Capital, Empire, Letter: Romanization in Late Qing China

Capital, Empire, Letter: Romanization in Late Qing China Uluğ Kuzuoğlu Twentieth-Century China, Volume 46, Number 3, October 2021, pp. 223-246 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tcc.2021.0022 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/806080 [ Access provided at 7 Oct 2021 23:14 GMT from Washington University in St. Louis ] CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA UlUğ KUzUoğlU This article explores the history of the Roman alphabet in the late Qing empire (1637–1912). Following the opening of treaty ports to Western capital in the midnineteenth century, missionaries and diplomats who entered the Qing territories began to romanize various local languages. By the end of the nineteenth century, more than 20 languages had been romanized, which had an indelible impact on the politics of language and writing in China in the following decades. This article examines the origins of romanization in nineteenth-century China by situating it within a larger history of capitalism, imperialism, and the industrial printing press. Exploring the ideological and material dimensions of alphabetization, it contends that the Roman alphabet imposed a new epistemology of writing on China, which generated novel contradictions regarding language politics––contradictions that are still extant today. Keywords: language reforms, missionaries, printing, romanization, script reforms, Thomas Francis Wade The second half of the nineteenth century was a new era in the history of Chinese scripts and languages. Over the course of 50 years, from circa 1850 to 1900, dozens of Christian texts were translated into more than 20 local Chinese languages and printed in the Roman alphabet by Protestant missionaries. Most of these texts have been lost, but the remaining ones along with a plethora of debates preserved in contemporary periodicals constitute the subject of this article. Romanization of Chinese languages offers a gateway into the colonial mechanics of making local cultures legible for imperial and evangelical missions in the age of capital and raises larger questions that this article responds to, such as: Why did Protestant missionaries begin romanizing Chinese languages in the mid-nineteenth century, after almost 50 years of translation and print work in Chinese characters? How was this movement linked to other missionary romanizations undertaken in the rest of the colonial and semicolonial world? And what can this nineteenth-century episode tell us about the intersection between imperialism, capitalism, and the Roman alphabet? While some scholars, most notably John DeFrancis, tried to establish a direct link between seventeenth-century Jesuit romanizations, nineteenth-century Protestant ones, and Twentieth-Century China 46, no. 3, 223–246, October 2021 © 2021 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc. 224 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU twentieth-century Chinese language and script reforms,1 this article proposes to rethink script invention within historically specific technological and ideological contexts. In particular, it historicizes nineteenth-century Chinese romanizations within a global moment of missionary romanizations that were as much an extension of Western imperialism as of industrialized print. Nineteenth-century missionaries’ interface with non-Western languages and cultures was indeed shaped by the technology of movable metal type and the iron handpress, invented around 1800. The missionaries were the primary harbingers of industrialized printing presses in the non-Western world, and they were particularly transparent about their search for economy in printing and distributing evangelical information. Their penchant to romanize languages followed a similar economic logic: the majority of the missionaries believed that a phonetic alphabet, in particular the Roman alphabet, was the most efficient way to represent a given speech, purportedly economizing the transmission of knowledge from missionary presses to the minds of the local populace. The romanization of non-Western languages at large, and Chinese languages in particular, was intertwined with nineteenth-century print technologies and the industrial logic of efficiency that was embedded in them. The first wave of romanization started with missionary-printers who spread industrial print technologies to South and Southeast Asia in the early nineteenth century, concomitant with British imperial outreach. At this early stage, as the first section explores, missionaries were preliminarily romanizing local languages in an effort to publish bilingual texts and dictionaries. In doing so, they were primarily interested in technologizing the local scripts themselves, bringing them into the industrial age of print in an effort to disseminate Western knowledge among local cultures. The technologization of the Chinese script along with other non-Western scripts such as Arabic and Devanagari was thus an immediate product of what I would like to call “typographical evangelism.” Starting in the 1850s, however, bilingual texts and metal types in local scripts were complemented with an effort to directly romanize local languages in China, especially those that were spoken in the coastal regions and were not represented via alphabets, such as Cantonese, Hokkien, and Shanghainese among others. The turn from technologizing local scripts to romanizing them, as I explore in the second section, stemmed from a greater colonial romanization movement taking place synchronically across the world, as exemplified by the Alphabetical Conferences organized by missionaries in London in 1854. Advanced typographic machines combined with new anatomical theories of languages compelled leading missionaries to reckon the Roman alphabet to be the inherently superior technology to represent any given speech. The Roman alphabet turned from an auxiliary technology of making populations legible into a civilizing instrument of disciplining the labor of writing and thinking in the colonized world. The missionaries until then, and some even afterwards, were in awe of the Chinese script itself. Indeed, Robert Morrison (1782–1834), the first missionary from the London Missionary Society to land in China, put the Chinese writing system above the alphabet in the following words in 1815: “To convey ideas to the mind, by the eye, the Chinese Language answers all the purposes of a written medium, as well as the Alphabetic system of the West, and perhaps in some respects, better. As sight is quicker than hearing, so ideas reaching the mind by the eye, are quicker, more striking, and vivid, than those which reach 1 John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 14–28. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 225 the mind by the slower progress of sound.... The Chinese fine writing…darts upon the mind with a vivid flash; a force and a beauty, of which Alphabetic Language is incapable.”2 In spite of their romantic admiration for the Chinese written culture, the missionaries found the Chinese characters to be inexpedient for their evangelical projects in the following decades. Concomitant with increased Western colonial expansion in the world, the missionaries’ engagement with non-Western scripts at large and Chinese script in particular underwent significant transformations. After the Nanjing Treaty in 1842, missionaries were granted permission to reside in the Chinese treaty ports, where they were directly exposed to Chinese linguistic diversity. Informed by the globally circulating information on non-Western languages and scripts, the missionaries in China began to consider the Roman alphabet, and in a few cases other phonetic scripts, as the most efficient way to print and evangelize in myriad local languages. For the rest of the century, they romanized almost two dozen different tongues in China, from the Ningbo dialect to Cantonese to Hakka, creating an alternative information circuit that was alphabet- and speech-based. Even though romanized publications exclusively consisted of biblical excerpts, rather than translated literature or primers in local languages, this was the first time in Chinese history that linguistic diversity found expression on printed paper. The missionaries were the leading proponents of alphabetized multilingual representation in China. Despite an undeniable link between Euro-American imperialism and the romanization of Chinese languages in the nineteenth century, it would be incorrect to collapse the two into one, for (semi)colonialism in China operated at different linguistic registers. Evangelical missionaries sought to reenact the Pentecost in China and were invested in different languages spoken throughout the empire, although they mostly limited their romanizations to the coastal regions where their operations were the most intensive. For Western imperial officials in the treaty ports, on the other hand, standardization of correspondence for diplomatic and bureaucratic matters was of utmost importance. Missionaries and the East India Company’s officials and later the colonial officials in treaty ports frequently crossed paths, particularly because the missionaries possessed much-needed linguistic capital, but the alliance between them was pragmatic and functional and never unequivocal. Sometimes the two joined hands in printing dictionaries and in diplomatic matters; other times, they collided. The third section examines this collision through the British diplomat Thomas Francis Wade (1818–1895) and his romanization of Mandarin as spoken in Beijing, first printed in 1859. A revised version of Wade’s romanization, known as Wade-Giles, became the international standard for transcribing Mandarin in the English-speaking world from the 1890s to the 1980s, when the pinyin of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) gradually replaced it. From its invention in the 1850s to its internationalization in the 1890s, however, there was a constant tension between Wade’s romanization and the missionaries’ romanizations, because the former did not meet the requirements for the latter’s multilingual vision of China. Wade’s romanization only represented Beijing Mandarin, and it was incapable of representing not only other languages but even the regional differences within Mandarin. By the 1870s, as a counterweight to Wade, the missionaries were striving to invent a common Roman alphabet that could represent all the vernacular variants of Mandarin, which could potentially expand the geographical dissemination of biblical knowledge and buttress the missionaries’ own status. 2 Robert Morrison, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language in Three Parts, vol. 1, part 1 (Macao: Printed at the Honorable East India Company Press, 1815), xi. 226 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU The missionary effort to romanize Chinese languages continued into the early twentieth century, until it was superseded by the Chinese script reformers themselves, who embraced the alphabetization movement for their own purposes. By the early years of the Republican era (1912–1949), the missionaries’ century-long engagement with Chinese scripts and languages had come to an end, as the Chinese reformers championed the movement in their search for modernity in a colonial world order. The linguistic tensions that grew out of missionary romanizations, however, continued to haunt Chinese reformers during the decades to come, as multilingual and monolingual visions of the nation-state frequently clashed. The history of nineteenth-century romanization in China was thus the first episode in the long history of integrating Chinese languages into a global alphabetical order, the contradictory outcomes of which are still observed today. Typographical evangelism The invention of the iron handpress in Britain around 1800 was a critical moment in the world history of print. As an extension of the industrial mechanization underway in Britain, Charles Mahon, Third Earl Stanhope (1753–1816), a mathematician and engineer whose interests ranged from printing treatises about the paddles of steamboats to inventing mechanical instruments to perform logical operations, engineered the iron handpress with the aid of an ironsmith. The main drive behind the mechanization of the handpress was the rationalization of printing, which would reduce the need for skilled labor by supplementing it with sophisticated mechanical actions. Stanhope introduced a system of compound levers and a screw motion that raised the platen after the pull, which significantly increased pressure at the moment of impression.3 As the British printer Charles Frederick Partington claimed, the Stanhope press introduced novelties that the wooden press was not capable of generating. First of all, as opposed to the platen of a wooden press, which was only half the size of the sheet and required two motions to print an entire sheet, the new platen was made large enough to print a whole sheet of paper at once. This was a technique that the iron framing enabled, for “[it] will not admit of any yielding, as the wood always does, and indeed is intended to do, the head being often packed up with elastic substances, such as pasteboard, or even cork.”4 The iron handpress changed the bodily labor of printing as well, as it required less effort in the pull, and was “capable of all the force of the common press, with, perhaps, a tenth of the labour.”5 Stanhope, in a philanthropic spirit, never patented his invention, and improved versions soon flooded the market. The physical properties of iron handpresses, moreover, 3 Colin Clair, A History of Printing in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 209–10; Horace Hart, Charles Earl Stanhope and the Oxford University Press, part 7 of Montagu Burrows, ed., Collectanea, 3rd ser. (Oxford: Printed for the Oxford Historical Society at the Clarendon Press, 1896; repr. London: Printing Historical Society, 1966), 366, 399. 4 Charles Frederick Partington, The Printers’ Complete Guide (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1825), 265–66, quoted in Richard-Gabriel Rummonds, Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and Iron Handpress (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press / London: British Library, 2004), vol. 1, 111–12. 5 Thomas Curson Hansard, Typographia (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1825), 637–47, quoted in Rummonds, Nineteenth-Century Printing Practices and Iron Handpress, vol. 1, 115. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 227 enabled long-distance transportation as well. Composed mainly of a large iron piece and minimal moving parts, the new handpresses could endure the conditions of global transport in ways that wooden presses with multiple moving parts could not. By the 1820s, the iron handpresses were used in a variety of places from New York to Hawai‘i, the Malay Peninsula, and the Middle East, and nineteenth-century missionaries were central to the global dissemination of this technology. As the historian Nile Green argued, the globalization of industrialized printing grew hand in hand with the evangelical missionary societies formed in London, and later in other places in Europe and the United States, whose biblical projects relied on the use of sturdy printing machines. The London Missionary Society (1795), the Church Missionary Society (1799), and the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) slowly entered into the South Asian and East Asian markets by importing these technologies to new centers of missionary printing. Starting in 1815 and 1816, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the German Missionary Society also started exporting these machines to the lands of the “heathen.”6 As a matter of fact, at the request of the ABCFM missionary Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801–1861), a Washington iron handpress and an Albion iron handpress, improved versions of the Stanhope press, were sent to Canton in the 1830s.7 In the following decades, other missionary societies imported similar iron handpresses to China, along with other newly developing print technologies.8 The industrial age of metal gradually changed the entire landscape of printing and typography in the world. Not only presses but also types were cut out of metal, and the missionaries positioned themselves as the leading typographers who commissioned the casting of new metal types for Roman as well as non-Roman scripts. During the early nineteenth century, when missionaries from recently established evangelical societies reached South, Southeast, and East Asia, they encountered local languages with a variety of scripts. At this initial stage, when the missionaries started to produce bilingual texts including dictionaries, adapting local scripts to new technologies was an integral part of the “communication of intellectual, moral, and religious truth, in the most inviting form.”9 Some of the earliest metal types were indeed invented at the Baptist Mission Press’s type foundry in Calcutta, where various types for Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Oriya, Burman, and Gujarati scripts, among others, were cast in the 1820s. The first partial font for Chinese characters was also cut by Baptist missionaries at Serampore, only 15 miles from Calcutta, between 1805 and 1810, as part of the greater missionary business. Later on, the Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman commented on the new technology with the following words: “The Chinese characters in this work are printed from Metal Types.… While they add greatly to the legibility if not to the beauty of the Chinese characters, their being movable enables us to print…any Chinese work 6 Nile Green, “Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution: Industrialization, Evangelicalism, and the Birth of Printing in Early Qajar Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 3 (2010): 411. 7 Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), 42. 8 Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 66–83. 9 “Advertisement,” in Specimen of Printing Types in Use at the Baptist Mission Press (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1826). 228 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU whatever, at an expense too by no means immoderate.”10 Compared to woodblock printing, which required the manufacture of entirely new sets of wooden blocks for each text, the movable metal types allowed the missionaries to combine discrete characters at will, increasing both productivity and durability. The most famous and most widely used font in Chinese characters was undertaken by Peter Perring Thoms (d. 1851) in 1815. A printer and translator for the East India Company, Thoms brought movable type from London to Macao to be of service to Dr. Robert Morrison (1782–1834). Morrison was the first missionary in Canton dispatched by the London Missionary Society and the first to publish a dictionary of the Chinese language there, with funds granted by the East India Company; for the final publication of A Dictionary of the Chinese Language in six volumes, which took eight years—from 1815 to 1823—to complete, the East India Company spent $60,000.11 Comparing his lexicographical masterpiece to the earlier dictionaries printed in the West, Morrison noted that his work contained around 40,000 Chinese characters that closely followed the Kangxi Dictionary, an imperially commissioned dictionary originally published in 1716.12 The publication of this dictionary was made possible with the two Chinese fonts that Thoms cut with the assistance of Chinese and Portuguese workers.13 In the following decades, Thoms’s assistants managed to cut more than 200,000 characters, which proved to be the most useful for missionary publications, for they were the most durable. Massive and expensive, the large fonts contained about 46,000 characters (each about an inch square) and filled 60 cases; the small fonts, which were used the most, contained around 22,000 characters and were held in 16 cases.14 Besides Morrison’s, two more dictionaries that were as significant in the history of Chinese lexicography as Morrison’s were printed with these fonts. One was Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language by Walter Henry Medhurst (1796–1857), published in 1837 in Macao at the East India Company’s Press.15 After the Opium Wars, the governor of Hong Kong, Henry Pottinger, offered these fonts to Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884), who used them to print his own A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect in Canton.16 Apart from these dictionaries, about 20 other English-Chinese works were printed with these fonts until December 1856, when the fonts were destroyed along with the factories in Canton during the Arrow War (1856–1860).17 10 Joshua Marshman, Elements of Chinese Grammar (Serampore, India: Mission Press, 1814), xvi, quoted in Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 34. Another partial font cut in Malacca in 1814 followed Marshman’s font. 11 Samuel Wells Williams, A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language: Arranged According to the Wu-fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1874), v. 12 Morrison, A Dictionary of the Chinese Language, x. 13 Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 36. 14 William Milne, A Retrospect of the First Ten Years of the Protestant Mission (Malacca: Printed at the Anglo-Chinese Press, 1820), 238; Frederick Wells Williams, The Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, LL.D.: Missionary, Diplomatist, Sinologue (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1972 [1889]), 244. 15 Water Henry Medhurst, Dictionary of the Hok-këèn Dialect of the Chinese Language (Macao: Printed at the Honorable East India Company’s Press, 1832). 16 Frederick Wells Williams, Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, 47–63. 17 Samuel W. Williams, “Movable Types,” Chinese Recorder 6 (1875): 26; Frederick Wells Williams, Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, 244–45. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 229 As the number of missionary publications proliferated, the calculation of cost and labor became a primary concern for the missionaries. The aforementioned Walter Henry Medhurst offered the most detailed analysis of printing technologies at the time. Also a missionary from the London Missionary Society, Medhurst was a pioneer in the industrialization of not only Chinese but also Arabic-lettered printing in Malacca, where he was managing the printing operations from 1817 onward.18 Comparing xylography, lithography, and letterpress in printing Chinese characters, Medhurst concluded in 1838 that letterpress, in connection with the developing technology of the iron press, was the most favorable technology in the long run.19 As another missionary, John C. Lowrie in Canton, pointed out, “We live in an era of metal and steam … hence, I am strongly in favor of giving full and fair trial to our Chinese metal type.”20 In the following decades, the Chinese metal type enjoyed the endorsement it received from the missionaries. Until the First Opium War (1839–1842), the missionaries were not allowed to establish print shops within the territory of the Qing empire, and neither were they allowed to seek the help of native Chinese woodcutters to cut metal types. Some, like Elijah Coleman, who imported the iron handpress to Canton in the 1830s, were working there illegally, but the risks were indeed too high. Three Chinese punch-cutters working for Samuel Williams in Canton were imprisoned in 1834 and branded as traitors (漢奸 hanjian) for working with foreigners.21 These constraints forced the missionaries to print in Macao, Malacca, Penang, Batavia, Serampore, Singapore, and Calcutta, where they could still seek the labor of Chinese migrants and cast types for missionary publications.22 The missionaries during this period followed the outsider’s strategy of striving to disseminate Western knowledge in China via composing and printing in Chinese characters.23 The missionary engagement with Chinese languages and publications changed significantly after the Qing’s defeat in the Opium Wars and the subsequent opening of the treaty ports. Following decades of partial and distant access, the Qing market was finally open to missionaries along with Western capital. As missionaries began setting up new presses in the treaty ports, they transitioned from outsiders to insiders and seized the coveted opportunity to intensify evangelization through print. Even more importantly, with direct access to local languages, the missionaries’ commitment to print shifted from publishing solely in Chinese characters to representing local tongues through the typographic medium of the alphabet. Thus started the missionary romanization movement in the 1850s. 18 Green, “Persian Print and the Stanhope Revolution,” 411. 19 Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 31–32. 20 Letter dated April 5, 1843, quoted in Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai, 32. 21 Samuel W. Williams, “Movable Types,” 26–27. 22 K. T. Wu, “The Development of Typography in China during the Nineteenth Century,” Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 22, no. 3 (July 1952): 294–96; Samuel W. Williams, “Movable Types”; Ibrahim bin Ismail, “Samuel Dyer and His Contributions to Chinese Typography,” Library Quarterly 54, no. 2 (April 1984): 162; Evan Davies, Memoir of the Rev. Samuel Dyer: Sixteen Years Missionary to the Chinese (London: John Snow, 1846), 131–41. 23 Michael C. Lazich, “The Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China: The Canton Era Information Strategy,” in Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff, eds., Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 305–27; Songchuan Chen, “An Information War Waged by Merchants and Missionaries at Canton: The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834–1839,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (2012): 1705–35. 230 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU romanizing china The increase in the number of missionary presses in China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the rest of the world in the 1840s and 1850s gave a renewed impetus to the romanization of local languages, which until then had been only partially undertaken by the missionaries in their bilingual publications. The movement had indeed started in the late eighteenth century with the Orientalist Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who laid the ground for the theory of Indo-European languages and sought to write Indian languages in the Roman alphabet, as a strategy to assimilate the local cultures of information into an emerging imperial scholarly tradition that employed the Roman letters to accumulate knowledge and power. Only in the 1840s and 1850s, however, did the movement turn into a missionary project to romanize local languages in an effort to open a new channel of communication between the missionaries and the myriad local linguistic communities, whose languages were described as “diseases” by some of the leading missionary linguists, such as Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900).24 Max Müller was not only a prominent Orientalist but also a major proponent of romanization at large and an authoritative voice in a series of Alphabetical Conferences that took place in London in 1854. The purpose of these conferences was to determine a common alphabet for the Indian subcontinent––one that could be exported to other colonial and semicolonial places as well. Müller penned his Proposals for a Missionary Alphabet for the conferences, which proposed a theoretical justification for romanizing languages. In his long treatise on the merits of the alphabet, he adopted an anatomical approach to the problem of linguistic transcription. Sounds, noted Müller, were guttural, palatal, labial, lingual, and dental, produced through varying physiological assemblies of the speech organs.25 As such, “how can these principal sounds,” he asked, “be expressed by us in writing and printing, so as to preserve their physiological Value, without creating typographical Difficulties?”26 According to Müller, the solution to all problems was the creation of a Physiological Alphabet. Müller’s theory of the alphabet offered a new formula to define the “value” of letters through bodily and typographical mechanics. Speech, according to this formulation, was an act of physiological labor, mechanically produced by organs, and each letter of the so-called Physiological Alphabet was the inscription of a given physiological form. As such, Müller’s Alphabet was not only the transcription of organ clusters but also a powerful mechanism to tame the organs of the speech, to give them the “correct” shape, to discipline the labor of speech, and cure the disease of the mind. The theory of the alphabet proposed by Müller was not only physiological but deeply ideological. Formulated at a critical moment, Proposals for a Missionary Alphabet naturalized both the colonial ideology of British imperialism and the linguistic ideology 24 On the history of missionary language debates in British India, see Robert A. Yelle, Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 33–70. 25 Max Müller, Proposal for a Missionary Alphabet (London: Printed by A. and G. A. Spottiswoode, 1854), 16. 26 Müller, Proposal for a Missionary Alphabet, 26. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 231 of valorizing speech under a capitalist world order that was transforming labor relations not only in the production of commodities but also of information, language, and thought. The industrial printing press was indeed a powerful medium to justify both colonialism and capitalism, for the mechanical precision it allowed turned “efficiency,” the core value of industrialism, into a normative marker of superiority. The missionary use of the alphabet in the nineteenth century followed a similar industrial logic that put efficiency in the production of information and the rectification of thought at the forefront. That efficiency, many of the alphabetizers believed, could only be achieved with a phonetic alphabet. The Physiological Alphabet for Müller was nothing other than the Roman alphabet, but for other scientists in the British Empire, an even more efficient system of phonetic writing could be invented. Alexander Melville Bell’s Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics or Self-Interpreting Physiological Letters (Figure 1), published in 1867, was one such system. The mechanics of speech were Bell’s main concern (and apparently a concern for the rest of his family, for his son Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone). The lungs operated as the “bellows,” and the larynx, the pharynx, the soft palate, the nose, and the mouth were modifiers of breath in what Alexander Melville Bell called “the speaking machine.”27 While sharing the same principles with that of the missionaries, Bell’s project argued for a new form of universalism that was based on the physiology of the sound and that could be represented by any graphic sign, not necessarily the Roman alphabet. He thus made the world of writing and speech purely physiological, the bodily occurrence that was common to all humankind. Bell’s universalism was also intertwined with colonialism and evangelism. Visible Speech not only promised “the speedy diffusion of the language of a mother country throughout the most widely separated COLONIES” but also, now that the foundation was laid, that “the Linguistic Temple of Human Unity may at some time, however distant the day, be raised upon the earth.” After some more thinking on the issue, Bell argued that this linguistic temple was none other than English, underscoring the imperialist visions of English language that ensued throughout the twentieth century. The implementation of his Visible Speech, especially in China and India with their diverse languages and dialects, could turn them into “a great social and political engine.”28 Bell’s imperial vision resonated with other missionaries, too. Earlier in 1844, the missionaries from the Morrison Education Society in Macao had already begun to instruct the locals in English “in order to awaken the Chinese mind from its long hibernation, and to give it an impulse that shall cause it to go forth in search of truth in a manner comporting with the high destiny of man.… Let them be taught to read and write and speak in the English language,” noted the missionaries’ report, “and their minds [will] at once [be] liberated.”29 While the dissemination of the language of empire was a part of the drive for missionary romanizations in China, it was not necessarily the primary catalyst. The missionaries were foremost of all invested in carrying the biblical message to the minds of the people in the most “efficient” way possible. The coastal provinces, where the number of missionary societies had been growing since the 1850s, were home to speakers of languages 27 Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1867), 11. 28 Bell, Visible Speech, 21–22. 29 “Report of the Morrison Education Society,” Chinese Repository 13 (1844): 637–38. 232 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU Figure 1a. Diagrams from Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1867), 38. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA Figure 1b. A table from Bell, Visible Speech, 39. 233 234 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU without phonetic writing systems. Even though the missionaries in China never called their alphabets the Physiological Alphabet, their phonetic projects did carry with them the conceit that a phonetic alphabet was the most expedient medium of writing, one that economized both printing and the transmission of biblical knowledge. With the global missionary force behind alphabetization and the ubiquitous presence of the missionaries in China, the invention of phonetic scripts became central to missionary work. Until the 1850s, romanization of Chinese languages was only partially undertaken, given the limitations of access, and there was not an agreed-upon romanization method. What is striking about the three aforementioned dictionaries by Morrison, Medhurst, and Williams is that each one was on a different, mutually unintelligible, language: Mandarin as spoken in Nanjing, Hokkien, and Cantonese, respectively.30 As historians of language reforms recurrently point out, languages spoken in China were not unified under Mandarin until the twentieth century. As such, the linguistic landscape of imperial China was composed of heterogenous regional languages, sometimes referred to as “topolects” (fangyan 方言). Far from being “dialects” of Mandarin, these regional languages and their vernacular permutations had separate syntaxes, grammars, and lexicons.31 As Shang Wei’s work on late imperial vernacular literature has demonstrated, in contrast to the European or South Asian experience, the power of a common writing system in imperial China curtailed the use of regional languages, and as such they played “no formal role in administration and [made] minimal entrance into writing.”32 The missionaries in the nineteenth century were thus engaging an information order in which the power of the nonalphabetical writing system was paramount instead of the spoken word, which made it particularly challenging to devise a Roman alphabet that could accommodate all linguistic differences in China and be embraced by the local populations themselves. Robert Morrison’s romanization of the Nanjing Mandarin was the first attempt to devise a common alphabet for all Chinese languages. And for the English-speaking missionaries, it was the most authoritative one until Morrison’s death in 1834, as Elijah C. Bridgman, Walter Henry Medhurst, and other missionary printers and lexicographers followed Morrison’s lead in transcribing Cantonese and Hokkien. But dissent started to emerge right after his death. By the early 1830s, as missionary romanization was already becoming a worldwide phenomenon, the primary voice of the missionaries in China, Chinese Repository, was closely following the efforts to romanize the “barbarous” languages of the Americas, British India, Siam, the Philippines, and other territories colonized by the West, some of which did not have a writing system to begin with.33 Chinese was different. It did have a well-established writing system that the missionaries greatly admired, but its complexity, they believed, was inexpedient for evangelical purposes. Romanization was necessary both for training missionaries in speaking 30 Walter H. Medhurst and Samuel W. Williams used the vernacular dictionaries Shiwuyin and Fenyun cuoyao, respectively, to transcribe Hokkien and Cantonese into the Roman alphabet. 31 Victor Mair, What is a Chinese “Dialect/Topolect”? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms (Philadelphia: Department of Oriental Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1991). 32 Shang Wei, “Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China,” in Benjamin Elman, ed., Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 294. 33 Lorrin Andrews, “Remarks on the Hawaiian Dialect of the Polynesian Language; Prepared for the Repository,” Chinese Repository 5, no. 1 (May 1836): 12–21. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 235 local languages and for spreading the Word among the Chinese. Morrison’s system of transcription satisfied neither. First, it lacked diacritics to designate the tones, and, second, the letters were not capable of accommodating linguistic differences. To standardize orthography for all languages in China, Chinese Repository proudly announced in 1836 that the missionaries “have been in a great degree influenced by the efforts now making in India to render general…the adoption of one uniform system of orthography, suited to represent clearly and definitely the sounds of words in the Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and their cognate languages.”34 The reference was obvious: Chinese Repository wanted to follow the orthography invented by the Orientalist Sir William Jones in India.35 Samuel Williams, a prominent missionary printer and lexicographer in China, was the greatest opponent of Morrison’s romanization and the major supporter of the orthography of William Jones. “The character 快 [kuai],” noted Williams, “has been written kuai, c’oai, kouai, kwae, and kw’ai; 生 [sheng] has been written xam, seng, sàng, and sang; 妝 [zhuang] is choam, tchouand, choand, chwang, and chwáng.”36 All for the same sound. With the so-called “dialects,” the problems only proliferated: eull, olr, ul, ulh, lh, urh, ‘rh, í, e, lur, nge, ngí, je, and jí were some of the ways employed by different authors to transcribe the character 而 [er] in different dialects. Standardization, especially for a missionary printer, was central to building a foundation for Western sinology. Starting in 1841 with Elijah C. Bridgman’s Chinese Chrestomathy, Williams’s own Early Lessons in Chinese in Canton Dialect, and Aesop’s Fables in Hokkien, William Jones’s orthography made a headway into Cantonese and Hokkien, and in 1844 into Nanjing Mandarin as well with Williams’s An English and Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect. Starting in the 1850s, the problems of orthographic standardization were even more pronounced, as an increased number of missionaries ventured into new languages and assigned new phonetic values to letters, considering Jones’s scheme to be insufficient. Instead of printing the scriptures in Chinese characters, the missionaries after the Opium Wars had a clear aim to bring the alphabet—the metaphor not only for Christianity but for the Western civilization at large—to the illiterate in their own tongues. Between 1851 and 1911, biblical teachings were published in close to 20 different languages in China, as I will explain shortly. For some missionaries, the Roman alphabet was not the only choice for transcribing Chinese languages. In 1852, when missionary romanization was still in its infancy for local languages, missionaries in Shanghai voiced their dissatisfaction with the Roman alphabet, for the letters did not conform with Chinese “habits.” In the words of Tarleton Perry Crawford, the missionaries “realiz[ed] the impossibility of expressing correctly all the various sounds of the dialect by means of our alphabet, and [saw] its utter want of adaptation to the Chinese pen and habits of writing.”37 Those habits were indeed shaped by the material practices surrounding literary production that involved the instruments 34 “System of Orthography for Chinese Words,” Chinese Repository 5, no. 1 (May 1836): 12–21. 35 William Jones, “The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus, delivered 2d of February, 1786,” in The Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 1 (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799), 19–34. 36 Samuel W. Williams, An English and Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect (Macao: Printed at the Office of the Chinese Repository, 1844), iv. 37 L. S. Foster, Fifty Years in China: An Eventful Memoir of Tarleton Perry Crawford, D.D. (Nashville, TN: Bayless-Pullen, 1909), 354–55. Emphasis mine. 236 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU of writing and the architecture of composing. The strokes of a Chinese brush ran down the page vertically and the columns followed one another from right to left, as opposed to the horizontal and left-to-right direction of writing in the Roman alphabet. The socalled “efficiency” of alphabetical letters, in other words, imposed a new techno-spatial architecture on the page that ran counter to established habits of the mind and the hand. Tarleton P. Crawford attended to this problem immediately. Born and raised in the US state of Kentucky, Crawford was appointed as a missionary to China by the Southern Baptist Convention, and he reached Shanghai with his wife Martha Foster Crawford in 1852, when senior missionaries were trying to devise a phonetic system for Shanghainese. By then, the Chinese dictionaries published in different languages had already shown that the Chinese characters were pronounced through a combination of an initial and a final sound, traditionally known as fanqie (反切). Shanghai missionaries thus tried to create a system constructed on a simpler syllabic method that could designate a sign for initials and another sign for finals, instead of relying on the abundant letters of Roman alphabet. Aware of the limitations of the Chinese brush, missionaries were also keen to assimilate their system into the native culture of writing. Inspired by this work, Crawford started working on a system of his own, and “aided by a native teacher of excellent ear and penmanship,”38 he invented a complete system without tone marks. Each sound was written by a perpendicular line, on the left of which stood the initial, and on the right the final. According to Crawford’s own notes, other missionaries started using his system as well, and 100–200 native Shanghainese were taught to read it in a few years. The first blow to his system, however, was struck in 1863, when Crawford was posted to Deng County in present-day Henan. He tried to apply his phonetic system to the local dialect in Deng County, but tone marks proved to be too difficult to manage.39 It was only in the late 1880s, when romanization was enjoying its heyday, that he returned to his invention, decided to incorporate the tones into the signs by way of showing them with hooks to the right or left, and presented it to the missionary community as an alternative to the Roman alphabet (Figure 2).40 Crawford did not leave a detailed explanation behind, so it is hard to understand the system’s linguistic convenience. But even if it were perfect in every stroke, it is not difficult to see its lack of appeal among the missionary community. In order to print the signs, new fonts were necessary along with new funds to cast them. Printing had never been easy for the missionaries. Even the Roman alphabet, although in theory it facilitated the production and distribution of the scriptures in local tongues, generated a plethora of problems. One big issue with the Roman alphabet was its nonstandard use. In spite of Samuel Williams’s attention to the standardization of Jones’s orthography for Chinese languages, missions were working independently of one another in the second half of the nineteenth century. Just like the debates over the standardization of terminology—what was the correct translation of “God”: xin (心) or shangdi (上帝)?41—the Roman alphabet was far from standard in publications of the scriptures in local tongues. 38 Foster, Fifty Years in China, 357. 39 Foster, Fifty Years in China, 357–59. 40 T. P. Crawford, “Phonetic Symbols for Writing the Dialects of China,” Chinese Recorder 19 (March 1888): 109. 41 S. Wells Williams, “The Controversy Among the Protestant Missionaries on the Proper Translation of the Words God and Spirit into Chinese,” Bibliotheca Sacra 35 (1878): 732–78. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 237 Figure 2. “Crawford’s Syllabary.” L. S. Foster, Fifty Years in China: An Eventful Memoir of Tarleton Perry Crawford, D.D. (Nashville, TN: Bayless-Pullen, 1909), 361. The lack of consensus on the phonetic values of letters was symptomatic of the fragmented and often competing nature of the missions. At a more practical level, however, it posed financial and material difficulties for printing. As late as 1890, when there was still no consensus over romanization, Hudson Taylor of the China Inland Mission noted the cost of matrices for special letters. In the romanized system for the Ningbo dialect, for instance, there were four extra consonants designated by diacritic marks. Hudson remarked that the cost of the little type needed just for those four letters equaled the remainder of the font!42 Given the difficulties with the Roman alphabet itself, a non42 Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1890), 371. 238 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU Roman phonetic system like Crawford’s was a hopeless endeavor, no matter how well attuned it was to the Chinese brush. Funds could not be secured even for the “Standard Alphabet” fonts of Karl Richard Lepsius, which the Prussian Egyptologist had devised as a uniform European orthography for all languages in the world, despite the personal interest of Samuel Williams in the fonts.43 And later, in 1893, J. A. Silsby’s shorthand for Shanghainese faced the same fate.44 The belief in the power of the alphabet ran so deep that the missionaries rarely questioned the fundamental premises of romanization, even after facing the material and habitual contradictions it posed. Because they were so profoundly committed to the evangelical ideal of reaching the communities in their own tongues, they did not recognize that their commitment was predicated on the specifically Western historical experience of vernacular printing. Not taking into account the historically distinct conditions under which Chinese languages and the writing system interacted with one another, missionary alphabetization manifested nothing less than a conceited effort to replicate European history in China. The constant wave of problems they encountered did not stem from missionary incompetence but from the vanity of alphabetical universalism. Meanwhile, missionary romanization took off, albeit in a decentralized manner. From the 1850s onward, thousands of publications came out of the missionary printing presses in Macao, Canton, Shanghai, local mission presses in other cities, and, in some cases, Glasgow and Berlin. Languages spoken in the coastal stretch from Beijing to Guangdong, where missionary work was the densest, were romanized one after another, and the scriptures were printed with the funds from the British and Foreign Bible Society, China Inland Mission, and American Bible Society.45 The first religious publication in romanized languages came out in Ningbo, a hub of missionary activities, in 1851. The New Testament in the Ningbo dialect was for the most part romanized and published between 1851 and 1861 (Figure 3).46 And in the following years about 20 more local languages were romanized, from Shanghainese to Hakka to Zhongjia.47 The quick escalation in the number of romanized languages was good news for evangelization but bad for standardization. In 1874, Williams was still complaining about the confusion generated by the diversity of spellings for the same character.48 By then, the impossibility of devising one common alphabet for all languages in China had already become clear. The linguistically rich environment of the southeastern provinces was particularly problematic. As one missionary from Fujian put it very graphically: 43 William Lobscheid, English and Chinese Dictionary: With Punti and Mandarin Pronunciation (Hong Kong: Daily Press Office, 1866), 88. 44 John A. Silsby, “Phonetic Representation of Chinese Sounds,” Chinese Recorder 24 (October 1893): 472–79. There was also another phonetic system created by Adam Grainger through the use of native Chinese characters, but I have not been able to locate this source. Records of the Second Triennial Meeting of the Educational Association of China (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission, 1896), 145–46. 45 John R. Hykes, Translations of the Scriptures into the Languages of China and Her Dependencies (New York: American Bible Society, 1916), 12–36. 46 Marshall Broomhall, The Chinese Empire: A General and Missionary Survey (London: Morgan and Scott, China Inland Mission, 1907), 397. 47 For a list of all romanizations, see, Broomhall, Chinese Empire, 371–418; Hykes, Translations of the Scriptures. 48 Samuel Wells Williams, Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language, xix. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 239 Figure 3. The Gospel of Matthew in Ningbo dialect. Ah-lah kyiu-cü Yiæ-su-go Sing-yi tsiao-shü Môt‛æ djün Foh-ing shü [Jesus our savior’s New Testament Gospel of Matthew] (Ningbo: 1853), title page and p. 1. Courtesy of the American Bible Society Library and Archives. But what a Babel of brogues, and dialects there is among those wild mountains! A native can hardly pass the limits of his own village but his speech will betray him. The tones are the most unstable elements. Consonants, and even vowels have limits and laws of mutations, and though these are somewhat vague they cannot be wholly disregarded. But the tones seem utterly lawless. They shoot up to the sky, they plunge into the bowels of the earth, they stiffen straight out, they double up and twist about; they sing, cry, whine, groan, scold, plead; here, are musically plaintive; there, are gruff and overbearing.49 The “lawless” sounds of southeastern China aside, the missionaries believed Mandarin could still be represented with one alphabet despite regional differences. In other words, even if Amoy dialect, Cantonese, and Mandarin could not be written with the same signs, Mandarin spoken in Beijing, Shandong, Nanjing, Sichuan, Hubei, and other regions could theoretically be unified with one single orthography. From 1870 to the turn of the century, the hitherto separate missionary societies unified in an effort to devise one single alphabet capable of representing all vernacular Mandarin tongues. The major instigator for this sudden coalition among all missionaries was in fact a nonmissionary romanization project, which turned out to be the major contender among all romanizations: Wade’s romanization. 49 J. E. Walker, “Shao-wu in Fuh-Kien; A Country Station,” Chinese Recorder 9 (September– October 1878): 349. 240 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU Thomas Francis wade and alphabeT The search For a sTandard Thomas Francis Wade’s romanization, first published in 1859 in Peking Syllabary, was not part of the missionary movement. It might even be speculated that Wade invented his system partly as a response to the missionaries’ search for a universal alphabet. His diplomatic vision, in general, did not overlap with the demands of the religious missions. First dispatched to the Qing empire in 1842, Wade started learning Cantonese and acted as an official interpreter until becoming a part of the official British diplomatic corps in 1845. Serving in Nanjing, Hong Kong, and Beijing, he was instrumental in the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858 and the Chefoo (Yantai) Convention in 1876, which opened new treaty ports in the Qing. Knighted in 1875, he retired in 1883 and became the first Professor of Chinese at Cambridge in 1888.50 After he died in 1895, his romanization became the international standard for the English-dominated world and was in use until the PRC’s pinyin romanization became widely accepted at the end of the twentieth century. As a pragmatic statesman, Wade was looking for a practical romanization scheme that would enable the foreign speakers of Chinese to converse with diplomats and bureaucrats in the official medium. The choice of Beijing Mandarin, or as he put it, “the Dialect of Peking,” reflected linguistic realpolitik more than anything else. “It is forty years,” wrote Wade in his preface, “since Dr. Morrison predicted that [the Dialect of Peking] would corrupt the general language of the Empire, and we make bold to say that this prediction has been to a great extent fulfilled.”51 Thomas Taylor Meadows, an interpreter at the British Consulate in Canton, addressed this problem in his account of Guangdong in 1847. Of 231 officials in Guangdong, 74 were from Beijing, and 15 of them came from other regions of Zhili Province, of which Beijing was one part. Meadows noted that one-half of all the officials from different ranks that he spoke with conversed in “pure Pekin colloquial” and that the language of the others approached it, but that “not one used the pronunciation given as the mandarin by Morrison, and by Mr. Medhurst, in their dictionaries, and as the court dialect by Mr. Williams (with a different orthography), in his vocabulary.”52 Missionary orthographies, in other words, did not meet the need for representing Beijing Mandarin. Meadows was indeed the first to point out the inconvenience of William Jones’s orthography for Beijing Mandarin, and thus he invented his own in 1847, which preceded Wade’s.53 From a practical perspective, Wade’s romanization was just one of many romanization schemes for vernacular languages, but the difference between his orthography and 50 James C. Cooley Jr., T. F. Wade in China: A Pioneer in Global Diplomacy, 1842–1882 (Leiden: Brill, 1981); James L. Hevia, “An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game: Thomas Francis Wade in China,” Late Imperial China 16, no. 2 (December 1995): 1–22. 51 Thomas Francis Wade, The Peking Syllabary, Being a Collection of the Characters Representing the Dialect of Peking; Arranged after a New Orthography in Syllabic Classes, According to the Four Tones; Designed to Accompany the Hsin Ching Lu, or Book of Experiments (Hong Kong: 1859), unpaginated, preface to Hsin Ching Lu. 52 Thomas Taylor Meadows, Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (London: Wm. H. Allen, 1847), 44. Emphasis original. 53 Meadows, Desultory Notes, 55–58. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 241 missionary orthographies was not simply a technical issue. Wade and the missionaries had conflicts of interest, and when Wade openly advocated against missionary activities in China in 1868, coincidentally overlapping with the publication of his popular book Self-Taught Language Lessons, his romanization came under attack by the missionaries. Wade’s objective was to keep the international order as little disturbed as possible, and Peking Syllabary reflected his attitude to international politics: one standard transcription was all that was necessary to ensure unambiguous communication between foreigners and Chinese officials. He never endorsed the British and American missionaries’ project to romanize all languages and dialects, nor did he ever mention studying the missionary dictionaries, except one by the Portuguese missionary Joaquim Affonso Gonçalves, Diccionario China-Portuguez, published in Macao in 1833. According to his own narrative, Wade started working on Beijing Mandarin in 1847 in Canton with Ying Longtian (應龍田 ?–1861), who may have been a Manchu bannerman, and the source he consulted was Gonçalves’s Diccionario. Finding Gonçalves’s tones inaccurate, Ying Longtian volunteered to phonetically rearrange the dictionary.54 When Wade finalized his own orthography in 1859, he followed in Ying’s linguistic and Meadows’s diplomatic footsteps, and published it as Peking Syllabary. The period during which Wade conceived and published Peking Syllabary bears significance, for it coincided with the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), one of the bloodiest civil wars in world history. The ubiquitous role of Christianity as well as the ambiguous role of missionaries in it cast doubt on the future alliance between the Christian mission and foreign diplomacy concerning China.55 The absence of missionaries in Wade’s narrative might have signaled his unease with the missionary enterprise during these years of uncertainty. Even after the Taiping Rebellion came to an end, Wade was still wary of missionary involvement in international politics. Wade took precautions against missionary influence as soon as he could. His first diplomatic action against them was in 1868, when the Tianjin Treaty of 1858 was going through revisions. Article Eight of the Tianjin Treaty stated that the missionaries were entitled to the protection of the Chinese authorities and that, as long as they did not offend the laws, their missions could not be interfered with. When the treaty was revised 10 years later, the Chambers of Commerce demanded more concessions on trade, and on April 30, 1868, William Lockart of the London Missionary Society claimed that the British missionaries should also be given the right to purchase land and reside anywhere in China. But Thomas Wade was not at all pleased with the demand. In December 1868, he proposed a change to this article: 54 Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 69. It is hard to tell to what extent Wade’s romanization was informed by the Chinese textbook for learning the Manchu language, Qingwen zhiyao (manju gisun-i oyonggo jorin-i bithe). For a speculative account, which Kaske’s discussion of the subject seems to verify, see Pär Cassel, “‘Spelling Like a State’: Some Thoughts on the Manchu Origins of the Wade-Giles System,” in Lars Peter Laamann, ed., “The Manchus and Tartar Identity in the Chinese Empire,” special issue, Central Asiatic Journal 58, nos. 1/2 (2015), 37–47. 55 Stephen Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2012). 242 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU If this privilege be conceded to the merchant it will, of course, accrue equally to the Missionary; but I believe their cause will, for a time, be better without it; and I am entirely opposed to any privileges being conceded distinctively to the missionary body. Lord Elgin had serious doubts about the expediency of inserting an Article upon the subject of the Christian Religion at all in the Treaty, his belief, if I am not mistaken, being that, while the enforcement of Treaty stipulations affecting the propagation of Christianity was offensive to our feelings and outraging to the feelings of any nation which might be compelled to accept such conditions, the cause of Christianity itself would be advanced by nothing so little as political support.… But to one and all of the class [literati] the appearance in China of Christian Missionaries, backed by the power or prestige of their respective governments, must be simply as offensive as an invasion, similarly supported, of Buddhist or Confucian teachers would be to ourselves.56 Questioning not only the geography of evangelization but also the expediency of including the propagation of Christianity in the treaty struck at the heart of missionary politics. In a critique of Wade’s view of Christian missions, John Shaw Burdon, a British missionary, noted that “in a word, Mr. Wade wants accomplished schoolmasters and professors rather than preachers of religion, and scientific missions with a Christian tendency rather than Christian missions with an educational tendency.”57 Wade’s Roman letters were his politics in material form—they were deliberately unlike those of the missionaries. Wade’s popularity steadily increased after the publication of Self-Taught Language Lessons in 1867, and his romanization eventually culminated in the Western standard for transcribing Chinese. Missionary romanization after 1867 was in many ways a response to Wade’s Peking Syllabary. Missionaries were not only typographical evangelists but also evangelical vernacularists. For them, each vernacular language deserved equal representation in print. They rejected Wade’s romanization not simply because of his antimissionary remarks but because it exterminated the possibility of representing local tongues. Wade’s romanization was by definition unadaptable to any Mandarin-speaking region in the southern and central Chinese provinces, because it was not capable of representing the fifth tone (入聲 rusheng), also known as the “checked tone” or “entering tone.” Unheard in Beijing Mandarin, which only had four tones, the fifth tone was a constitutive part of speech in other regions. The fifth tone designated a glottal stop, and the missionaries preferred using the letter h at the end of a word to designate it. Wade, on the other hand, was using h as an integral part of his four-tone Beijing pronunciation. Wade’s shih, for instance, could stand for lion (獅 shih in the first tone), stone (石 shih in the second tone), history (史 shih in the third tone), or city (市 shih in the fourth tone).58 When the use of h was not reserved for the fifth tone, it only caused confusion for the southern and western vernaculars. China 56 Quoted in Timothy Richard, “The Political Status of Missionaries and Native Christians in China,” Chinese Recorder 16 (March–April 1885): 96. 57 J. S. Burdon, “Mr. Wade’s Views on the Missionary Question,” Chinese Recorder 4 (1871– 1872): 249. 58 Wade, Peking Syllabary, 55. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 243 Inland Mission openly challenged Wade in 1867 by devising a new orthography, using h only for the fifth tone. In the following decades, the China Inland Mission’s orthography was deliberately used by other missionaries, and missionaries continued using it even after Wade’s romanization became the de facto standard in international communication and literature. Most famously, the Mathews dictionary of 1931 used China Inland Mission’s romanization along with Wade’s romanization.59 From the 1870s onward, while a variety of vernacular romanizations were underway, some missionaries decided to disregard Wade altogether. John Chalmers of the London Missionary Society, author of English-Cantonese dictionaries, suggested that the romanization of Morrison or Williams should be universally applied to the missionary enterprise, “leaving others to follow Wade.”60 The lack of a standard system was diminishing the missionaries’ chances of ever superseding Wade, but reaching a consensus was not a walk in the park. If the romanization of Morrison or Williams were adopted, what would happen to the China Inland Mission’s romanization, which was already used to print the Scriptures in vernacular tongues? The issue was addressed in 1877 at the General Conference of Protestant Missionaries in China, convened in Shanghai, and a committee was formed to arrange a uniform system for representing Chinese sounds with Roman letters, consisting of vernacularists such as the compiler of the Amoy dialect dictionary Carstairs Douglas, the Shanghainese translator of the scriptures Samuel I. J. Schereschewsky, the author of Shanghainese grammar books Joseph Edkins, the lexicographer of Cantonese John Chalmers, and others.61 Yet there was no considerable progress before the next General Conference in 1890.62 When the issue was raised again, some of the missionaries voiced their opinions against romanization at large. Among the Hakka, for instance, a missionary noted that it was easier for the native people to learn the Bible through Chinese characters written colloquially. Another missionary from Sichuan echoed this observation and reported that “if one knew no Chinese characters and wished only to learn to read the Bible, perhaps the romanized might be the easiest, but most know some elementary expressions from the classical and from the Mandarin (colloquial) in Chinese characters.”63 The majority of the missionaries, however, were in favor of romanization, and, by the end of the conference, a permanent Committee on Mandarin Romanization was formed under the Education Association of China.64 59 Frederick W. Baller, Mandarin Primer (Shanghai: China Inland Mission and American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1894), v; Frederick W. Baller, An Analytical Chinese-English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission (Shanghai: China Inland Mission and American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1900). I have not been able to locate the original publication of Robert Henry Mathews, A Chinese-English Dictionary Compiled for the China Inland Mission (Shanghai: China Inland Mission and Presbyterian Mission Press, 1931), but it is possible that he built on Baller’s dictionary. 60 John Chalmers, “Correspondence: Orthography of Chinese Words,” Chinese Recorder 7 (November–December 1876): 443; Records of the Second Triennial Meeting, 143. 61 Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1877), 17–18. John Shaw Burdon, Chauncey Goodrich, and R. Lechler were the other committee members. 62 One exception was the devising of the Union System of Romanization by missionaries in Shanghai in 1889. J. A. Silsby, “Shanghai Romanization,” Chinese Recorder 34 (August 1903): 401–2. 63 Records of the General Conference (1890), 94–95. 64 Silsby, “Mandarin Romanization,” 347. 244 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU During the next decade, the missionaries continued to lose ground to Wade’s romanization. Wade’s reputation had increased considerably with his appointment as Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, and his contacts within diplomatic circles were certainly not against the adoption of his romanization, which, even in the words of the missionaries, “represent[ed] Pekingese so admirably.”65 By the 1890s, especially after Herbert Giles standardized its use in his A Chinese-English Dictionary, Wade’s romanization system, thereafter referred to as Wade-Giles, was used in consulates, Foreign Customs, and predominantly in the Postal Service.66 Despite the wide use of Wade-Giles outside of China and for international communications, however, romanization in China was still unsettled. Even Giles had combined Wade’s romanization with missionary romanizations in his famed dictionary, and he accompanied each character with its pronunciations in the Cantonese, Hakka, Fuzhou, Wenzhou, Ningbo, Beijing, mid-China, Yangzhou, and Sichuan “dialects” and even showed the fifth tone for southern Mandarin vernaculars.67 In 1904, after more than a decade of work, the Committee on Mandarin Romanization finally published The Standard System of Mandarin Romanization, which the missionaries hoped would establish a standard alphabet for all Mandarin vernaculars. The Standard System fixed the phonetic values of letters through a mix of Wade, Giles, Williams, China Inland Mission, Mateer, and Baller romanizations. It was potentially revolutionary, for it had the capacity to put an end to almost 100 years of Western debates about standardizing romanization. There followed immediately a primer, the gospels of Matthew and Mark, and Pu tung wen bao, a monthly periodical published in Standard Romanized Mandarin.68 The central idea of The Standard System was to use the same letters for different phonetic values. For instance, the character 江 (jiang in pinyin) was transcribed as giang, in which the first letter g could accommodate the phonetic values of the northern dj and the southern k. In some cases, two spellings were provided for one character: 希 and 西 were both pronounced as hsi (xi in pinyin) in Beijing, but the latter was si in Nanjing; the system retained both pronunciations.69 From 1904 to 1907, the most purchased book of the Educational Association, at least according to the missionary reports, was The Standard System.70 Its success in the eyes of the missionaries aside, The Standard System in fact became obsolete almost as soon as it came out of the press—not because Wade-Giles reigned supreme but because Chinese scholars repurposed the phoneticization movement and championed it in a very short period of time. In the 1890s, as a response to the disadvantaged position of the Qing empire within a colonial and increasingly alphabetical world order, especially following the establishment of the telegraph and Morse code, Chinese scholars from various backgrounds began devising phonetic scripts for China. Supported 65 Baller, Mandarin Primer, iv. 66 Lane J. Harris, “‘A Lasting Boon to All’: A Note on the Postal Romanization of Place Names, 1896–1949,” Twentieth-Century China 34, no. 1 (November 2008): 98–99. A Chinese-English Dictionary was compiled and printed in 1892, and Giles expanded and reprinted it in 1912. 67 Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese-English Dictionary (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1912), xii. He also added Korean, Japanese, and “Annamese” to his list of pronunciations. 68 J. A. Silsby, “Reform in Etiquette Called For,” Chinese Recorder 36 (March 1905): 144. 69 Silsby, “Reform in Etiquette Called For,” 145. 70 “Our Most Popular Books,” Chinese Recorder 38 (August 1907): 437. CAPITAL, EMPIRE, LETTER: ROMANIZATION IN LATE QING CHINA 245 by leading intellectuals such as Tan Sitong (譚嗣同 1865–1898), Liang Qichao (梁啟超 1873–1929), and Zhang Taiyan (章太炎 1869–1936), the movement quickly acquired a native character. Resisting the Western romanization efforts, most of the script reformers instead called for the invention of non-Roman phonetic syllabaries for a modernizing China. During the last two decades of the Qing, the missionaries’ endeavor to devise The Standard System was thus overshadowed by the power of the Chinese phoneticization movement itself. From the turn of the century onward, as prominent Chinese linguists and reformers began to struggle with an alphabetical modernity, Chinese alphabetization ceased to be a debate simply among the missionaries and Western diplomats and instead turned into an existential issue for the future of China as a nation-state. conclUsion: The alphabeT and i Ts legacies From typographical evangelism to Wade’s letters, Chinese romanization in the nineteenth century was the product of an emergent colonial and international order. Embedded within both the technological conditions of industrial print and the ideological matrix of colonialism and capitalism, romanization was representative of the fundamental contradictions that China had to confront while it was forced into a globalizing economic, bureaucratic, and linguistic order, especially after the opening of the treaty ports. At the level of information and communication, an alphabetical interface with language stood at the center of this order, which was predicated on and grew out of a specifically Western historical experience. The power of industrial print did not merely lie in its capacity to increase the output and circulation of information. It was in part through the mechanical precision of the typographic medium that empires justified alphabetical colonialism. From Max Müller’s Physiological Alphabet to missionary romanizations, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of an imperial ideology that turned the alphabet into a universal measure for efficiency and progress. As opposed to earlier decades in which missionary printers strived to technologize local scripts themselves, from the 1850s onward, the Roman alphabet reigned supreme in the colonial and semicolonial world. Alphabetical imperialism was not without its own contradictions. For the missionaries themselves, the evangelical ideal was to replicate the European Protestant experience and bring the Word to the minds of the people via their own vernacular languages. For colonial bureaucrats like Thomas Francis Wade, however, alphabetical pedagogy had to target diplomatic communications based on one language only, Mandarin as spoken in Beijing. From the 1860s to the 1890s, as the Qing’s pace of integration into a colonial world order intensified, the paradoxical tension between the two visions occupied the minds of all alphabetizers. The question was not whether China needed an alphabet or not but how many Chinese languages an alphabet was supposed represent. Beijing Mandarin only? Or all Mandarin vernaculars spoken throughout the empire? Or all Chinese languages, Mandarin and non-Mandarin alike? Alphabet was alien to an imperial literary culture that thrived on using Chinese characters.71 In fact, alphabetical imperialism did not penetrate the minds of late Qing 71 It should be noted that there were other phonetic scripts in the Qing empire, including Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Chagatay. But the Western actors’ alphabetization efforts were mostly contained within the provinces where Chinese characters were the main medium of communication. 246 ULUĞ KUZUOĞLU intellectuals until the 1890s, when the universalism espoused by the alphabetical medium was bolstered even more with the expansion of new communications technologies, such as Morse code, and an international order composed of nation-states and separate national languages. Starting then, phonetic representation of languages became a central concern for the late Qing and Republican reformers themselves, and in many ways, their experiences mirrored those of the missionaries and Western diplomats. Reckoning the materiality of the alphabetical medium, they engaged not only in print technologies and telegraphic communications but also in issues surrounding literacy and language politics. Especially from the 1910s to the 1950s, the invention of a Chinese phonetic script became so critical that the conflict between monolingual and multilingual imaginations of the Chinese nation-state turned out to be pivotal for the making of a Chinese modernity. Although the debates came to a temporary halt in 1958 with the invention of pinyin, which represents only Mandarin as the national language, conflicting language politics within and outside of the PRC have persisted ever since. Looking back on a longer history of romanization, it seems that the repercussions of alphabetical imperialism continue to define what it means to speak and be Chinese in the world, even today. acKnowledgmenTs The research for this article was undertaken with support from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and from the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Dissertation Completion Fellowship. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Twentieth-Century China for their comments. noTes on conTribUTor Uluğ Kuzuoğlu is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history in the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis. He is completing a book manuscript on the history of Chinese script reforms, tentatively titled “Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age.” Correspondence to: Uluğ Kuzuoğlu. Email: ulugkuzuoglu@wustl.edu.