Spanning three centuries from the late Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing empire, this work reconsiders the cultural history of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries compiled between 1605 and 1912. Based on a corpus of 81 dictionaries, Feifei Shen combines historical research with metalexicographic analysis, regarding bilingual dictionaries as linguistic, pedagogical, material, and cultural representations. Rather than treating these dictionaries as collections of lexical equivalents, the author places them in relation to missionary activity, French Sinology, Chinese language education, printing technology, and changing forms of cultural exchange between China and France.
This monograph consists of two parts: historical study and metalexicographic analysis. The first part (Chapters 1-6) focuses on historical studies, tracing the origins and the development of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries. Chapter 1 begins with classical traditions of Chinese dictionaries and introduces the early Romanization systems devised by Jesuit missionaries. Matteo Ricci’s Xīzì qíjì (1605) and Nicolas Trigault’s Xīrú ěrmù zī (1626) laid the phonetic foundation for later French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries through the transcription of the pronunciation of Chinese characters using the Latin alphabet.
Chapter 2 then analyzes the gradual shift in the principal lexicographers of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries from missionaries to sinologists, placing this transition in the context of missionary activities, the rise of French Sinology, and the growth of French language education in both missionary and official schools in the late Qing dynasty. The author further identifies three overlapping phases in this evolution: the early phase (1605-1840), closely associated with missionary activities; the middle period (1840-1890), which reflected the impact of the opening of Chinese ports and French colonial expansion; and the late period (1890-1912), when dictionary production expanded rapidly alongside the growth of French Sinology and the expansion of French commercial and diplomatic activities in China.
Chapters 3 and 4 provide a systematic overview of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries through quantitative and typological analysis, classifying the dictionaries into three major types: Mandarin dictionaries, dictionaries of other Chinese Han languages, and dictionaries of non-Han languages. The two chapters further examine how Chinese and French lexicographic traditions jointly shaped the evolution of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the professional backgrounds of 51 lexicographers and the variation of different dictionary types. The author also discusses the contributions of publishers and printing technologies to dictionary production, and highlights the innovations in the typography of Chinese characters, particularly Marcellin Legrand’s separable characters (p. 130), which reduced the number of required punches from 32,000 to 9,000. This discussion indicates that the production and circulation of French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries were driven not only by referential needs but also by material and institutional conditions.
The second part (Chapters 7-12) turns to metalexicographic analysis, examining the paratexts, macrostructures, nomenclatures and microstructures. Chapter 7 explores the dictionaries’ paratexts (p. 141), the textual elements that surround the main entries, which include prefaces, introductions, grammatical overviews, errata, and appendices. While these sections provide readers with background knowledge of Chinese history, customs, and linguistic features, they also vary across dictionaries and historical periods, reflecting changes in the intended readership and the purposes of dictionary compilation.
Chapters 8 and 9 analyze the dictionaries’ macrostructure and nomenclature, comparing the entry organization, information structure, headword selection, and their arrangement. These chapters further examine how dictionary nomenclatures reflect the compilers’ cultural perspectives and historical contexts. Beyond identifying individual differences, the two chapters also demonstrate how shared conventions gradually emerged in the treatment of Chinese characters and their phonetic transcriptions. Twelve specific Chinese characters are further analyzed in Chapter 10. They illustrate how entries encode material culture, spiritual culture, social culture, and linguistic culture. The analysis covers a wide range of themes, including religion, marriage practices, Confucian thought, and imported goods.
Finally, chapters 11 and 12 examine the metalinguistic information and the microstructure, which concern grammatical labels, usage markers, equivalents, examples, paraphrases, citations, and cross-references. These discussions suggest that these dictionaries establish correspondences between French and Chinese words and provide readers with linguistic and cultural information that facilitates the interpretation of meaning and the actual usage of the language.
Feifei Shen’s work convincingly demonstrates that French-Chinese bilingual dictionaries are not merely language reference tools but historical texts that bear witness to centuries of cultural exchange. Her study covers a period which begins with Europeans’ early attempts to transcribe Chinese with a Latin-based phonetic system and ends with the fall of the last imperial dynasty of China. During this period, French missionaries became the most active in China compared to those of other countries. Unlike the strongly pragmatic approach of the American school of “China Studies”, European missionaries investigated China and its languages in a more humanistic perspective. Since the establishment of the Chaire de langues et littératures chinoises et tartares-mandchoues at the Collège de France in 1814, sinologists gradually replaced missionaries as the principal actors in the compilation of French-Chinese dictionaries. The book thus reveals how bilingual dictionaries mediated between French and Chinese, fostering broader intellectual and cultural exchange. However, given the broad scope of the study, some chapters remain primarily descriptive. This opens space for future work to theorize the social conditions of dictionary production, to compare French-Chinese lexicography with bilingual dictionaries in other languages and to model the cultural coding of headword selection. This book offers, nonetheless, a comprehensive account of three centuries of French-Chinese bilingual dictionary evolution and points toward new directions in historical lexicography, missionary linguistics and the study of cross-cultural knowledge transfer.
