual for the Westerners born with “the spirit of free trade” (Fairbank 1969, p. 278), was probably the biggest concession ever made by the Manchu government whose biggest fear was to see the barbarians live together with the natives. It is assumed that the Manchu government was reluctant to see the blending of the foreigners and the indigenous Chinese because it was extremely worried about the possibility that they might someday be united to revolt against its imperial rule (Mao 1998, p. 107). In fact, during the pre-treaty era when Canton remained the only port open to the outside world, some measures had been adopted to prevent the foreigners from living in the communities of the locals, including the establishment of the cohongs aimed to confine the foreign merchants to settling and operating in a designated area called “Shisanhang” (十三行 the Thirteen Hongs), since the fewer barbarians to live among the Chinese people, the safer the Manchu government may have felt. However, the English text of the Treaty of Nanking shows that the people who were permitted to reside in the five ports included not only “families” but also “establishments”, with the latter interestingly being untranslated in the Chinese version. Referring to a “group of people employed in an organization, a household” (Hornby 2002, p. 941), “establishment” could have been a vaguely defined and easily misinterpreted word to the treaty translators. What can be certain, however, is that semantically it is broader than jiajuan (家眷) which is “equivalent to wife and family, perhaps including servants, but certainly more narrow than in the English version of the treaty” (Fairbank 1969, p. 220). The impact of such a mismatch is obvious: on one hand, it may have been easier for the Chinese treaty text to be ratified by the Emperor of China, given that the absence of the Chinese equivalent of “establishment” implied fewer barbarian immigrants to China; the survival of “establishment” in the English treaty text, on the other hand, enabled the British subjects to bring in more people than their family members if the English version was authorized for interpretation. In the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty of Nanking, this discrepancy was indeed taken advantage of by the Britons. When the British superintendents and consular officers came to office in the treaty ports, they brought with them some people that should not have been recognized as jiajuan, including the two Cantonese interpreters brought by Consul Gribble into Xiamen, and several linguists in an

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entourage of 15 people following Consul Thom who assumed his post in Ningbo. Consul Alcock, when involved in the conflicts between his employees and the local authorities in Shanghai, claimed that these employees were part of the “establishments” according to Article II of the Treaty of Nanking (Fairbank 1969, p. 220). As a result, the conghong practice as a constituent of the Canton System was threatened, and the Manchu government’s enduring attempt to isolate the foreigners from the indigenous population were undermined. Cities and Towns vs. Gangkou (港口) Article II: His Majesty the Emperor of China agrees that British Subjects, with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their Mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint at the Cities and Towns of Canton, Amoy, Foochow-fu, Ningpo, and Shanghai, and Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., will appoint Superintendents or Consular Officers, to reside at each of the above-named Cities or Towns, to be the medium of communication between the Chinese Authorities and the said Merchants, and to see that the just Duties and other Dues of the Chinese Government is hereafter provided for, are duly discharged by Her Britannic Majesty’s Subjects. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

Article II of the Treaty of Nanking was to solve the problem about the residence of the British people in China. In conformity with the English treaty text, the British subjects were authorized to reside at “the cities and towns” of the five treaty ports to be opened for free trade. However, in the Chinese version an entirely different story was told: the British subjects, most of whom were adventurers and merchants, were only allowed to live in gangkou (港口), i.e. harbors or anchorages all situated in the outskirts of the cities in the cases of Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai. Conceivably, the Chinese version was more appealing and agreeable to the Manchu government—according to this article, the bulk of the barbarians would be kept away from the heart of the five cities, which suggested that their threats to the local authorities and the imperial rule would be lessened considerably. However, the discrepancies between the two versions in terms of the British right of residence had inevitably evoked disputes during the execution of the treaty. Commissioner Qi Ying, also the plenipotentiary of negotiations of the Treaty of Nanking, according to the Chinese treaty text, demanded that the guild halls be built only at the harbors for the British merchants to settle in, whereas his counterpart, Sir Henry Pottinger, decided, based on the English text, that the British businessmen were qualified to live, to build or rent houses in a designated site beyond the harbors or even within or in the neighborhood of the walled cities (Shen 1983, pp. 217– 220). As the two sides failed to arrive at any consensus due to the disparities of the treaty texts, the British merchants’ residence problem had to be suspended and thus

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remained an obstacle in the Sino-British relations for the next few years. Now the question is, who was to blame for this nuisance? The English treaty text, as previously noted, were drafted and rendered into Chinese chiefly by John Robert Morrison, a British translator who observably may have known all too well about the exact Chinese equivalent of “the cities and towns” given that in the latter part of the same clause he translated a similar phrase into chengyi (城邑 walled city), which was more accurate in this context. Obviously, different renditions for almost the same expression by such a highly eligible translator should not be simply ascribed to technical errors. It is more likely that such a solution both served the needs of safeguarding the British interests in China and improving the treaty’s accessibility to the obstinate Manchu imperial court. As early as on February 20, 1840, in his directive to the British ambassador plenipotentiary in China, Henry John Temple Palmerston, the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of Great Britain, already emphasized that any controversy aroused by different interpretations of the treaty should be resolved in line with the English version (Hu 1993, p. 536). However, his idea was not written out as a stipulation into any treaty until the 1858 negotiations of the Treaty of Tientsin. According to the international practice, the signatories could choose their own versions for final interpretation in case of disputes, when no statement was made in the treaty as to which version was more authoritative. The Chinese authorities, therefore, had every reason to ask the British subjects not to reside within the walled cities based on their interpretation of the Chinese treaty text which stipulated that they should stay within the distant harbors. The discranpancy created by John Robert Morrison, on the other hand, once again allowed the British authorities who “recognized only their own interpretation” (Fairbank 1969, p. 201) to bargain for their subjects to move from the far-off harbors into the walled cities. Residing in the interior of the cities, in fact, may not have brought more substantial profits than remaining at the harbors, particularly for the British traders who had arrived all by sea—they did it probably because only by doing so could British flag as the icon of conquest be hoisted at the heart of the Chinese cities and towns. Cede vs. Jiyu (给予) Article III. It being obviously necessary and desirable, that British Subjects should have some Port whereat they may careen and refit their Ships, when required, and keep Stores for that purpose, His Majesty the Emperor of China cedes to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., the Island of Hongkong, to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, Her Heirs and Successors, and to be governed by such Laws and Regulations as Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., shall see fit to direct. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

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Article III of the Treaty of Nanking, which concerns the cession of Hong Kong Island to Britain, epitomizes a tremendous victory of the British who had longed for a trading base in China that was under their control. As early as George Macartney’s well-known embassy to the Celestial Empire in 1893, his plea for a small isle near Zhoushan as the settlement for British merchants, as previously noted, was categorically denied by Emperor Qianlong who decided that territory and sovereignty were non-negotiable. Taking possession of an island as a base for expansion in China, however, was so urgent for the British colonial enterprise that in November, 1840, 6  months after the outbreak of the First Opium War, the cession of Hong Kong Island became one of the three major issues of the Sino-British negotiations. In January, 1841, the British navy annexed Hong Kong Island and when rumor had it that it was practically based upon an agreement reached between the Chinese plenipotentiary and his British counterpart, the whole Manchu imperial court was shocked and enraged to the extent that Emperor Daoguang issued a decree to reproach his plenipotentiary and have him arrested: I was infuriated after reading the memorial! I am the sovereign of the world, and every inch of this land and every subject of this country are state-owned. How dare Qi Shan [the plenipotentiary] cede Hong Kong and consent to commercial intercourse without my authorization…His behaviors are unappreciative, conscienceless and unforgivable indeed! He is to be discharged and arrested.15 (Wen et al. 1964, p. 805)

The Chinese Emperor’s fierce reaction indicated that he had once been as tough as his grandfather Emperor Qianlong in terms of territorial questions. However, his stubbornness seemed to have withered away in the aftermath of the Opium War, in which case, although the military defeats by Britain may have been the leading factor, the impact produced by the discrepancies between the English and Chinese versions of the Treaty of Nanking concerning Article III should not be underestimated. In accordance with the English treaty text, the Island of Hong Kong was “ceded” by the Emperor of China to the Queen of Great Britain. “Cede” in English means “to give up one’s rights to or possession of sth.” (Hornby 2002, p. 404) or more specifically, “to give (usu. land or a right) to another country or person, esp. after losing a war” (Addison Wesley Longman China Limited 1998, p. 221). It implies, in the case of Article III of the Treaty of Nanking, that firstly the cession of Hong Kong was more like a war trophy, and secondly, China would lose possession of or give up its right to rule in Hong Kong Island. Such implications, unquestionably, were in line with Britain’s long-held dream for the possession of a threshold to China and its growing self-esteem as the most powerful European country. However, treated as the equivalent of “cede”, “jiyu” (给予) in the Chinese version simply means “to give” or “to bestow”, sounded as if the Island of Hong Kong had been given as a gift or even a reward for tributes, as what the dynasties of the Celestial Empire always did to its client states over the millennia under the tributary  The original is“览奏殊堪痛恨!朕君临天下,尺土一民,莫非国家所有,琦善擅与香港,擅准通 商,胆敢乞朕恩施格外,是直代逆乞恩。……如此辜恩误国,实属丧尽天良!琦善著即革职锁 拿。” 15

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system. In other words, when “cede” had been reduced to “jiyu” in order to make cession of Hong Kong sound less humiliating, the Middle Kingdom’s illusion as posited at the heart of the world was once again taken advantaged of. To Be Possessed in Perpetuity vs. Changyuan Jushou Zhuzhang (常远据守主掌) The translation of “to be possessed in perpetuity” in Article III is another example to reveal how far deceptions in treaty translation could have gone. “Possess” in English means “to have as one’s property” (AWLCL 1998, p. 1164), whereas “in perpetuity” means “for ever” or “permanently” (AWLCL 1998, p.  1115). “The Island of Hongkong to be possessed in perpetuity”, therefore, suggests that the Hong Kong Island was to be owned by Great Britain as its property permanently— obviously the best result that the British government could expect. Despite that Hong Kong may have been occupied initially “as an atonement for the insult offered [at Canton] to Her Majesty’s Crown and Dignity” (Fairbank 1969, p. 123), it was soon expected to be made a free port that collected revenue “chiefly by leasing the crown lands” (Fairbank 1969, p. 123) and even “a base of operations” (Fairbank 1969, p. 123) aimed at containing China militarily and economically. Hong Kong was so strategically important that it was even likened by the British Foreign Secretary Palmerston to a wedge driven into the Chinese mainland, with which “the British fleet could carry out its gunboat policy, the British drug dealers could store and sell their opium, and any crimes could be committed under the protection of the British authorities” (Qiao and Jin 1992, pp. 18–19). The British ambition for Hong Kong, however, was obscured by “changyuan” (常远) in the Chinese text as the rendition of “perpetuity”, which in Chinese simply means “changqi” (长期 for a long time) (Xu 2008, p. 209), indicating that the Island of Hong Kong was to be garrisoned with British troops or brought under control by the British authorities for a long period of time instead of being possessed permanently. The British government, consequently, could make use of such a big discrepancy to haggle with the Manchu government after the signing of the Treaty of Nanking. For instance, when informed by his British counterpart that the home government of Britain demanded that the residents of Hong Kong should “no longer come under the jurisdiction of China in any way” (Fairbank 1969, p. 128), Plenipotentiary Qi Ying was astounded since the Treaty of Nanking “had referred to the cession of the ground for British use” (Fairbank 1969, p. 129) only and “had not provided that the Chinese inhabitants should become British subjects” (Fairbank 1969, p. 129). In other words, the Manchu government was convinced that the cession of Hong Kong simply implied the appropriation of the land and thus should not in the least include the handover of the rule over the populace, whereas from the vantage point of the British authorities, how could a land “to be possessed in perpetuity” allow no transfer of the right to rule? Suffice it to say that in the aftermath of the signing of this treaty, the conflicts between the two sides concerning the cession of the Island of Hong Kong were not resolved, but rather amplified by such discrepancies.

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3.3.3.2  Translation of the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin In order to remove the trade barriers and strengthen its influence in China, Britain initiated the Second Opium War which impelled the Manchu government to sign the Treaty of Tientsin. The Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin, together with the Covention of Peking also signed between China and Britain, signified a new adjustment of the Sino-British commercial and diplomatic relations since the opening of the treaty times. In the years to follow, the provisions of the Treaty of Tientsin played an extremely significant role in regulating the Sino-British trade relations during the second half of the nineteenth century and the initial years of the twentieth century (Cao 2010, p. 110). During the implementation of the Treaty of Tientsin, however, clashes between China and Britain recurred and extended from the peripherals to the centers, from the coast areas to the inland cities, and from trade to other facets of Sino-British relations. It is interesting to note that some of the clashes were also triggered by the discrepancies between the English and Chinese treaty texts for which the translators were to blame. Residence in Chaozhou or Swatow? Article XI In addition to the cities and towns of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo and Shanghai, opened by the Treaty of Nanking, it is agreed that British subjects may frequent the cities and ports of Newchawang, Tang-chow, (Taiwan) Formosa, Chaozhou (Swatow), and Kiung-chow (Hainan). They are permitted to carry on trade with whomsoever they please, and to proceed to and fro at pleasure with their vessels and merchandise. They shall enjoy the same privileges, advantages, and immunities at the said towns and ports as they enjoy at the ports already opened to trade, including the right of residence, of buying or renting houses, of leasing land therein, and of building churches, hospitals, and cemeteries. (the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin, 1858)

(Tianjing tiaoyue, 1858)

The English version of Article XI of the Treaty of Tientsin allowed five more ports to open, in which Chaozhou was noticeably followed by a pair of brackets with “Swatow”16 in between. However, in the Chinese version the bracketed “Swatow” was erased with Chaozhou left only, which cannot be ascribed simply to unwitting mistranslation, particularly given that the area covered by the former was much smaller than that covered by the latter. During the early years of the Qing period and beyond, Chaozhou covered a vast area of nine counties, in which the walled city, miles away from the South China 16

 Nowadays known as Shantou, the biggest city in East of Guangdong Province

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Sea, remained the administrative and business center of East of Guangdong Province. However, with an increasing number of foreign merchant ships visiting Swatow to do business with the locals in the treaty times, the city of Chaozhou was seriously challenged as a centuries-old trading hub. When Emperor Xianfeng (咸 丰), who later ractified the Treaty of Tientsin, assumed the throne, the role of Chaozhou as the business center of East of Guangdong was entirely eclipsed by that of Swatow which by then had already grown into a populous, vigorous and unobstructed port from an unknown fishing village (Rao 1949, p. 1). It should be noted, however, that notwithstanding Swatow, by virtue of its geographic advantage as a port, could have been more appealing to the Westerners flocking by sea, it had remained still a district under the jurisdiction of Chaozhou by the time the Treaty of Tientsin was signed. In fact, what are bracketed in treaties are not inconsequential. They are indispensable in that they frequently specify, clarify or narrow down the topics under discussion. In the case of Article XI, since Chaozhou and Swatow pointed to different domains, the bracket used in the English version may have suggested that specifically it was Swatow, a port under the jurisdiction of Chaozhou, rather than the whole district with the latter as the administrative center, was to be opened to the Great Britain. Actually, the idea that Swatow, blessed with “great facilities for water communication with the interior” (Moncrieff 1857, p.  64), may have been more seductive to Britain is not totally groundless—in the letter from Mr. Moncrieff, Head of the British General Chamber of Commerce Shanghai to Earl of Elgin dated October 2, 1857, the British suggestions for treaty revision clearly revealed their preference for Swatow as the treaty port: In addition to the five ports now open to foregin trade, under the existing Treaty, the Chamber would propose the addition of the following: — The port of Swatow, on the south-east coast of Kwang-tung province; the port of Teng-­ choo, on the north coast of the province of Shan-tung. The former of these is already well known as a valuable market for the export of sugar, and being situated at th mouth of a larger river, it has great facilities for water communication with the interior. (Moncrieff 1857, p. 64)

On the other hand, the consulate set up in Swatow by the British Consul George W. Caine in July, 1860—two years after the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, also manifested Britain’s official recognition of this burgeoning city as a treaty port. However, the British authorities, as they always did, became discontent with being confined to a small port like Swatow. In the aftermath of the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, they began to seek opportunities for a closer connection with the Chinese beyond the port. In July, 1860, Consul Caine was instructed by his superior to pay a visit to the local authorities in the walled city of Chaozhou, and, to his astonishment, he was declined (Fang 2000, p. 81). One of the British government’s deployments since Lord Macartney’s embassy to China during 1792–1793, as noted previously, was to establish reciprocal diplomatic relations with the Manchu government, including direct contact and communication between the officials of both sides on an equal footing. Britain’s yearning for diplomatic egalitarianism was so strong that

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a relevant clause was even provided in the Treaty of Tientsin upon the request of the British negotiators: Article VII: Her Majesty the Queen may appoint one or more Consuls in the dominions of the Emperor of Chin; and such Consul or Consuls shall be at liberty to reside in any of the open port or cities of China, as Her Majesty the Queen may consider most expedient for the interests of British commerce. They shall be treated with due respect by the Chinese authorities, and enjoy the same privileges and immunities as the Consular Officers of the most favoured nation. Consuls and Vice-­ Consuls in charge shall rank with Intendants of Circuits; Vice-Consuls, Acting Vice-­ Consuls, and Interpreters, with Prefects. They shall have access to the official residences of these officers, and communicate with them, either personally or in writing, on a footing of equality, as the interests of the public service may require. (the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin, 1858). Interestingly, the local officials rejected the British consul’s visit to the walled city of Chaozhou on the pretext that the security of the consul and his entourage could not be guaranteed if they insisted (Fang 2000, p. 81), which practically overstated the indigenous hostility towards the foreign intruders and sounded more like a menace. The British consuls were so infuriated that they furiously protested by claiming that the local authorities’ deinial of the British access to the walled city of Chaozhou had seriously violated the Treaty of Tientsin, especially article VII. They even declared that they had the right to construct a consulate within the walled city of Chaozhou according to Article XI, suggesting that they had believed this ancient city to be covered as one of the treaty ports. The question now was, what could have been done to avoid such disputes? One of the solutions, it seemed, could have been found also in the Treaty of Tientsin, given that its English version was for the first time provided as the one with “the correct sense” since the treaty era was inaugurated: Article L: All official communications addressed by the Diplomatic and Consular Agents of Her Majesty the Queen to the Chinese authorities, shall, henceforth, be written in English. They will for the present be accompanied by a Chinese version, but it is understood that, in the event of there being any difference of meaning between the English and Chinese text, the English Government will hold the sense as expressed in the English text to be the correct sense. This provision is to apply to the Treaty now negotiated, the Chinese text of which has been carefully corrected by the English original. (the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin, 1858)

(Tianjing tiaoyue, 1858)

This provision, however, did not seem to be highly effective. The Chinese authorities in the 1860s, nearly two decades after the treaty system was imposed upon China, were still beset with a lack of eligible translators. Under such circumstances, when it was time to execute the Treaty of Tientsin, or settling the disputes with the

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British side, the only accessible version for them would be the Chinese one, notwithstanding that it was considered by the British as second to the English treaty text. Therefore, when the British demanded that a site within the city of Chaozhou be designated for the construction of a British consulate, it was not refused by Ruilin (瑞麟), Viceroy of the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi, and Guo Songtao (郭 嵩焘), Inspector-general of Guangdong Province, who even promised the lease of an edifice in Chaozhou as the official residence for the British consuls (Shen 1966, p. 3558), regardless of the fact that the British request was not legitimate according to the English text (Shen 1966, p. 3518). In fact, the viceroy and inspector-general were not the only ones that had mistakenly included the walled city of Chaozhou as part of the negotiated treaty port. The populace within the city, when asked about the reasons of opposing the British entry into their hometown, expressed their fear of the barbarians’ operations allowed by the treaty, such as opening trading guilds and building churches (Shen 1966, p. 3513). Like their officials, the Chinese subjects within the walled city of Chaozhou did not realize that the British intruders should not have arrived according to the more authoritative English treaty text. On August 10, 1866, nearly 8 years after the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin, the British authorities eventually succeeded in erecting a consulate within the walled city of Chaozhou, where an Anglo-American firm even managed to get a trading post set up in the name of a Chinese broker in April of the next year (Fang 2000, p. 85), symbolizing that Chaozhou as a treaty port had already been formally recognized by all parties concerned. Ironically, the British authorities did not seem to realize that extending the domain of the treaty port to include the walled city of Chaozhou was not based upon the English treaty text they claimed to be “original” with “the correct sense”. This reveals that which version should be deemed as conveying the original meaning, the English or the Chinese one, was not at all nonnegotiable to Britain. Suffice it to say that to the British authorities, nothing was impossible in order to defend their interests in China, including the use of “any difference of meaning between the English and Chinese text”. Notably, in the case of the Treaty of Tientsin, the translator once again became a conspirator. Horatio Nelson Lay, son of the first consul George Tradescant Lay at Canton and also a key interpreter and translator during negotiations of the Treaty of Tientsin, indeed left a huge margin for Britain to use his inadequate translation for further operations. Being Chief Foreign Inspector of the Shanghai Customs since the mid-1855, Lay rapidly grew into a “middleman” (Fairbank 1978, p. 253) and an expert of the Chinese language, culture and psychology. In the process of negotiations, he was not only an interpreter and translator, but also the one in charge; in order to get the upper hand over the Chinese negotiators, he even strategically displayed his vehement temper: In fact, however, in all matters of knowledge of China, her officials and her people, the envoys of the three treaty powers were in the hands of their interpreters—Lord Elgin in those of Mr. Wade and Mr. Lay…but it was Mr. Lay who took the initiative on this occasion, and his action, necessary though it may have been, was performed in a manner unnecessar-

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3  E-C Translation as Conquest in the Late Qing 1811–1911 ily brusque and even brutal…Now Mr. Lay had a temper and, being the mouthpiece of a conquering power imposing terms on a defeated nation, he gave free play to his natural disposition and assumed a domineering tone designed to beat down Chinese opposition by force of vehemence rather than of argument. This overbearing tone was carried through the whole of the negotiations (Mose 1910, pp. 521–522).

The British plenipotentiary Lord Elgin also confessed that the Treaty of Tientsin was achieved mainly through menace and coercion imposed by Lay: “We went on fighting and bullying and getting the poor commissioners to concede one point after another” (1872, as cited in Mose 1910, p. 523). The most radical instance to exhibit Lay’s strategic brutality in the negotiations was his open, merciless insult to Qi Ying, the old Chinese plenipotentiary and the counterpart of his superior. After seeking in vain to establish personal bonds with Lay, Commissioner Qi reprimanded him as “an awfully detestable guy who speaks in a defiant manner”17 (Jia et al. 1979, p.  945) in his memorial to the Chinese emperor before he received the imperial order to commit a suicide in disgrace. Under such circumstances, no one should be surprised if the bracketed “Swatow” in the English original of the Treaty of Tientsin was knowingly left out in the Chinese text by Lay as a bull dog fighting for British interests. 3.3.3.3  Courteous Style In rendering the English treaty texts into Chinese, not every British negotiator knew exactly what kind of Chinese should be applied, which was exclusively true with the British top-ranking officials who had very limited knowledge of the stylistic features of the official documents of the Celestial Empire. The British Foreign Secretary Palmerston, in his instruction to his two plenipotentiaries George Elliot and Charles Elliot, simply warned that his letter to Viceroy of the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi should be rendered in a plain and faithful manner without being surrendered to the form of any Chinese language (Hu 1993, p. 531). When the Chinese stylist Huang Entao (黄恩涛) recognized the supplementary articles of the Treaty of Nanking transcribed by the British translator Robert Thom as “exceeding harsh and stiff” (Fairbank 1969, p. 122) and complained that he had difficulty in rephrasing them in more idiomatic Chinese, the British plenipotentiary Sir Henry Pottinger, who had been involved in the treaty drafting, responded by claiming “it did not matter to him what Chinese the treaty was written in so long as the spirit and meaning of his original were truly represented” (Fairbank 1969, p. 122). Obviously, neither Palmerston nor Pottinger had any idea about the importance of style in a country like China that had long been constructed upon the tributary system, under which, the Celestial Empire, envisioned as the heart of the world, became habituated to accepting the reverence from its tributary states to the extent that any barbarism or vulgarity in the official documents submitted to the court would be seen as an assault on its dignity. Pottinger’s precursor Lord Macartney’s 17

 The original is “言语狂悖,极为可恶。”

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experiences in China during 1792–1793 might help to throw light on the Manchu government’s strict censorship of style of translation: the correspondences from Macartney’s embassy, including the letter of credence from King George III to Emperor Qianlong, were rendered into Chinese by the translators employed by Macartney—including a teenager named George Staunton, the best that Britain could offer at that time who was even awarded by the Chinese emperor for his proficiency in the Chinese language. These translated correspondences, almost without exception, had to be examined, rewritten and embellished by the Catholic courtiers originally from Portugal, France and Italy to keep in line with the Celestial Empire’s writing style before being presented to the Qing court (Wong 2011, pp. 11–15). In his “Fangyi xingui batiao” (Eight New Rules to Defend against Barbarians) released on March 8, 1835, Lu Kun (卢坤), Viceroy of the Provinces of Jiangsu, Jiangxi and Anhui, accused the barbarians who could speak only a little Chinese of being ignorant of both the meaning and style of the Chinese official documents (Lu 1993, p. 36). Lu’s accusation reveals the very fact that the Chinese authorities in the Late Qing always felt obliged to censor, stylize or neutralize any expression in translation that had failed to be adapted to the form of the official documents (Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences 1958, p. 1853). An anonymous British female reader who called herself “a visitor to China” (“Relations,” 1836, p. 123), reported “a curious fact” (“Relations,” 1836, p. 128) in which the failure of Lord Amherst’s embassy to China in 1816 was ascribed to a lack of an eligible European interpreter. According to her account, Amherst failed because he did not follow the king of Siam in supplanting “brother to the emperor” with the more appealing “tributary to the emperor”, which also unveils rewriting as a common practice for the Manchu government to have the style of translation tailored to its tributary system: It is said that the king of Siam, in his triennial embassy to Peking, styles himself in his letter, brother to the emperor. His ambassador is a Siamese, but is under the direction of the Chinese, who make a new letter for him, wherein the king is called “tributary to the emperor”. It is remarkable that the same style from the prince regent, afterwards George the Fourth, was objected to in lord Amherst’s embassy, and an alteration acceded to: “one of the many acts of vacillation which contributed to the failure of the embassy. (“Relations,” 1836, p. 128)

Interestingly, equalitarianism, apparently intolerable to the Celestial Empire under the tributary system, was frequently seen in the treaties signed between the foreign countries. In the treaties signed between the Assyrians and the Hittite Empire there existed “structural and stylistic parallels” (Bederman 2004, p.  143) that characterized the frequent usage of second-person imperatives, such as “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” (Bederman 2004, p. 143). It was held that such expressions were chiefly used to be indicative of personal bonds, with an emphasis on “fealty and dependent status” (Bederman 2004, p. 143), as noted by McCarthy: The familiar imperative form arose at least in part from the fact that the business was really all in the family, so to speak. It is a natural mode of expression in the circumstances. Moreover, it was not only used by [a] king … speaking to his vassal, but is used by the vassal speaking to the king! (1963, as cited in Bederman 2004, p. 143)

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In order to show intimacy between the treaty signatories and express blessings for their friendships, the words such as “brother” or “brotherhood” were habitually applied in the treaty texts. In the Hittite version of the treaty between Pharaoh Rameses II and King Hattusili III of the Hittite Empire signed in 1280 B.C., bother or brotherhood was even frequently related to peace: The great king, the king of the Hatti land, [his] brother, [from] this day on to establish good peace (and) good brotherhood between us forever. He is a brother [to me] and I am a brother to him and at peace with him forever. (Lualdi 2009, p. 34)

It should be noted, however, that the use of brother/brotherhood in treaties could not in the least ensure the parity between the parties involved, as such usages were also found in the typical unequal treaties. Unlike Sir Henry Pottinger who overtly claimed indifference about the formal features of Chinese treaty texts, the translators, as well as the Chinese stylists that helped to polish the texts, seemed to have learned more about the differences between “tributary discourses” that underpinned the Celestial Empire’s dominance over its tributary states, and “treaty discourses” that underlined personal bonds and equality between the signatories. John Morrison’s renditions of “brother”, “reside” as well as the recurring “agree” in the Treaty of Nanking are good examples to show what a translator could do to avoid provoking the Chinese emperor: The Omission of “Good Brother” VICTORIA, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, etc., etc., etc. To All and Singular to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting! Whereas a Treaty between Us and Our Good Brother the Emperor of China, was concluded and signed, in the English and Chinese Languages, on board Our Ship the Cornwallis, at Nanking, on the Twenty-ninth day of August, in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Forty-two, by the Plenipotentiaries of Us and of Our said Good Brother, duly and respectively authorized for that purpose; which Treaty is hereunto annexed in Original. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842). As a practice in treaty drafting, a preamble is generally written out to specify who, where, when and why signed the treaty. In the case of the Treaty of Nanking, “Good Brother”, as the referent to the Emperor of China, was mentioned twice in the preamble of its English version to express Queen Victoria’s desire for closer links between herself and the Chinese emperor as well as between her empire and the Middle Kingdom. It was put in this way not only because it was a tradition in European treaty writing but also because by the year 1840 Great Britain had successfully weighed down other European nations militarily, politically and economically, and become the leader of the Western powers in their global colonial enterprise. In this connection, underscoring in the English treaty text brotherhood between Britain and China, respectively as the most ambitious European power and the most populous empire, may have been advantageous to the British interests and thus appealing to the British decision-makers. However, for the Emperor of China who had long been envisioned as the sole governor of the entire world under the tributary system, any attempt to parallel a

3.3 Translation of Unequal Treaties 1842–1860

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foreign ruler with him, verbal or nonverbal, would be interpreted as posing an enormous challenge to his authority. Expressions such as brother/brotherhood in the Sino-foreign treaties, therefore, may have been rephrased or even erased in their Chinese versions before they were presented to the throne for ratification. Notwithstanding that the attitudes of the drafters and translators of the Treaty of Nanking towards the word “brother” remain unknown, one thing is certain: they seemed to have safely avoided rendering this tricky term, given that the preamble that contains such an expression as “Good Brother”, unexpectedly, remains missing in any Chinese version of the Treaty of Nanking now available.18 Agree vs. Enzhun (恩准) Article II His Majesty the Emperor of China agrees that British Subjects, with their families and establishments, shall be allowed to reside, for the purpose of carrying on their Mercantile pursuits, without molestation or restraint at the Cities and Towns of Canton, Amoy, Foochow-fu, Ningpo, and Shanghai, and Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain, etc., will appoint Superintendents or Consular Officers, to reside at each of the above-named Cities or Towns, to be the medium of communication between the Chinese Authorities and the said Merchants, and to see that the just Duties and other Dues of the Chinese Government is hereafter provided for, are duly discharged by Her Britannic Majesty’s Subjects. (the Treaty of Nanking, 1842)

(Nanjing tiaoyue, 1842)

In the English version of Article II of the Treaty of Nanking, “agree”, which simply means “consent”, was not used as an honorific. Generally, it was a word used bilaterally between people of different social status rather than exclusively by the ruling class even in the Victorian Age. Conversely, its equivalent in the Chinese text, “enzhun” (恩准), which means “approved by his Majesty” (Wu 2010, p.  427), remained part of the discourses used unilaterally by the Chinese monarchs down towards their subordinates, and was frequently seen in the Chinese emperors’ imperial edicts to their subjects. It implies that anything given or approved by the Emperor of China, under the tributary system, was not through “agreement” or “consent”, which sounded more like a result of the consultations between equal entities, but instead through “reward” bestowed particularly by his Mejesty who saw himself the owner of everything in the whole world. It is indeed true that traditionally, when the emissaries from the encompassing states came to the Middle Kingdom to present their tributes to the imperial court,  The practice of omitting the parts of the Chinese treaty text sensitive to the Chinese emperor was not unusual at that time. According to Fairbank (1978), the Treaty of Nanking “was written out in Chinese with an equal raising of characters to give equality to England and China. But these egalitarian forms were not carried over into the treaty text sent to Peking”. (p. 211)

18

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they would always, under the tributary system, receive rewards conceived of as being granted by the mercy of the emperor. Under such circumstances, despite that the right for the British subjects to reside in the five treaty ports provided in Article II may have been obtained mainly through the imposition of the British gunboat policy, it sounded, as a result of stylistic manipulation, as if it had been willingly bestowed by the Chinese emperor to Britain like a reward to a tributary state of China. Reside vs. Jiju (寄居) On the other hand, “reside”, which can be found as well in Article II of the English text of the Treaty of Nanking, was another expression that underwent stylistic modification. In English, to “reside” simply means “to live” or “to have one’s home (in a certain place)” (Hornby 2002, p. 2361). The British colonial experiences show that the British colonizers would selttle down in a place and make it a permanent settlement after it was conquered, as what had happend to India and the other colonies since the sixteenth century. However, the Manchu government, whose biggest fear, as previously noted, was to see the barbarians “residing” among the indigenous people in China, obviously would not embrace the idea of making any part of its territory home to the British intruders. “Jiju” (寄居) in the Chinese version as the translation of “reside” by John Morrison and his colleagues, which means “living away from home” (Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press 2005, p. 411), thus seemed to have provided a solution as it, in contrast, conveyed every courtesy that may have helped to dispel the fear of the Celestial Empire. By so doing, the translators may have sought to leave the Chinese authorities with the impression that the British subjects to arrive in the five treaty ports would, as expected, follow the footsteps of their pre-treaty predecessors who had been most content with staying only as temporary visitors within the designated areas such as the Thirteen Hongs, with no intention of making any part of China their permanent settlement.

3.4  Summary Since the outbreak of the First Opium War, China has seen two types of translation both become the agents of the Western conquest of China—Biblical translation and the translation of the unequal treaties. In interrogating Biblical translation as an instrument of the expansion of the Kingdom of God, the attention has been concentrated on the debates on the Term Question, in which the American and British Protestants drastically disagreed as to which term, Shangdi or Shen, should serve as an alternative, notwithstanding that they had both consented to exclude Tianzhu as the appellation of God. Meanwhile, the Chinese people were accused of their idolatry and paganism, whereas the superiority of Christian faith was romanticized. The emphasis of these two camps was placed on which term was of higher ranking, reflecting their fear of being unable to legitimize God’s oneness and supremacy to convert the Chinese people had it not been properly rendered. Given the intricate sociopolitical milieu of

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China in the mid-nineteenth century when Christianity was rapidly disseminated worldwide with European expansion, the Term Question had obviously transcended the linguistic and cultural confines to be included as a constituent of the colonial enterprise. On the other hand, the impact produced by the deceiving translation of the Sino-­ British unequal treaties was enormous not only because China’s territory and sovereignty were thereby largely undermined, but also because they contributed to supplanting the centuries-old tributary system with the treaty system that forced China’s door to be widely opened to the Western conquerors. Like the debates on the Term Question of Biblical translation, the deceiving translation of the Sino-British unequal treaties also mirrored the unsymmetrical power relations between China and Britain for two reasons: firstly, the Qing imperial court, due to a lack of eligible indigenous translators, was forced to resort to the “barbarian” translators such as John Robert Morrison, Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff, Robert Thom and Horatio Nelson Lay who were all concerned only about the interests of their own countries and secondly, the tricks by the foreign translators, even if they were not difficult to recognize, always panned out under the protection of the British gunboat policy. Neither the Treaty of Nanking nor the Anglo-Chinese Treaty of Tientsin was eventually able to “remove the causes out of which the war arose, redress the grievances complained of and prevent the recurrence of them” (Bernard 1868, p. 38), as what a peace treaty was expected, but instead tended to fuel more conflicts beween Britain and China, in which translation did play the role of catalyst.

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Boone, W. J. (1848, January). An essay on the proper rendering of the words Elohim and θɛus into the Chinese language. The Chinese Repository, 17(1), 17–89. British and Foreign Bible Society. (1902). The book of God’s kingdom: A popular illustrated report of the British and foreign bible society, 1901–1902. London: The Bible House. British and Foreign Bible Society. (1906). There is a river: A popular illustrated report of the British and foreign bible society, 1905–1906. London: The Bible House. British and Foreign Bible Society. (1913). Have ye never read?: A popular illustrated report of the British and foreign bible society, 1912–1913. London: The Bible House. Browne, G. (1859). The history of the British and foreign bible society: From its institution in 1804, to the close of its jubilee in 1854 (Vol. 1). London: Bagster and Sons. Cao, Y. (2010). Bupingdeng tiaoyue yu wanqing zhongying maoyi chongtu [Uequal treaties and the Sino-British trade conflicts in the late Qing]. Changsha: Hunan renmin chuanshe. Chen, J. (2004). Wenhua yu Dongya Xiou guoji zhixu [Culture and international order in East Asia and Western Europe]. Shanghai: Shanghai daxue chubanshe. Chinese version of the Bible; manuscript in the British museum; one version undertaken in Bengal, and another in China; with brief notices of the means and measures employed to publish the Scriptures in Chinese previous to A. D. 1830. (1835, October). The Chinese Repository, 4 (6), 249–261. Cox, J. (2008). The British missionary enterprise since 1700. New York/London: Routledge. Fairbank, J. K. (1969). Trade and diplomacy on the China coast: The opening of the treaty ports 1842–1854. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fairbank, J. K. (Ed.). (1978). The Cambridge history of China Vol. 10: Late Ch’ing, 1800–1911 (part 1). London/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Fang, J. C. (2000). Chaoshan diqu zhongying jiaoshe shushi [Episodes in Sino-British diplomatic affairs at Chaozhou-Shantou area]. Shantou Daxue Xuebao [Shantou University Journal], 16(3), 79–88. Foley, T. S. (2009). Biblical translation in Chinese and Greek—Verbal aspect in theory and practice. Leiden/Boston: Brill. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. (2005). A modern English-Chinese Chinese-­ English dictionary. Beijing: Author. Gong, D. Y. (2009). Jindai Jidujiao he Rujiao de jiechu [The contact between Christianity and Confucianism in modern times]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Graebner, A. L. (1910). Outlines of doctrinal theology. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House. Grasso, J., Corrin, J., & Kort, M. (2004). Modernization and revolution in China: From the opium wars to world power (3rd ed.). New York: M. E. Sharpe. Guo, W. (2003). Zhuanzhe: Yi zaoqi zhongying guanxi he Nanjing tiaoyue wei kaocha zhongxin [Transition: The early Sino-British relations and the treaty of Nanking]. Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe. Hanes, W. T., & Sanello, F. (2002). The opium wars: The addiction of one empire and the destruction of another. Naperville: Sourcebooks. Hornby, A. S. (2002). Oxford advanced learner’s English-Chinese dictionary (4th ed.). Beijing: The Commercial Press. Hu, B. (1993). Yingguo dang’an youguan yapian zhanzheng ziliao xuanyi (xia ce) [A selected translation of the British archives on the opium war, Vol. 2]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Hu, M. X. (2010). Wanqing Zhongying tiaoyue guanxi yanjiu [A study on the Sino-British treaty relations in the late Qing]. Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe. Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (Ed.). (1958). Yapian zhanzheng moqi yingjun zai changjiang zhongxiayou de qinlue zuixing [The British army’s aggression in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze river at the end of the opium war]. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe. Jaggard, A. (2011). Developing spiritual success: The journey of discipleship, the path of spiritual and relational vitality, and the future of the church. Bloomington: authorhouse.

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Chapter 4

E-C Translation as Resistance in the Late Qing 1811–1911

4.1  Introduction Before the investigation of translation as resistance in the Late Qing is conducted, it is highly necessary to revisit the definition of “translation as resistance” in this chapter, distinguishing it from Venuti’s well-known “resistant translation”. Briefly speaking, resistance in Venuti’s formula is aimed at the cultural hegemony imposed by the Western powers and his strategy to this end is foreignizing translation. Resistance in this study, however, is not culturally bound, but rather suggests how a nation seeks to turn against the foreign coercion and aggression. In this sense, translation as resistance refers to translation as being used/manipulated/appropriated to facilitate in self-strengthening/national salvation/race preservation, etc., which, like translation as conquest, can be examined as well in four dimensions: text selection, translation purpose, translation strategy and stylistic choices that correspond respectively to Aristotle’s material cause, efficient cause, final cause and formal cause. In other words, to explore translation as resistance is to observe whether (1) the texts selected for translation can be used for resistance; (2) the translated texts are produced with the purpose of resistance; (3) the stylistic choices facilitate resistance; (4) the translation strategies serve the purpose of resistance. The decades since the outbreak of the First Opium War in 1840 saw two conflicting groups of Chinese scholar-bureaucrats gradually formed along the lines of their responses to the Western invasion. The first one, known as Qingyipai (清议派Pure View Group), was extremely conservative in their sociopolitical stance to the extent that they violently attacked all endeavors to introduce the so called “cunning Western gadgets” (Schwartz 1983, p. 16). The foreign intruders, in their conviction, could be expelled not by technology, but rather by arousing “the consolidation of the hearts of the Chinese people” (as cited in Schwartz 1983, p. 16), because China’s superiority over foreign countries “lies not in reliance on equipment but in the steadfastness of the minds of the people” (as cited in Schwartz 1983, p. 16). Recognized as “Muscular Confucianism” (Schwartz 1983, p.  15), such a tradition could be © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 X. Huang, English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7572-9_4

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traced back to the later years of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) when the national hero Yue Fei (岳飞) was considered as defeating the barbarians from the North with the combination of the uppermost Confucian virtues and martial ethos. On the other hand, some high-ranking officials, headed by Viceroy Li Hongzhang (李鸿章) and Viceroy Zhang Zhidong (张之洞) who acknowledged the Sino-­ Western power differentials and the importance of science and technology, tended to introduce the Western gadgets to achieve the ultimate goal of “self-­strengthening” (Schwartz 1983, p.  9), thus winning themselves the title of Yangwupai (洋务派 Westernization Group) to distinguish from the ultraconservatives. China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese war during 1894–1895, however, impelled the ruling class to reexamine its self-strengthening scheme in a wider context. Inspired by a man of great learning, it was realized that Japan and the Western countries gathered their strength not only through military growth, but also through their sociopolitical and legal advances as well as ethical and ideological developments (Schwartz 1983, p. 18), and this man was Yan Fu, one of the most celebrated thinkers and translators in the Late Qing. Almost at the same time, literary translation, like the translation of humanities and social sciences advocated by Yan, was also appropriated by some Chinese scholars to warn against the foreign threats and boost the morale of their compatriots, thus considerably facilitating the cause of race preservation and national salvation. Literary translation in China was, as in many other countries, an act of two-way communication in which the earliest rendition between Chinese and English in the Qing period dates back to the onset of the nineteenth century when Robert Morrison published in London a 71-page booklet titled Horæ Sinicæ: Translations from the Popular Literature of the Chinese (1812) that opened a small portal for the Westerners to penetrate the marvelous world of Chinese literature. In the following decades, the translation of Chinese literary works as a notable constituent of the Protestant enterprise was carried on by the missionaries from generation to generation and culminated when James Legge dedicated nearly half of his life in introducing the ancient Chinese classics to the West, the most important of which are known as the Four Books and Five Classics. However, literary translation basically had not been used as a means for patriotic appeals and national struggles in the Late Qing until it was taken over by the Chinese, among whom Lin Shu proved the most prolific, prominent and noteworthy translator. In the following section, we will explore how Yan and Lin, facing the national calamities in the making, sought to gather their countrymen’s strength to resist the foreign threats with their translations based on the four constituents of the analytical model formulated in this book: text selection, translation purpose, stylistic choices as well as translation strategies that correspond respectively to Aristotle’s material cause, final cause, formal cause and efficient cause.

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4.2  Translation of Western Humanities 4.2.1  Western Humanities: Key to China’s “Wealth and Power” The last fig leaf of Manchu government was removed when China’s ostensibly indomitable navy was hopelessly crushed by its Japanese counterpart in the 1894– 1895 Sino-Japanese war, followed by constant questioning on the Yangwupai’s decades-old efforts in introducing the Western technology. Meanwhile, the Chinese intelligentsia that shared Yan Fu’s exclamation that “the changes of today are unprecedentedly drastic probably since the Qin Dynasty (221–207 B.C.)”1 (Yan 1986c, p. 1), prompted by a strong sense of crisis, embarked on a search for the approaches to preservation of the race and survival of the nation. During the surge of the nationwide self-salvation, Yan preached his ideas of resistance in his series of treatises titled “Lun shibian zhi ji” (On the Rapid Change of the World), “Yuanqian” (On strength), “Jiuwang juelun” (On Salvation) and “Pihan” (In Refutation of Han Yu) all published in 1895. When the news arrived that the Qing government decided to sign the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan as an official gesture to acknowledge defeat in the Sino-Japanese war, Yan was so enraged that he released an article titled “Yuanqian xupian” (A Sequel to “On strength”) to oppose the so called “peaceful settlement” and call on the Chinese people to fight to the end. From his perspective, resistance was the only way to bring the ultimate victory while “qiuhe” (求和begging for peace) could only result in the fall of the nation (Yan 1986i, p. 39). In his essay “Baozhong yuyi” (the Extended Meaning of Race Preservation) published in 1898, Yan sorted out the history of conquest and resistance between the “Ouzhou baizhong” (European white race) and the “Yazhou huangzhong” (Asian yellow race), pointing out that in the last two centuries the white men came to rule over the whole planet and enslaved the red, brown and black races just because their people’s minds had come under illumination. By the same token, if the yellow race intended to avoid a similar fate, the fatuity of its people must be ridded (Yan 1986a, pp.  86–87). Yan’s ideas of resistance that permeated through these essays, in the following years, immensely prefaced and motivated his translation enterprise and ideologically prepared himself for the translation of the Western humanities in China. His involvement in translation, according to his eldest son, was political indeed: This year, when the peaceful agreement [the Treaty of Shimonoseki] was reached, my dad was so irritated that he began to dedicate himself to translation. His first work Tianyanlun was rendered from T. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and was completed within only a few months.2 (Yan 1986, p. 1548)

 The original is“观今日之世变,盖自秦以来未有若斯之亟也。”  The original is “和议始成,府君大受刺激,自是专力于翻译著述,先从事于赫胥黎之天演论,未 数月而脱稿。” 1 2

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In fact, Yan’s political motive of introducing Western learning could as well be revealed in his own statements. In the wake of the desperate failure of the political reforms premeditated and headed by Kang Youwei (康有为) and Liang Qichao (梁启超) in 1898, he claimed translation to be a top priority, being ahead of any other business: So long as the status quo of China and the West could be well learned by the officials and the elite of the next generations even a day ahead of time, then the Chinese race will not suffer from extinction; even if it is unfortunately trapped temporarily, there will be the day of revival. This is why I am still making translation my own undertaking, leaving other businesses alone.3 (Yan 1986g, p. 525)

On other occasions, Yan would take opportunities to reiterate his purpose of treating translation as a conduit of self-strengthening and national revival, notwithstanding that the expressions he used varied. For instance, In one of the letters to his mentor Wu Rulun (吴汝纶) written upon the completion of Tianyanlun (On Evolution) known as rendition of Evolution and Ethics by Thomas Henry Huxley, he revealed that his wish was “to render as many as he could so that the people of his race were able to learn and benefit from what the other races had achieved”4 (Yan 1986e, p. 523). Likewise, in the letter to his patron Zhang Yuanji (张元济), Yan mentioned that he had been working so hard on translation all because he expected his compatriots to be enlightened by the Western learning (Yan 1986 g, p. 527). The most explicit revelation of his impetus for translation, however, could be found in his preface to Tianyanlun, where Yan articulated that he chose Evolution and Ethics for translation not only because it was in line with the philosophy of a certain Chinese sage, but also because it coincided strictly with his own proposition—“ziqiang baozhong” (self-strengthening and race preservation) (Huxley 1894/1981, p. x).

4.2.2  T  ianyanlun: Towards “Self-Strengthening and Race Preservation” In the model of translation as resistance formulated in this book, text selection refers to the process in which “texts with the function of resistance are selected to meet the purpose of resistance”. In this section, we will sort out the source texts picked by Yan Fu to fulfill his translation purpose, with special attention paid to Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics as the original of Yan’s most influential translated work. It is now universally accepted that Yan preferred the texts of Western humanities to other genres primarily because the Yangwupai’s incessant efforts to rescue China by introducing the Western technology had proved in vain by China’s defeat in the 1894–1895 Sino-Japanese War. 3  The original is “但令在野之人,与夫后生英俊,洞识中西实情者日多一日,则炎黄种类未必遂 至沦胥,即不幸暂被羁縻,亦得有复苏之一日也。所以摒弃万缘,惟以译书自课。” 4  The original is“多成几册译书,使同种者知彼族所为何事,有所鉴观焉耳。”

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During his stay in Great Britain as an overseas student, Yan conducted an extensive research on the British sociopolitical and economic systems as well as various political ideologies prevailing in Britain and other Western countries. His finding was that Viceroy Li Hongzhang’s self-strengthening scheme was problematic in a country like China where profound social and psychological transformations had yet to take place (Yan 1986b, p. 44). For this reason, He decided that the priority to resist the foreign aggression was to introduce an array of prominent works of sociology, politics, laws, economics, etc. into China via translation, the bulk of which being Evolution and Ethics, The Wealth of Nations, The Study of Sociology, On Liberty, The Spirit of the Laws, A History of Politics, A System of Logic and Logic the Primer. In fact, Yan Fu was rather “selective” (Fei 1983, p. 48) in ushering the books of Western learning into China, given that these masterpieces, each being the founding work in its own field, combined to constitute a sound capitalist ideological system, thus “instigating the intellectuals of the past, such as Liang Qichao, to develop national sense and explore the ways of making China a powerful country”5 (Fei 1983, p. 48). Undoubtedly, Yan’s attempts to introduce the Western important works practically had a profound impact upon the Chinese intelligentsia and contributed considerably to the ferment and growth of the ideological torrents to follow, be it socialist, liberal, or neo-traditionalist. Among Yan’s renditions, Tianyanlun deserves an extensive discussion not only because it was his “most resounding success” (Schwartz 1983, p.  99), but also because it was the first translation that Yan overtly claimed to be in tune with his idea of “ziqiang baozhong”, as noted previously. Evolution and Ethics, as the source text of Tianyanlun, provides a succinct, picturesque and poetic narration of the main tenets of Darwinism. It probes into a wide spectrum of human history, the trend of Western philosophy since pre-Socrates and the problems of human race. Paradoxically, it is not a work to preach social Darwinism, but rather “represents an attack on social Darwinism!” (Schwartz 1983, p. 100) all because Huxley in this book aims at “protecting human ethical values against the efforts to create an ‘evolutionary ethic’” (Schwartz 1983, p.  100). In other words, this book distinguishes between natural world and human society, backing the shelter of the weak and opposing the application of the law of “survival of the fittest” (Huxley 1894, p. 52) in settling the problems of mankind. As a devout adherent of Herbert Spencer, Yan was obviously a proponent of social Darwinism. His well-known writings accomplished during 1895–1898, such as “Lun shibian zhi ji”, “Yuanqian”, “Jiuwang juelun” and “Pihan” almost all encompassed one theme— “to die or to survive?”. From his perspective, “survival of the fittest”, as the philosophy of evolution, seemed more legitimate in getting China out of its predicament. Given that “Spencer’s writings are abundant, profound, and vast” (Schwartz 1983, p. 98) and thus “cannot hastily be translated” (Schwartz 1983, p. 98), Yan eventually selected a more accessible tract which was based on the author’s lectures. To render  The original is“鼓励了我们上一辈的知识分子,如梁启超等,发扬民族意识,探索强国之道。”

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Evolution and Ethics, however, did not suggest an unreserved consent to all the viewpoints displayed in this book to him. Probably in order to make the rendition of Evolution and Ethics read more social-Darwinian, he made a lot of shifts, the foremost of which was to eclipse the ethical parts and foreground the evolution by rendering the title into Tianyanlun, literally On Evolution or On Evolution of Universe. But this is not all. In the following section, a discussion will be offered to clarify how Yan used some strategies to shift Huxley’s book to suit his own ideology.

4.2.3  Yan Fu’s Strategy: Making Shifts Yan’s series of essays published during 1895–1898 indicate that before his translation of Evolution and Ethics came to be formally delivered in 1898, he had developed some ideas of resistance that were basically founded upon but not limited to evolution theory. In the process of translating Evolution and Ethics, he managed to inform such ideas by means of making shifts, which, noticeably, were not in the least improvised, but rather a product of his strategy of “dazhi” (达旨conveying the gists), as articulated in his introduction to Tianyanlun: As this [Evolution and Ethics] is a book recently published by its author that dwells on a new learning only seen in the last 50 years, my translation chooses to focus on explicating the main tenets it conveys. Therefore, inversions and additions of words and sentences might occur from time to time as my translation does not strictly correspond in terms of lexical and syntactical sequences, on the premise that the meaning should remain the same as in the original. It is called “dazhi” (conveying the gist), rather than biyi (笔译translating). Although it is preferred for the sake of convenience, it is not an orthodox way.6 (Huxley, 1894/1981, p. xi)

Interestingly, notwithstanding that Yan’s bottom line for “dazhi”, which was apparently characteristic of strong liberalism, was to ensure that the meaning of the translation should remain the same as in the original, he had seriously transgressed it in the process of rendering Evolution and Ethics, given that the shifts he had made frequently resulted in discrepancies between the ST and TT, with the latter filled with his own ideas of resistance that were surprisingly absent from the original. 4.2.3.1  Shift to “The Weak are often Devoured by the Strong” The ferment of Yan’s evolution-based ideas of resistance could be pinpointed in the revised version of his article “Yuanqiang” published in 1895, in which he, following a briefing on Charles Darwin as the founder of evolution theory, made a statement to propagandize the risk of the weak being devoured by the strong: 6  The original is“今是书所言,本五十年来西人新得之学,又为作者晚出之书。译文取明深义, 故词句之间,时有所颠到附益,不斤斤于字比句次,而意义则不倍本文。题曰达旨,不云笔译, 取便发挥,实非正法。”

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4.2 Translation of Western Humanities Man struggles with man, and animal struggles with animal both for self-existence. The struggle begins between species as well as between societies. The weak are often devoured by the strong, and the foolish are often enslaved by the wise.7 (Yan 1986h, p. 16)

In the same article, Yan affirmed the legitimacy of applying Darwinism in the domains of human society by arguing: “Darwin said: ‘creatures struggle for self-­ existence and the fittest survives.’ It is true with animals and plants; it is true as well with politics and cultures”8 (Yan 1986h, pp. 26–27). It should be noted, however, that Darwin himself was essentially reluctant to observe the human activities with the law of the jungle, and Huxley, his devout adherent and defender, was even more conservative in this connection. In Evolution and Ethics, Huxley made clear his opposition against social Darwinism in the following statement: Social process means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process; the end of which is not the survival of those who may happen to be the fittest, in respect of the whole of the conditions which contain, but of those who are ethically the best. (Huxley 1894, p. 81)

In fact, to oppose the socialization of Darwinism was not the bottom line of Huxley who, in the same tract, went so far as to take Britain for example to doubt whether there existed severe struggle for existence and, correspondingly, the so called “selective operation” (Huxley 1894, p. 38) in human society: During these centuries, from the reign of Elizabeth to that of Victoria, the struggle for existence between man and man has been so largely restrained among the great mass of the population (except for one or two short intervals of civil war), that it can have had little, or no, selective operation. As to anything comparable to direct selection, it has been practiced on so small a scale that it may also be neglected. (Huxley 1894, p. 38). Yan’s translation: (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 40)

Yan’s translation avoided the mention of the struggle’s being “largely restrained”, supplanting it with “英国之兵争盖寡” whose meaning has been reduced to “there were few military conflicts in Britain”. As to Huxley’s assertion of “little” or “no” selective operation, particularly of no “direct selection”, Yan’s rendition turned out a total treason, which emphasized that selective operation was applied occasionally in Britain over the centuries, though not sufficiently. Right in the same chapter, Huxley proceeded to question that “the struggle for existence” (Huxley 1894, p. 38), if any, had exerted any serious influence upon the British people: If the struggle for existence has affected us to any seriously extent (and I doubt it) it has been, indirectly, through our military and industrial wars with other nations (Huxley 1894, p. 40). 7  The original is“民民物物,各争有以自存。其始也,种与种争,群与群争,弱者常为强肉,愚者常 为智役。” 8  The original is达尔文曰: “物各竞存,最宜者立。动植如是,政教亦如是也。”

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4  E-C Translation as Resistance in the Late Qing 1811–1911 Yan’s translation: (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 40).

A paraphrase of Yan’s rendition of this sentence may help to realize how far he had gone in misrepresenting what the author intended to express: ” suggests that the struggle for existence in Europe and America “ ” compares evoluwere as heated as a blazing fire, whereas “ tion to a furnace in which natural selection was taking place; ” depicts the human society as “ being rapidly improved by struggle and natural selection in many fields—politics, academics, industry, commerce as well as military campaigns, and !” ended this sentence with an exclamation: “Whoa, that was a “ real wonder!”. Briefly, Yan’s rendition created a dramatic scenario in which the struggle for existence within human society was right in progress, which, unfortunately, was not in the least Huxley’s intended meaning. A comparison between the ST and TT shows that Yan would take every opportunity to foreground the severity of struggle and competition between species in his translation, notwithstanding that it could have been overstated: One year with another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself (Huxley 1894, p. 2). Yan’s translation: (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 1).

Stemming from the first paragraph of the whole book, the original helps to open the topic on evolution and ethics by envisioning the biological features of Southern London over 2000 years ago. Huxley imagined that different kinds of plants maintained a balance after the so called “struggle for existence”, with his attention obviously focused on “balance” rather than “struggle”. However, in Yan’s translation, the emphasis upon balance was completely gone, with “the struggle for existence” being portrayed as vividly and seriously as a battle, in which “the weak”, as Yan stressed, “were extinct earlier than the strong” (强者后亡, 弱者先绝). Such a bold shift of meaning has even left the impression that it “reads almost like a battlefield report”9 (Wang 1982, p. 24). A parallel instance could be found in the first section of Chap. IV, Vol. I, in which Huxley’s narration of “the cosmic process” (Huxley 1894, p.  13) regarding its impact upon the “plant life” (Huxley 1894, p. 13) was most succinct: The tendency of the cosmic process is to bring about the adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current conditions (Huxley 1894, p. 13). Yan’s translation: (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 17).

 The original is“读起来简直像一个战况公报了!”

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Yan’s rendition consists of two sentences: the first sentence assumes that the cosmic process, as the cause of the evolution of life, creates an environment in which all creatures are struggling for existence and only the fittest can be self-sustaining. In the second sentence, a familiar tone recurs—the creatures are divided into the strong and the weak along the line of self-sustainability, with the assertion that the self-­sustaining species will become strong, and the strong will flourish, whereas those in want of self-sustainability will be on the weak side, and the weak are doomed to extinction. The meaning of the source text by Huxley, as we can see, was once again side-tracked. In fact, Huxley did not only doubt whether there existed harsh struggle for existence historically; he even challenged, as previously noted, the legitimacy of introducing the law of “survival of the fittest” into human society, of which Yan’s translation is equally noteworthy: There is another fallacy which appears to me to pervade the so called “ethics of evolution.” It is the notion that because, on the whole, animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent “survival of the fittest”; therefore, men in society, men as ethical beings, must look to the same process to help them towards perfection. (Huxley 1894, p. 80). ,਴ᴹᡰᇌ (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 91)

According to the source text, with respect to the legitimacy of “survival of the fittest” in the human world, the author’s attitude was straightforward and manifest: it is very wrong to assume that the human beings need the process of surviving the struggle for self-perfection just because the animals and plants need it. This clarification is particularly essential because it is also the keynote of the whole book by Huxley, making a watershed between his theory and Spencer’s social Darwinism. Unfortunately, Yan’s rendition turns out to be another misrepresentation as it declares that there is no invariable way for adaptation and asserts that the creatures, strong or weak, good or evil, all have their ways to be adapted and that the environment in which they are posited is also a crucial factor to be considered. Yan’s translation, as a result, leaves the impression that when Huxley was warning against the tendency of introducing the law of “survival of the fittest” into human society for self-perfection, he seemed to have been heading in a totally different direction. Now the question is, why did the translator seek to shift the discourses of the author who had not advocated introducing the law of the jungle to deal with human affairs? First of all, the author and translator held different attitudes towards the interrelations between struggle, ethics and survival: Huxley affirmed that ethics can check the cosmic process, thus men do not struggle for survival—they survive just because they are “ethically the best” (Huxley 1894, p. 81), while for Yan, men will acquire conscience or ethic only after they struggle for survival, hence conscience or ethic is the consequence rather than the cause of survival (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 32). More importantly, posited in different sociopolitical settings, the translator’s expectation of his rendition was not in tune with the writing purpose of the author.

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As an “ethical philosopher” (Huxley 1894, p. viii), Huxley constantly paralleled ethics with evolution largely because he wanted the British Empire to reconsider its role as the conqueror and recast its relations with the conquered in the surge of global colonization. However, when Yan published his translation of Huxley’s work in 1898, China was experiencing probably the most serious national crisis, with its vast territories being ruthlessly torn out and annexed by the foreign powers. Under such circumstances, what it really needed was not ethic of any kind, about which the Chinese people had been taught so well with Confucianism, but instead the alarm on the intrusion of the strong and the extinction of the weak. In this sense, Yan’s rewriting of the source texts, which conveyed to his compatriots that they would run the risk of extinction if they did not struggle for existence, rightly served such a purpose. 4.2.3.2  Shift to “The People Who are United Tend to Survive” Another essential constituent of Yan’s ideology of resistance can be epitomized by a Chinese character that permeated both his treatises and translations—qun (群), which in Yan’s discouses has multiple meanings: it connotes, narrowly, the people formed in communities and societies or the state of living in groups and communities, and broadly, the state of being united or the spirit of collectivism/nationalism. In the essays published by Yan during the last decade of the nineteenth century, qun was constantly connected to his publicity of community consciousness and national awareness. For example, in the revised version of his treatise “Yuanqiang” delivered in 1895, Yan sounded to his countrymen the alarm on the vulnerability of an unconsolidated community to the foreign aggression: If the individuals are so slow, slack and ignorant that they just fight for their own sake, the communties will become unconsolidated, which, when running into the people of atrocity, intelligence and patriotism, will be either bullied or destroyed.10 (Yan 1986h, p. 18)

Yan’s emphasis upon qun as a key concept of his ideas of resistance was not only seen in his writings, but also in his translations such as Tianyanlun as the rendition of Evolution and Ethics. In the annotations of Chap. 13 with the caption of “Zhi Si” Repression of Selfishness), Yan inserted the idea of “neng qun zhe cun, bu qun ( ) (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 32), with the implication that zhe mie” ( “those who are united tend to survive, while those who are not tend to perish”. Moreover, he would make every chance to propagandize the same notion by means of additions or shifts also through his translation of Evolution and Ethics: The struggle for existence tends to eliminate those less fitted to adapt themselves to the circumstances of their existence. The strongest, the most self-assertive, tend to tread down the weaker. (Huxley 1894, p. 81).

 The original is“夫苟其民契需恂愗,各奋其私,则其群将涣。以将涣之群,而与鸷悍多智、爱 国保种之民遇,小则虏辱,大则灭亡。”

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(Huxley 1894/1981, p. 91)

The source text, as an extension of the idea of “survival of the fittest”, was oriented by Huxley to pave the way for his further elaboration of  the checking of the cosmic process by ethics. Yan rendered it rather flexibly, and to a great extent faithfully, except that he unexpectedly interposed “ ” whose equivalent remains unrecognizable in the original. Literally, the inserted sentence suggests that it is an unalterable tendency of evolution that those who unite themselves in communties will survive, whereas those who fail are bound to perish. Thus, when Huxley concentrated on deploying his criticism of applying “survival of the fittest” to human society, Yan headed in a different orientation by shifting the focus onto the interplay between solidarity and survival. A more extreme instance can be spotted in Chap. X, Vol. I, where the author sought to evaluate the roles of self-assertion and conscience in the evolution of human society: The check upon this free play of self-assertion, or natural liberty, which is the necessary condition for the origin of human society, is the product of organic necessities of a different kind from those upon which the constitution of the hive depends. (Huxley 1894, pp. 27–28). Yan’s translation (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 30)

The author attempted to clarify in this sentence, as he always did in other parts of his book, that self-assertion, or natural liberty, is not necessarily detrimental to human society—quite on the contrary, the communities or societies might not have been formed without it. Yan’s rendition, however, once again differs considerably from the original, which could be paraphrased as: “When self-assertion becomes serious, it will lead to excessive liberty; when liberty becomes excessive, it will lead to violation of others’ rights; when violation occurs, it will lead to conflicts; when conflicts arise, the society will collapse; when the society collapses, the people will lose their way of making a living. Thus, when self-assertion prevails, the common way of the society will vanish, and the human being will perish”. Therefore, when Huxley affirmed self-assertion as the stimulator of the formation of human society, Yan chose to take a basically negative attitude towards it in his rendition, considering it as the blame for the breakdown of qun. In Chap. VI, Vol. II, when the author was elucidating what the Stoics termed the “political” (Huxley 1894, p. 75) nature of mankind, or “pure reason” (Huxley 1894, p. 74) in modern philosophy, he was, implicitly, somewhat reserved in achieving the

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society’s “common good” (Huxley 1894, p. 75) by means of the so called “the sacrifice of self” (Huxley 1894, p. 75): Indeed, seeing that the progress towards perfection of a civilized state, or polity, depends on the obedience of its members to these commands, the Stoics sometimes termed the pure reason the ‘political’ nature. Unfortunately, the sense of the adjective has undergone so much modification that the application of it to that which commands the sacrifice of self to the common good would now sound almost grotesque. (Huxley 1894, p. 75). Yan’s translation

(Huxley 1894/1981, pp. 84-85)

Yan’s rendition deviates from the original to the extent that it suggests that it is of paramount importance for every individual in a community/society to sacrifice him/herself for the common good, and only in this way can the community/society become united, consolidated and powerful. In fact, Yan’s translation as shifting the original to encourage self-sacrifice for the common interests of a community/society was not in the least improvised: on other occasions, he also used the phases such as “she ji wei qun” (舍己为群self-sacrifice for communities) (Huxley 1894/1981, p.  90), “xian qun er hou ji” (先群而后己priority of communities to self) (Yan 1986d, p. 76), “qu si wei qun” (屈私为群repression of selfishness for communities) (Huxley 1894/1981, p.  45), “qu ji wei qun” (屈己为群self-repression for communties) (Huxley 1894/1981, p.  46), and even “sun ji yi qun” (损己益群 self-­ damage for communities) (Huxley 1894/1981, p. 85) to express the same idea. Now the question is, why did Yan constantly shift the source text to present qun as a key collectivistic or nationalistic concept, even at the cost of being unfaithful to the original? Pusey (1983) gave his answer by making a contrast between Huxley and Yan with respect to their appeals: Yen Fu and Huxley might still in one sense be worlds aparts in their resolve. In their immediate dreams each certainly had his own world most in mind, Huxley a better England, Yen Fu a stronger China, Huxley a more humane society, Yen Fu a more united—and, hence more militant — ‘social organism’. (p. 169)

Yan’s ideas of qun exerted tremendous influence over his contemporary intellectuals, especially Liang Qichao as one of the most famous activists in the Late Qing. Upon completion of the draft of his translation of Evolution and Ethics in October, 1896, Yan immediately had it sent to Liang, who in March of the next year responded with a long letter to express his concern about the priority of forging the Chinese people into a consolidated social organism to the effect that “In today’s China, the people remain unconsolidated with their minds seriously obstructed. If the obstruction is to be removed, the people must be united first”11 (Liang 1986, p. 1570)—an argument apparently inspired by Yan’s rendition.

11

 The original is“但中国今日民智极塞,民情极涣,将欲通之,必先合之。”

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4.2.4  Elegant Style The translation of Western books in the Qing Dynasty could be traced back to the outset of the nineteenth century when some Protestant missionaries sought to follow their Catholic vanguards in disseminating Christianity via the introduction of Western technology and culminated since the 1850s when a few translation institutes were constructed as part of the self-strengthening scheme initiated by Yangwupai. The quality of the translated works by these institutes, however, turned out far from being satisfactory to the Chinese men of letters who were shaped by a time-honored poetic tradition in which style was valued as the most essential. Their disappointment can be best revealed by Ma Jianzhong (马建忠), who, in his historic “Ni she fanyi shuyuan yi” (Proposal for the Establishment of Translation Academy) submitted to the imperial court, vehemently criticized the translations produced since “the Movement of Westernization” (洋务运动), claiming that “the audience had already been duly disgusted by the vulgarity of the translation before the reading had yet to be completed”12 (Ma 1984, p. 126) and suggested “four to five men well versed in classical Chinese be employed to help stylize the translated works”13 (Ma 1984, p. 128). Wu Rulun, authoritative enough to make his utterances as a master of the most influential stylistic schools in the Late Qing, also expressed his discontent with the works rendered over the decades by complaining “It’s a shame that most of the translations done at home were too crude and unstylish to convey the meaning”14 (Wu 1986, p. 1318) and “why is the people’s mentality so lousy? For no other reason than the absence of elegance in style”15 (Wu 1986, p. 1318). Such an impression, however, was overturned after he read through the draft of Yan’s translation of Evolution and Ethics. As one of the top stylists and also the lifetime mentor and friend of Yan, Wu was so intoxicated by his rendition that he took great pleasure in authoring a forword for him, in which, he acclaimed the style of the language applied by Yan as “comparable with that of the essays by the Late-­ Zhou philosophers”16 (Wu 1986, p. 1319) and recognized his translation as “unparalleled since the introduction of Western books in China”17 (Wu 1986, p.  1316), with the conclusion that “only those who write like Yan can be committed to translation”18 (Wu 1986, p. 1318). The emphasis placed by both Ma and Wu on elegance of translation, probably sounding way too rigorous or even undesirable at the present time, ought to be reexamined against the backdrop of the Late Qing in its closing years, in which the  The original is“阅者展卷未终,触人欲呕。”  The original is“拟请长于古文词者四五人,专为润色已译之书。” 14  The original is“又惜吾国之译言者,大抵弇陋不文,不足传载其义。” 15  The original is“民智之沦何由?此无他,文不足焉故意也。” 16  The original is“而其书乃骎骎与晚周诸子相上下。” 17  The original is“自吾国之译西书,未有能及严子者也。” 18  The original is“文如几道,可与言译书。” 12 13

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Chinese elite who might have felt forced to acknowledge the Western military and technological advantages, were still full of confidence in the superiority of the traditional Chinese culture and literature. Such a delusion can be best revealed by Guo Songtao, who as the Manchu government’s envoy in Britain asserted that “The British Empire lags far behind China in literarture and art, despite its sophistication in politics and education and solid foundation in wealth and power”19 (Guo 1982, p. 147). Given such circumstances, when the heterogeneous texts were to be admitted into the Chinese literary system and accepted by the Chinese scholar-­bureaucrats, they ought to be readily made stylistically appealing, as had always been done through the millennium-old history of the Buddhist scriptures translation in China. It should be noted, however, that not every contemporary of Yan was attracted to his style. Liang Qichao, one of the earliest readers of Tianyanlun, accused his rendition of being too elegant to benefit the students (Liang 1902, p. 113). In response to his critique, Yan (1986f) clarified that he was not rendering for students and that elegance was more a stratagem to facilitate in attracting those who were also “the readers of Chinese ancient classics” (p. 517). These people, “important enough to change the situations but inherently conservative and profoundly skeptical about things from abroad”20 (Wang 1982, p. 26), were mostly scholar-bureaucrats and targeted by Yan as the receptors of his translated works and the potential leaders of the social reforms towards a powerful and militant China. Yan’s strategies, to a large degree, worked. He was successful at least to the extent that “many conservative literati were actually induced to read his translation of Evolution and Ethics for its beauty of style” (Schwartz 1983, p. 94).

4.3  Translation of Western Fiction 4.3.1  F  iction: “An Incredible Power to Dominate the Way of Man” As early as in January, 1873, Xinxi xiantan (A Garrulous Story) was launched in China as the first rendition of a full-length foreign novel but sadly attracted very little attention (Pollard 1998, p.  6). It was not until Lin Shu was involved in the translation enterprise that fiction became the leading literary form of translation in the closing years of the Late Qing. Now, an important question stands in the way that should not be bypassed: why was fiction rather than other literary genres chosen? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to revisit the historical scenarios in which Lin Shu’s incredible translation venture was inspired and motivated.

19 20

 The original is“此间富强之基,与其政教精实严密,斐然可观,而文章礼乐不逮中华远甚。”  The original is“足以左右大局,然而却保守成性,对外来事物有深刻的疑惧。”

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In 1898, the reforms aimed at urging the Manchu ruling elite to introduce a brave new political system encompassing the setup of constitutional monarchy were sadly frustrated after it had lasted for nearly 100 days. Liang Qichao, one of the Reformists’ leaders, fled to Japan where he came to recognize political fiction as the catalyst of the wondrous revival of Japan since the Menji Restoration and decided that the reforms in China should be resumed with the translation of Western fiction, especially of the political novels. Liang, therefore, initiated a revolution in fiction with his influential treatise Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi (On the Relationship between Fiction and Social Order), in which he claimed: “Fiction boasts an incredible power to dominate the way of man”21 (Liang 1989a, p. 33). Almost for the first time, the Chinese reading public, who had traditionally deemed fiction as nothing more than pastime stuff, was surprisingly informed that it pratically assisted in political advances in Europe, America and Japan and even remained “the best among the literary genres”22 (Liang 1989a, p. 34). Fiction, which had blamed for propagandizing “violence and sex” (Wong 1998, p. 106), was also for the first time discussed as “a valuable, even noble endeavour” (Pollard 1998, p. 9), a medium to convey political ideology and even a tool for national salvation. Within a short time, Liang’s innovative ideas were spread and accepted nationwide. It is worth noting that the revolution in fiction was from the very beginning more political than literary, and fiction, in the same way, was far more instrumental than poetic and aesthetic, as opposed to its traditional role in the Chinese literary history. When Liang’s call for a revolution with an emphasis on fiction as an instrument for social reforms and national salvation was disseminated throughout the country, it received an immediate response from Lin Shu who made a proclamation on Qingyi Bao (the China Discussion)—a periodical founded by Liang Qichao in Yokohama, Japan, in which, Lin consented with Liang to translation as a means to transform the mentality of the populace and fiction as a genre that remained “the best among the literary genres”. This might partly explain why he was intoxicated with fiction translation, or why fiction, instead of other literary genres, dominated his marvelous undertaking of translation. From 1899 when his translation made its debut till October 11, 1911 when the rule over China by the Qing Dynasty was overthrown, Lin Shu published a total of 68 renditions from foreign novels, among which a great number can be categorized as “political fiction” (Liang 1989b, p. 21), the most well-known being Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Political fiction, according to Liang, was generally written to communicate the author’s political ideas and exert influence over the populace in order to renovate the national politics and advance the social progress (Liang 1989b, pp. 21–22). Uncle Tom’s Cabin, since the day it was delivered, has been known as a political novel with the intent of making the American people “feel what an accursed thing slavery 21 22

 The original is“小说有不可思议之力支配人道。”  The original is“小说为文学之最上乘。”

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is” (“Introductory Sketch,” 1895, p. xiii). Its popularity with the reading public was tremendous and obvious—over 30, 000 copies were sold in its first year of publication which “made the pretest of a small minority of abolitionists in America in the 1850s the concern of almost the entire nation” (Cheung 1998, p. 128). It was even held by Lincoln to be the catalyst of the anti-slavery sentiment in the North of America that helped to trigger the Civil War (Cheung 1998, p. 146). The influence of this masterpiece by Stowe was not limited to the United States; it was later circulated worldwide and became an important source of courage for the subjugated nations to fight for their freedom and independence. For this reason, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was looked upon as “a prime example of the novel as political instrument both in intent and effect” (Blotner 1955, p. 10). This is one of the reasons why Lin Shu and his collaborator in 1901, facing the national crisis in the making, did not choose another love story for translation after the great success of rendering and publishing La Dame aux camellias, but instead took an abrupt interest in this novel.

4.3.2  Rendering Uncle Tom’s Cabin for “Our Race is on the Verge of being Slaved” Admittedly, Lin Shu did not bear a lofty goal in mind when he undertook his first translation. The well-known story was that Wang Shouchang, a student of the Fuzhou Naval Academy and also one of his best friends, initiated the co-translation of La Dame aux camellias to help dispel this middle-aged man’s huge grief over losing his wife. It is true as well that Lin would sometimes translate entirely out of both curiosity and personal interest. For instance, he once rendered a book about ghosts just because he had shown sudden interest in theology after being informed by Yan Fu of its popularity in the West (Zhu 1923, p. 34). In this sense, Lin’s motivation for translation, if any, seemed to be arbitrary, vague, and inconsistent. However, an overview of his translated works accomplished during 1899–1911, from the prefaces, main bodies to postscripts, might leave a different impression. Notwithstanding that some of his translations came out indeed to satisfy his own curiosity or appeal to the reading public, much more were produced with a political agenda. Suffice it to say, the great bulk of his renditions was oriented to resist the foreign aggression suffered by China since the mid-nineteenth century. Lin’s translations can be fundamentally recognized as being directed for resistance not only because the spirit of resistance permeated his translated texts, but also because he had been a reformist, a revolutionary as well as a born fighter before “the Revolution of 1911” (辛亥革命) notwithstanding that he became “well known for his cultural conservatism” (Pollard 1998, p. 15) in his final years. Before being committed to translation, Lin was already a hot-blooded activist against foreign aggressions. In 1884, when the French fleet destroyed the Chinese naval forces and the shipyard that had been satirically built with the assistance of France near his hometown, the 32-year-old scholar became so disappointed and

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infuriated that he submitted a letter of protest to Viceroy Zuo Zongtang (左宗棠), frantically accusing the concerned military officials of breaching their fiduciary duty (Lee 1973, p. 52). Eleven years later, when the Sino-Japanese war ended up with the Chinese fleet being entirely crushed by its Japanese counterpart, Lin, who was preparing for the imperial examinations in the capital of the Qing Dynasty, once again sent a letter to the authorities protesting over the signing of the mortifying Treaty of Shimonoseki in which Taiwan, the Liaodong Peninsula, and the Pescadores Islands were to be sadly ceded to Japan (Lee 1973, p. 53). Given his early active participation in the protest movements against the foreign aggressions, it is not surprising to see him, since the translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, start to make his renditions a new arena in which his political positions, social views and alarms on the foreign threats were all articulated through his prefaces, postscripts as well as the renditions themselves. The rendering of Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Chinese thus became one of the most significant events in China at the turn of the twentieth century not only because it was probably the most influential translation from a foreign political novel at that time, but also because it was Lin’s very first translated text infused with patriotism and nationalism. In 1901 when this masterpiece was first introduced to the Chinese readers, China had just suffered the unrest aroused by the Boxer Rebellion and the looting of its capital by the Eight-Power Allied Forces. It is no exaggeration to say that China was on the verge of entirely losing its territories and sovereignty and seeing its people subjugated by the intruders. The need to publicize the national crisis, which had been strongly felt by such reformists as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, was not duly met due to the lack of a proper channel to reach the populace until Lin’s translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to be published in the first year of the twentieth century. In his preface to this work, his motive was made explicit and incontestable: The yellow race has been treated even worse than the black…when I realized that the yellow race is facing subjugation as well, my indignation just grew…Some Chinese are misled into believing that the white people will treat well their subjugated nations, and thus are actively seeking an allegiance to them. To these people, my translation of this book should serve as a warning.23 (Lin 1981c, p. 1)

Right in his introduction to the Chinese version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin known as Heinu yutian lu (A Chronicle of the Black Slaves’ Appeals to Heaven) (hereafter Chronicle), Lin asked his audience not to treat his rendition as an absurd fabricated story, but instead read it in close relation to the miseries that the yellow race was bound to suffer in the future (Lin 1981b, p. 2). In the afterword, he even issued a serious warning to his compatiots that “our race is on the verge of being enslaved”,24 recognizing his rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as facilitating in baozhong (race preservation):

 The original is“因之黄人受虐,或加甚于黑人……触黄种之将亡,因而愈生其悲怀耳……又 误信西人宽待其藩属,跃跃然欲趋而附之。则吾之书足以儆醒之者……” 24  The original is “为奴之势逼近吾种。” 23

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4  E-C Translation as Resistance in the Late Qing 1811–1911 I did not translate this book with Wei Yi just to tell a sad story to move our readers into tears; I did it because I felt obliged to make it a wakeup call to the public that our race is on the verge of being enslaved…Vulgar and shallow as my translation is, it is good enough to facilitate in boosting morale and patriotism as well as in preserving our race.25 (Lin 1981a, p. 206)

This passionate, far-sighted Chinese scholar in the year 1901, therefore, had already related his translation closely to the cause of national salvation and race preservation. The translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, was not the sole work by him that strongly voiced his resistant sentiments; in the years to come it was followed by more works rendered to the same end, manifesting that though his involvement in translation may have been fortuitous and impulsive, he did, for the rest of his lifetime, seriously undertake translation as an enterprise of resistance, as revealed in the preface to his translation of Le Tour De La France Par Deux Enfants: Weilu [another name of Lin Shu], an old pedant from Fujian, is low-born and contemptible…He sincerely hopes that these books would be read by the young people at home and abroad, whom he considers as dear and respectable as his own kinfolks, to help elevate their patriotic spirit. And he will call it his own enterprise…Weilu is a madman. He is, through all his life, yielding to nobody, and is especially unwilling to yield to the circling foreign powers…he will die one day…he will, nevertheless, before his death, try his utmost to render useful books to serve as alarms and advice.26 (Lin 1989, pp. 268–269)

As one of the educated elite whose shared value was to participate in the imperial examinations and thereby step into the imperial court to serve as high officials, Lin nevertheless did not scruple to dedicate himself to translation—a career from which the traditional Chinese litertati chose to stay away, largely because for him “patriotism was measured by the intensity of enthusiasm rather than by social status”27 (Lin 1989, pp. 269), suggesting that the Chinese people from all walks of life, driven by patriotic sentiments, were all in the position to do something to rescue their country in peril.

4.3.3  L  in Shu’s Strategies: De-Christianization and Subjectivation Lin Shu is nowadays frequently accused of taking liberty with the source texts in the process of translating, notwithstanding that some researchers such as Hanan (2001) and Zheng (2000) tried to prove him a loyalist to the English originals. In this book,

  The original is“余与魏君同译是书,非巧于叙悲以博阅者无端之眼泪,特为奴之势逼及吾 种……则吾书虽俚浅,亦足为振作志气,爱国保种之一助。” 26  The original is“畏庐,闽海一老学究也,少贱,不齿于人……亦冀以诚告海内至宝至贵、亲如 骨肉、尊如圣贤之青年学生读之,以振动爱国之志气。人谓此即畏庐实业也。畏庐者,狂人 也,平生倔强,不屈人下,尤不甘屈诸虎视眈眈诸强邻之下……死固有时……更能不死者,即强 支此不死期内,多译有益之书,以代弹词,为劝谕之助。” 27  The original is “天下爱国之道,当争有心无心,不当争有位无位。” 25

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it is recognized that his translated works, due to over-liberalism, are teemed with two categories of discrepancies: witting and unwitting. The unwitting, as their name suggests, refer to the discrepancies made unwittingly or unconsciously, which as uncontrollable factors were generally evoked by Lin’s carelessness, hastiness and ignorance of foreign languages. The witting discrepancies, in contrast, very often resulted from choices or decisions made by the translators. If witting discrepancies in Lin’s translated texts are interpreted as strategic, the important question is, what caused him to render in such a way? A closer investigation of Chronicle as his rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin manifests that although a huge number of discrepancies might have seemed arbitrary and unwitting, they were essentially well schemed to serve the translator’ motive for resistance mainly through the adoption of two strategies: de-Christianization and subjectivation. 4.3.3.1  De-Christianization Uncle Tom’s Cabin has come to be recognized as “an anti-slavery and religious novel” (Cheung 1998, p. 127) since its debut, and its author Harriet Beecher Stowe even envisaged it as a work written by God rather than by herself (Fields 1897, p.  377). A comparison between the ST and TT, however, shows that despite the original as being permeated with “political as well as religious sentiments” (Cheung 1998, p. 128), Lin Shu and his co-translator seemed to have endeavored to obscure or even delete the elements of Christianity in his translation: Mr. Wilson, you have shown yourself a Christian in your treatment of me, —I want to ask one last deed of Christian kindness of you. (Stowe 1981, p. 113). Lin and Wei’s translation: “ ” (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 54).

This sentence opens a dialogue between Mr. Wilson and George—a black slave at large planning to flee to Canada for shelter. Before leaving home for the new country, he asks Wilson to do him a favor. In this sentence, George calls Wilson a “Christian” and a man of “Christian kindness”, neither of which, however, has been rendered faithfully in Lin’s renditions: “教门有道之士”, which refers to the accomplished people of any religion, is not an appellation particularly to Christianity, whereas “德”, which simply means “virtue” in the Chinese language, has nothing to do with the so called “Christian kindness”. Other examples to show how Lin Shu attempted to de-Christianize this novel include the translations from “gave her a hymn” (Stowe 1981, p.  278) into “zuo zhenzhi” (作针黹 doing needlework) (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 135), from “an evangel to me” (Stowe 1981, p. 180) into “dao wu wei shan” (导吾为善 guiding me to do good) (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 85), as well as from “instructed in the truths of religion” (Stowe 1981, p. 328) into “jinzi yu xuewen” (浸渍于学问 be engrossed in learning) (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 158), etc.

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In fact, Lin’s de-Christianization strategy was not applied only by the rewriting of one or two phrases; on other occasions, he even boldly abridged the entirety of a conversation into a short sentence, with all the discourses related to Christianity missing in his rendition: “Tom, you love me,” he said. “I’s willin’s to lay down my life, this blessed day, to see Mas’r a Christian”. “Poor, foolish boy!” said St. Clare, half-raising himself. “I’m not worth the love of one good, honest heart, like yours.” “O, Mas’r, dere’s more than moe loves you, –the blessed Lord Jesus loves you.”. (Stowe 1981, p. 301) … Lin and Wei’s translation: (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 145).

This conversation takes place when Tom tries to soothe his master St. Clare who has just lost his beloved daughter by talking him into a Christian. Tom’s consolation for St.Clare is highly Christian as it is filled with the words such as “blessed,” “Christian,” “Lord,” and “Jesus”, for which Lin’s strategy was simplistic and straightforward—he used one sentence only to render the whole conversation in ” simply which no religious element was retained, as “ means “Tom comes forward to comfort him, but cannot help crying first”. This is not, however, the most extreme example one could expect as to how the religious material was filtered. A bolder deletion of the information relevant to Christianty can be seen in Chap. XI: “Yes, George, I’ll tell her; but I trust you won’t die; take heart, —you’re a brave fellow. Trust in the Lord, George. I wish in my heart you were safe through, though, —that’s what I do.” “Is there a God to trust in?” said George, in such a tone of bitter despair as arrested the old gentleman’s words. “O, I’ve seen things all my life that have made me feel that there can’t be a God. You Christians don’t know how these things look to us. There’s a God for you, but is there any for us?” “Oh, now, don’t—don’t, my boy!” said the old man, almost sobbing as he spoke; “don’t feel so! There is—there is; clouds and darkness are around the habitation of his throne. There’s a God, George, —believe it; trust in Him, and I’m sure He’ll help you. Everything will be set right, —if not in this life, in another”. (Stowe 1981, pp. 113–114).

When George, the above-mentioned wanted black slave tells Mr. Wilson, the owner of a bagging factory that he used to work for, his plan of seeking refuge in Canada, this kind-hearted white man begins to assure him that by trusting in God his safety at home could be guaranteed. George seems not very sure of his faith in Christianity and their conversation basically encompasses his question “Is there a God to trust in?” The translators, however, seemed reluctant to bother his Chinese audience with such a question as they chose to surprisingly wipe the whole conversation off their co-translation. Another noteworthy deletion came about in Chap. XL in which Tom, being ruthlessly beaten by his master Legree, yells in this way: Mas’r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I’d give ye my heart’s blood; and, if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I’d give ‘em freely, as the lord gave his for me. Oh, Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on

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your soul! It will hurt you more than ‘t will me! Do the worst you can, my troubles’ will be over soon; but if you don’t repent, yours won’t never end! (Stowe 1981, p. 410).

Then, Ms. Stowe unexpectedly interpolates, not only as an author but also as a narrator and commentator, another paragraph to compare Tom’s sufferings to the sacrifices of Jesus Christ: But of old, there was One whose suffering changed an instrument of torture, degradation, and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life; and, where his spirit is, neither degrading stripes, nor blood, nor insults, can make the Christian’s last struggle less than glorious. (Stowe 1981, p. 411).

Such an interpolation, however, was utterly filtered out in Chronicle just like many of the other religious references. Given that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as previously noted, is a novel of both political and religious significance, shouldn’t it deserve the preservation of every religious element in its rendition, thematically and structurally? The fact is that Lin Shu and his collaborator Wei Yi did not pay due attention to the religious material valued by the author and the reason could be that as Late Qing translators they had totally different concerns. In other words, the two translators basically did not consider religion as a theme of this novel, as revealed in Lin’s introduction to Chronicle: “This book dwells specifically on the black slaves; although it contains some trivials on other topics, they are all thematically connected to the slaves”28 (Lin 1981b, p. 2). In order to understand such a decision by the translators, it is of paramount importance to revisit the milieu in which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was introduced to China. Although the turn of the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic dissemination of Christianity in China (which even Robert Morrison might not have expected a few decades back), Christianity was still alien and heterogeneous to the bulk of Chinese people, especially for the orthodox Confucianists. In an era when Confucianism remained the dominant ideology among the Chinese populace, it would not be surprising to see Christianity be repressed or even muted in the translated texts, consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, as disciples of Confucius instead of Jesus Christ, Lin and Wei had every reason not to translate as propagandists of Christianity. But that is not all. Christianity, like many other religions in the world, always preaches “quietism” (Cheung 1998, p. 139) by encouraging “patience and forbearance” (Cheung 1998, p. 139). To the Chinese receptors who mostly were not its devout adherents, therefore, a faithful rendition of the religious material may not have helped to communicate the theme of anti-slavery, but instead may have obscured it to the extent that it may have even impeded the translators’ intent of using their translated text for political purposes. More importantly, the ideological conquest of China by the Western powers in the Late Qing, as discussed in the previous chapters, was practised mainly through the introduction and dissemination of Christianity which was also perceived by Lin 28

 The original is“是书专叙黑奴,中虽杂收他事,宗旨必与黑奴有关者,始行着笔。”

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Shu and Wei Yi as “the vanguard of imperialism as well as its ideological handmaid” (Cheung 1998, p. 141). Therefore, when Christianity was recognized as facilitating in the Western conquest of China, one should not be too surprised that the translators’ preference to de-Christianize Uncle Tom’s Cabin was interpreted as a strategy of resistance. 4.3.3.2  Subjectivation One of the characteristics of Lin’s translations is that he would not only inform the paratexts, such as the prefaces, introductions, notes, or postscripts, etc. with his reformist and nationalistic ideas, but would also infuse such ideas immediately into his translations in a sentimental or passionate manner. Such a strategy, preferably termed in this book as “subjectivation” that emphasizes the translator’s initiative and visibility, was applied extensively in his rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: I’ll fight for my liberty to the last breath I breathe. You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me. (Stowe 1981, p. 110). Lin and Wei’s translation : “ ” (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 52).

This utterance is made by the Black slave George while conversing with his former master Mr. Wilson about his plan of seeking refuge in Canada. He is confident that he can seek liberty right there and compare himself to Wilson’s ancestors who also fought for their liberty, implying that if anybody tries to stop him, he will fight for it. In the source text, which country is to be fought against, Britain or America, remains somewhat implicit, as there is no direct mention of either of their names. In contrast, the translation is much more explicit, emotional and inspiring—it suggests to the Chinese reading public that as America’s liberty was achieved by fighting against Britain, and the blacks’ liberty, in turn, was achieved by fighting against America, China would have to fight against the Western invaders if it desired to restore liberty as well. In Chap. XLIII, George, who has been living in Canada for years with his wife, decides to emigrate to Africa with his family. In a letter to one of his friends, George expresses his wish in this way: The desire and yearning of my soul is for an African nationality. I want a people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own; and where am I to look for it? (Stowe 1981, p. 430). Lin and Wei’s translation:

(Stowe 1981/1981, p. 202)

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The wish of George conveyed in the source text is simple: he craves for an independent country that belongs solely to the blacks and he expects himself to be one of them. As to whether his wish will come true or not, he does not seem to be very sure and confident. In Lin and Wei’s rendition, however, George becomes so optimistic, confident and enthusiastic about the blacks’ destiny that he even asserts that if he is provided with one or two sensible and resolute fellows of his race to help make his wish come true, the country will be rebuilt and the blacks will not have to live at the mercy of others any longer. Following these two sentences in this lengthy letter, there exist as long as more than ten paragraphs that all encompass the topic of building an African country, in which, George’s attitude towards the Western colonial powers is noteworthy: he is positive about Liberia and is eager to go there because it is “acknowledged by both France and England” (Stowe 1981, p.  430); he even thinks highly of the Anglo-­ Saxons, recognizing their temperaments as “stern, inflexible and energetic” (Stowe 1981, p. 431) that made Britain the world leader “during its pioneer period of struggle and conflict” (Stowe 1981, p. 431). When speaking about the rise and revival of the African race, which George has always been dreaming of, his tone of voice becomes soft and conciliatory: I trust the development of Africa is to be essentially a Christian one. If not a dominant and commanding race, they are, at least, an affectionate, magnanimous, and forgiving one. Having been called in the furnace of injustice and oppression, they have need to bind closer to their hearts that sublime doctrine of love and forgiveness, through which alone they are to conquer, which it is to be their mission to spread over the continent of Africa (Stowe 1981, pp. 431–432). Noticeably, George in the source text does not attempt to amplify the contradictions between the whites and blacks, nor does he intend to incite hatred among the blacks and turn them against the whites, but quite on the contrary provides a solution upon the “sublime doctrine of love and forgiveness”. He does it all because, as he confesses: “full half the blood in my veins is the hot and hasty Saxon” (Stowe 1981, p.  432). These paragraphs, however, were unexpectedly condensed by Lin and Wei into one:

(Stowe 1981/1981, pp. 202-203)

In contrast to the source text, the rendition by Lin and Wei tends to foreground the oppression of the blacks by the whites by warning “the people of our race are still stuck in America, being bullied like animals” ( ) and “we must not just sit and wait for the whites’ destruction of our race” ). (

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The translators chose to instill their own nationalistic ideas which were far more radical than those of George into the rendition probably because they would like their Chinese readership to pay due attention to the tortures inflicted by the whites on the Chinese laborers abroad, and more importantly, the sufferings of his compatriots at home brought by the foreign aggressors. At the end of this long letter, George swears to his friend as follows: I go to Liberia, not as to an Elysium of romance, but as a field of work. I expect to work with both hands,—to work hard; to work against all sorts of difficulties and discouragements; and to work till I die. (Stowe 1981, p. 432) Lin and Wei’s translation: (Stowe 1981/1981, p. 203)

In the source text, George tries to clarify that his journey to Liberia is not to have fun, but to base his dream of building a blacks’ country upon hard work, notwithstanding that it may even cost the rest of his life. Once again, Lin and Wei manifested translators’ subjectivity by informing the rendition with their ideas of race preservation and national resistance, in which George articulates: “My trip to Liberia is not to seek pleasure or comfort, but to raise the morale of our countrymen in order to prserve our race and expel the foreign aggressors. My determination will not wither away until the end of my life!” Lin’s approach of transfusing his reformist or nationalistic ideology into Chronicle, consequently, received a positive response from his contemporary audience. A reader under the pseudonym Ling Shi (灵石), echoed sentimentally his empathic translation upon reading his rendition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: When reading Chronicle, I wept for our yellow race with tears for the blacks, for the status quo of our yellow race with the sufferings of the blacks. I want every household of our yellow race to keep a copy of this book at home and wish every reader to weep for his sons and daughters and shed his tears for the heroes.29 (Ling 1989, p. 117)

4.3.4  Gracious Style The Late Qing translators as a group were very often bombarded with the criticisms such as “unfaithful to the original text and ignorant of Western literature and culture” (Hung 1998, p. 168), or “witting and unwitting misinterpretations of the originals generated spontaneous alternative versions of the modern” (Wang 1998, p. 303), and Lin Shu was no exception. Nevertheless, Lin remains one of the best-­known Chinese translators at the turn of the nineteenth century largely because his renditions feature a fusion of exotic literary themes and traditional Chinese prose style, notwithstanding that such a style is not always appealing particularly to the modern critics.   The original is “我读《吁天录》,以哭黑人之泪哭我黄人,以黑人已往之境哭我黄人之现 在。我欲黄人家家置一《吁天录》,我愿读《吁天录》者,人人发儿女之悲啼,洒英雄之热 泪。”

29

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Zheng Zhenduo, in his frequently quoted treatise Linqinnan xiansheng (Mr. Lin Qinnan), pointed out that humor as a delicate stylistic feature had even surprisingly been retained in Lin’s translations (Zheng 1984, p. 190), and his point of view was shared by Authur Waley who thought highly of Lin’s “precise, economical style” (Waley 1963, p.190) in representing the original stylistic characteristics. Some researchers who had even refused to accept him as a translator, also ascribed his great success to his unique style formed through the introduction of classical Chinese: Today, it must be realized that Lin Shu did not in the least translate even a single work. How could one who knew nothing about any foreign language be a translator? In fact, the oral relayers as his collaborators were the real translators and what Lin had done was no more than what may be termed “Sight Translation” in today’s translatology. His collaborators, however, remain little known whereas Lin Shu enjoyed the reputation of a great translator all because he was well versed in classical Chinese.30 (Wong 2011, pp. 210–211)

It is probably true that the fascination of Lin’s translated works is manifested chiefly in the style they boast, which was brought about by his daringness to render the foreign literary texts in classical Chinese. Even Hu Shi (胡适), a fanatical propagandist of baihua (白话Vernacular Chinese) and also the leader of “the Vernacular Movement” (白话文运动), had to acknowledge Lin’s accomplishment in employing classical Chinese to translate the foreign novels: Not a full-length novel had ever been written in classical Chinese, whereas Lin Shu used it to render more than one hundred full-length novels…Classical Chinese, since Sima Qian31 in Han Dynasty, has never been used to make such a tremendous achievement.32 (Hu 1988, p. 110)

Now the question is, why Lin Shu preferred wenyan, or classical Chinese, to baihua? One of the prevailing views among the critics is like: Because classical Chinese was his forte, and also because he was addressing fellow members of the elite, to whom the spoken language was ‘vulgar’. To persuade them of the quality of Western literature it was essential to use classical Chinese. (Pollard 1998, p. 15)

Such an argument, which seems persuasive, must have taken its cue from the case in which Yan Fu, as previously noted, sought to impress the Chinese ruling elite with the weight and profundity of the texts of Western humanities by applying classical Chinese in his renditions. It should be noted, however, that this argument may have been made without reference to a simple fact: unlike the readers targeted by Yan Fu for his translations of Western humanities, the receptors of Lin’s translated texts might have included, but were not limited to the so called “fellow members of  The original is “以今天的眼光来看,林纾根本没有翻译过一篇作品。完全不懂外语的怎可 能从 事翻 译 ?事实 上,他的合作者才是真 正的译 者,他所做的是今天翻 译 学 所说 的“视 译”(Sight Translation), 但他们却寂寂无闻,倒是林纾却得享翻译大家的盛名,他所倚赖的便是 一支优秀的古文文笔。” 31  a Chinese historian of the early Han Dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 A. D.) and the author of Shi Ji, or Records of the Grand Historian 32  The original is “古文不曾做过长篇的小说,林纾居然用古文译了一百多种长篇小说......古文 的应用,自司马迁以来,从没有这种大的成绩。” 30

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the elite” (Pollard 1998, p. 15) as translated novels were far less scholastic and more accessible to the Chinese reading public. More importantly, as Lin’s translation enterprise was admitted as a constituent of the “revolution in fiction” (Wong 1998, p. 105) ignited by Liang Qichao, his readership may have gone beyond the literati elite to include the populace envisaged as the rising backbone for social transformations and national salvation by the Reformists who had already lost their faith in the ruling class after the “Hundred Days of Reform” (百日维新). Given that Lin Shu’s translations were informed with his own political ideas, it is safe to assert that what he had done did not in the least break away from a tradition deeply embedded in the time-honored Chinese literature—wen yi zai dao (文以 载道writing to convey truth). Under the influence of such a tradition, writings were constantly intended by the literati to convey or disseminate truth, which, with minor exceptions, were beautifully stylized in classical Chinese, the most typical example being the Four Books and Five Classics. Therefore, when Lin Shu chose to render the foreign novels with a political agenda, it would not be surprising to see translation as a special form of writing be presented in a gracious prose style with the characteristics of classical Chinese. Additionally, shortly after Lin started his career as a translator in 1899, the whole country witnessed, as previously noted, the occurrence of the so called “revolution in fiction” in which, “fiction remains the best among the literary genres”, as a slogan, was propounded by its leader Liang Qichao to sweep away for fiction the obstacles in the way of becoming a medium to communicate political ideas: This slogan may have been overstated, but it is not an empty one. It purports that fiction has become the most outstanding literary genre, and that the audience, when reading the novels, expected to feel the beauty that should have been felt in other literary genres.33 (Chen 2004, p. 16)

Obviously, as a literary translator extremely active at the turn of the twentieth century, it was impossible for Lin to stay away from the impact of “revolution in fiction” and its slogan. Being one of the few brilliant late-Qing stylists of Tongchengpai (桐城派Tongcheng School), his decision to use classical Chinese to create a gracious style for his renditions could be looked upon as a manifestation of his understanding of “fiction remains the best among the literary genres”, notwithstanding that his practice was also attacked by Liang Qichao “whose aim was to convert the masses, and who to that end advocated the use of the forms the masses were accustomed to” (Pollard 1998, p. 15). Given that the readership of Lin’s translated works was not confined to the ruling elite, the act of embellishing his texts with classical Chinese looked more like a gamble. The truth was, Lin won in this gamble as his refined translations turned out extremely popular with his contemporary reading public. As a result, wenyan, or classical Chinese, has been recognized as “still playing a dominant role in rendering the foreign novels,”34 (Wong 2011 p.  212) and “an important force to boost the   The original is“这是一句不着边际的大话,可并非毫无意义的空话。它意味着小说成为文 学的最杰出代表,读者阅读时希望从中得到本来是其他文学形式才具有的美感。” 34  The original is“文言在翻译小说方面还是占了主导的地位。” 33

References

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popularity of the translated fiction”35 (Wong 2011 p. 212) during the Late Qing and the initial years of the Republic period (1912–1949). In the meantime, Lin Shu’s calls for race preservation and national salvation as well as alarms on the Western coercion and aggression, with the dissemination of his translated texts, have come to be known by the bulk of Chinese people.

4.4  Summary This chapter examines the different approaches to translation adopted respectively by Yan Fu and Lin Shu in the light of the analytical model formulated in this book. In terms of text selection, Yan chose to render the books of Western humanities badly needed in the Late Qing, whereas Lin focused on the translation of the Western novels that “boast an incredible power to dominate the way of man”. As far as stylistic choices are concerned, they both chose to stylize their translations in classical Chinese, notwithstanding that their intentions varied: Yan did it chiefly to make the ruling elite accept the Western humanities that conveyed heterogeneous ideology, whereas Lin adopted gracious style more as an embodiment of his perception of a slogan like “fiction remains the best among the literary genres”. Meanwhile, the translation strategies they applied were also different: In Evolution and Ethics, Huxley doubts the existence of any harsh struggle in human history and challenges the legitimacy of introducing the law of “survival of the fittest” into human society. Besides, he does not quite agree to attain the “common good” through “the sacrifice of self”. Yan, quite on the contrary, sought to amplify in his rendition the severity of struggle between species and advocate individual self-sacrifice for the greater social good by shifting Huxley’s discourses. On the other hand, better known as an anti-slavery novel in China, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also religiously significant with the inclusion of abundant Christian elements. Lin Shu, however, chose to accentuate its political significance by effacing and subverting the Christian elements on one hand, and to inform his own reformist and nationalistic ideas into the rendition on the other. Despite the disparities in text selection, stylistic choices as well as translation strategies, their renditions nevertheless both pointed to one orientation: race preservation and national salvation.

References Blotner, J. (1955). The political novel. Westport: Greewood Press. Cheung, M. P. Y. (1998). The discourse of occidentalism? Wei Yi and Lin Shu’s treatment of religious material in their translation of Uncle Tom’s cabin. In D. E. Pollard (Ed.), Translation and 35

 The original is“出色的古文, 才是推动翻译小说流行和畅销的主要力量。”

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creation: Readings of Western literature in early modern China, 1840–1918 (pp.  127–149). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Fei, X. T. (1983). Yinglun zagan [On my trip to Britain]. In CPPCC Research Council on Cultural and Historical Materials (Ed.), Wenshi ziliao xuanji di 87 ji [Selections of cultural and historical materials, Vol. 87] (pp. 48–55). Wenshi ziliao chubanshe: Beijing. Fields, A. (Ed.). (1897). Life and letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cambridge: Riverside Press. Guo, S. T. (1982). Guo Songtao riji di san juan (shang) [Guo Songtao’s Diary, Vol. 3 (Part 1)]. Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe. Hanan, P. (2001). A study in acculturation: The first novels translated into Chinese. Chinese literature: Essays, articles, reviews, 23, 55–80. Hu, S. (1988). Wushi nian lai Zhongguo zhi wenxue [Chinese literature in the last 50 years]. In Y. H. Jiang (Ed.), Hushi xueshu wenji (Xin wenxue yundong) [A collection of Hu Shi’s academic works (new literary movement)] (pp. 94–161). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Hung, E. (1998). Giving texts a context: Chinese translations of classical English detective stories 1896-1916. In D. E. Pollard (Ed.), Translation and creation: Readings of Western literature in early modern China, 1840–1918 (pp. 151–176). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Huxley, T. H. (1894). Evolution & ethics and other essays. London: Macmillan and Co. Chinese edition: Huxley, T. H. (1981). Tianyanlun [On evolution] (F. Yan, Trans.). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Introductory sketch. (1895). Uncle Tom's cabin; or, Life among the lowly: With an introductory sketch of Mrs. Stowe's life and career (pp. ix-xviii). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Lee, L. O. (1973). Romantic generation of modern Chinese writers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Liang Q. C. (1902, January). Shaojie xinzhu: Yuanfu [Introduction to a new book: Yuanfu]. Sein Min Choong Bou, 1(1): 113–115. Liang, Q. C. (1986). Liang Qichao zhi Yan Fu shu [A letter from Liang Qichao to Yan Fu]. In S. Wang (Ed.), Yanfu ji [A collection of Yan Fu’s works] (pp. 1566–1571). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Liang, Q. C. (1989a). Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi [On the relationship between fiction and social order]. In P. Y. Chen & X. H. Xia (Eds.), Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (di 1 juan) [Theoretical materials on Chinese fiction in the twentieth century, Vol. 1] (pp. 33–37). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Liang, Q.  C. (1989b). Yiyin zhengzhi xiaoshuo xu [Preface to the translation and publication of political fiction]. In P.  Y. Chen & X.  H. Xia (Eds.), Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (di 1 juan) [Theoretical materials on Chinese fiction in the twentieth century, Vol. 1] (pp. 21–22). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Lin, S. (1981a). Ba [Afterword]. Heinu yutian lu [A chronicle of the black slaves’ appeals to heaven] (S. Lin & Y. Wei, Trans.) (p. 206). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Lin, S. (1981b). Liyan [Introduction]. Heinu yutian lu [A chronicle of the black slaves’ appeals to heaven] (S. Lin & Y. Wei, Trans.) (p. 2). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Lin, S. (1981c). Xu [Preface]. Heinu yutian lu [A chronicle of the black slaves’ appeals to heaven] (S. Lin & Y. Wei, Trans.) (p. 1). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan. Lin, S. (1989). “Aiguo ertongzi zhuan” dazhi [Preface to the translation of Le tour de la France par deux enfants]. In P. Y. Chen & X. H. Xia (Eds.), Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (di 1 juan) [Theoretical materials on Chinese novels in the twentieth century, Vol. 1] (pp. 267–270). Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Ling, S. (1989). Du “heinu yutian lu” [Reading responses to A chronicle of the black slaves’ appeals to heaven]. In P.  Y. Chen & X.  H. Xia (Eds.), Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun ziliao (di 1 juan) [Theoretical materials on Chinese novels in the twentieth century, Vol. 1] (pp. 116–118). Beijing daxue chubanshe: Beijing. Ma, J. Z. (1984). Nishe fanyi shuyuan yi [Proposal for the establishment of translation academy]. In X.  Z. Luo (Ed.), Fanyi lunji [Collected papers on translation] (pp.  126–129). Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan.

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Chapter 5

Conclusions

This book is a project to delve into how translation facilitated in the Western conquest of China and how it was in turn employed by the Chinese people to fight back as a weapon in the late Qing 1811–1911, arguing that translation did not remain innocent, but became intermingled with power abuses in the Chinese milieu. Inspired by Pym’s emphasis on exploring the causes of translation history and Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes, an analytical model is formulated to examine whether and how translation served both as an instrument of Western conquest of China and a conduit of national resistance in the Late Qing in four dimensions: text selection, translation purpose, stylistic choices and translation strategies, corresponding respectively to material cause, final cause, formal cause as well as efficient cause defined by Aristotle. In the light of this analytical model, both Biblical translation and the translation of the Anglo-Chinese unequal treaties are examined to interrogate translation as part of the Western conquest of Late Qing China. In investigating the translation of the Scriptures as a tool of the expansion of the Kingdom of God, the debates between the British and American Protestants are discussed encompassing which term, Shangdi or Shen, should be accepted as the appellation of God. The finding is that although the two parties disagreed on the Term Question, they were nevertheless surprisingly alike in seeking to romanticize the Christian faith, subvert the indigenous and other foreign religions as well as include China as part of the Kingdom of God by propagandizing the Christian God as the one and only supreme Governor of the universe. On the other hand, the Chinese texts of the Treaty of Nanking and the Anglo-­ Chinese Treaty of Tientsin are construed in comparison with the English texts to see whether and how the British side benefited from deceiving translation and stylistic manipulation. It is pointed out that the way the treaties were translated mirrored the asymmetrical power relations between Britain as the conqueror and China as the conquered and facilitated in constructing and reinforcing the former’s dominance over the latter.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 X. Huang, English-Chinese Translation as Conquest and Resistance in the Late Qing 1811-1911, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7572-9_5

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5 Conclusions

In ascertaining translation as a means for Chinese resistance against the Western aggression, the renditions respectively by Yan Fu and Lin Shu are scrutinized in relation to their roles as alarming on the Western threats and boosting morale among the Chinese people. Before his translation of Evolution and Ethics was published in 1898, Yan Fu had developed some evolution-based ideas of resistance. In working out Tianyanlun as the first rendition he had ever made, he sought to infuse it with his own ideas of resistance. In order to make the heterogenous ideology in his translation more agreeable to the Late-Qing ruling elite, he rendered it in classical Chinese to make it stylistically elegant and appealing. On the other hand, Lin Shu created a different approach towards resistance by translating Uncle Tom’s Cabin to warn of the political and social crisis facing China and propagandize patriotism and nationalism among his compatriots. These two translators, despite their distinctions in text selection and translation strategies, shared nevertheless one telos in common: race preservation and national salvation. Robinson (2014) underlines the significance of applying postcolonial approaches to translation in “our own societies” (p. 88), asserting that one of their virtues lies in recognizing the power use of translation in “various” communities (p. 88). Looked at from this perspective, the primary value of this study rests with recognizing the power use of translation in the Chinese context, which may make the map of global postcolonial translation studies more complete. In addition, this book has also made several other possible contributions to the translation studies: Firstly, postcolonialism is introduced as “our late-twentieth-century perspective on how conqueror cultures have bent conquered cultures to their will; how conquered cultures have responded to, accommodated, resisted or overcome that coercion” (Robinson 2014, p. 14), thus legitimizing Chinese mainland as the object of postcolonial translation studies. Secondly, an analytical model is established to examine the roles of translation in four dimensions, thus ushering a new perspective and method for the researchers to analyze and evaluate the complicity of translation in history. Thirdly, this book is, as far as the writer knows, one of the few in which the translation of Sino-British unequal treaties of the nineteenth century is systematically investigated as a tool of empire. Fourthly, “Translation as Conquest” and “Translation as Resistance”, as two core concepts in this book, may help to theorize the research of translation history in the postcolonial context. The studies of translation history, as Pym (2014) articulates, should be conducted “in order to express, address and try to solve problems affecting our own situation” (p. x). The research results of this book, therefore, may even give some hints to the policy-makers on various levels across the world: owing to power differentials, we do not live in an ideal world in which exchanges among the nations are conducted on a footing of equality. Thus, when envisaged as being manipulated for conquest of any kind, be it economic, political, cultural or spiritual, translation can as well be picked up as a weapon of resistance.

References

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References Pym, A. (2014). Method in translation history (2nd ed.). London/New York: Routledge. Robinson, D. (2014). Translation and empire: Postcolonial theories explained (3rd ed.). London/ New York: Routledge.