Early Modern Travels of Manchu

Marten Soderblom Saarela is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

• ConventionsIntroduction. A Cultural History of the Manchu ScriptChapter 1. To Follow Fuxi or Kubilai Khan? Written Manchu Before 1644Chapter 2. The Beijing Origins of Manchu-Language Pedagogy, 1668-1730Chapter 3. Phonology and Manchu in Southern China and Japan, c. 1670-1716Chapter 4. Manchu Words and AlphabeticalOrder in China and Japan, 1683-1820sChapter 5. Leibniz's Dream of a Manchu Encyclopedia and Kangxi's Mirror, 1673-1708Chapter 6. The Manchu Script and Foreign Sounds from the Qing Court to Korea, 1720s-1770sChapter 7. The Invention of a Manchu Alphabet in Saint Petersburg, 1720s-1730sChapter 8. The Making of a Manchu Typeface in Paris, 1780s-1810sConclusionNotesIndexAcknowledgments

"The Early Modern Travels of Manchu is a prime example of how to successfully conjoin the microhistorical with the global...The narrative plumbs into the social lives of the Manchu script, unfolding the reverberations of individual agencies, while keeping the readers updated of broader temporal and spatial movements. Needless to say, the book will not only inspire historians of global microhistory. Those of cultural mobility and early modernity, and not least, scholars of Manchu studies, will equally be engrossed." (Journal of Early Modern History) "A rich study...Saarela sets a new precedent for research about the languages of late imperial China and makes a vital contribution to the international genre of language histories with his biography of the Manchu script and its significance beyond the physical and political domains of the Qing dynasty." (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies) "Ranging widely across China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and western Europe, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu demonstrates convincingly that a form of global philology connected the early modern world." (Peter C. Perdue, Yale University) "Mårten Söderblom Saarela's book is a major achievement in several fields: Altaic linguistics, Manchu studies, Qing intellectual history, Chinese phonology, and European historical linguistics on Asian languages. Manchu linguistics in particular has never been treated in such a comprehensive manner, and this book lays a solid foundation for further study." (Nicola di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study)