Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Ph.D. (2015), is an Asia specialist at Jonathan A. Hill, Bookseller. He previously worked as an associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. He is a student of the cultural and political history of language in China.

• AcknowledgmentsList of Figures and IllustrationConventionsVIntroduction1 The How and Why of Manchu2 Manchu Documents, Books, and Three Reasons for Writing this Study1 Background: The Manchu Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Qianlong Period1 The Early History of Written Manchu2 The Manchu Language in China Proper3 Scholarly Efforts to Describe the Manchu Language and Qianlong’s Project to Change it2 Public Inscriptions and Manchu Language Reform in the Early Qianlong Reign1 Background: Manchu Steles and Public Inscriptions2 Public Inscriptions and Qianlong-era Language Reform3 The Names for Temples, Altars, and Gates4 The Inscription at Fragrance of the Teaching Temple5 Conclusion3 Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace Memorial System1 Manchu and Chinese Linguistic Regimes2 Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace Memorial System3 The Experiment of Bilingual Palace Memorials4 Language Choice and Secrecy5 The Limits of Linguistic Compartmentalization: Lateral Communications6 Conclusion4 Reading Manchu Palace Memorials Against the Idea of Manchu Decline1 The Idea of Manchu Decline2 Palace Memorials from Letters to Bureaucratic Summaries3 How did Qianlong Understand Authorship? The Examples of Kuilin, Kinglin, and Guncukdar4 Problems Related to the Composite Nature of Memorials5 Conclusion5 Imperial Corrections of Language Errors in Manchu Palace Memorials1 Corrections before Qianlong2 Qianlong’s Corrections of Manchu Usage3 Criticism of Language and of the Writer4 Reprimands for Mistakes in Languages other than Manchu5 Conclusion6 Philological Scholarship in Manchu: Linguistic Studies on the Pre-conquest Archive1 What was “Evidential Learning”?2 Manchu “Evidential Learning”3 Manchu Philology before Qianlong: The Translation of Confucian Literature4 The Pre-conquest Archive and the Early Veritable Records5 The Book of Characters Without Dots and Circles6 The Book of Old Manchu Phrases Lifted from the Veritable Records7 Footnotes to Early Qing History: The Grand Secretariat Copy of the Old Manchu Archive1 Editing the Old Archive2 The Yellow Sticky Notes3 The Philology of Manchu before Manchu: Multilingual Historical Glossaries4 ConclusionConclusion: Manchu after Qianlong1 Manchu as a Language of Court Scholarship2 Statistics on Manchu Document Production3 A New Role for Manchu?4 Survival as an Administrative Language in Multilingual Contexts5 Socio-political Change and Linguistic Change6 Manchu’s Survival as a Vernacular Language7 Limited use of Manchu as a Spoken Language in Nineteenth-century Beijing8 The Decline of ManchuBibliographyArchives and Databases UsedWorks CitedIndex