In this timely and refreshing work, Mårten Söderblom Saarela argues that in early modern Eurasia, the study of the Manchu script occupied a significant and heretofore underappreciated role in the production of knowledge about the study of language generally, and knowledge of the Qing specifically. The types of knowledge produced differed based on access to Manchu materials and Manchu speakers—the latter depending on proximity to Beijing—and individual authors’ scholarly and linguistic backgrounds. Söderblom Saarela convincingly demonstrates his thesis through an ordering and analysis of sources on Manchu linguistics, literature, and printing from across the Eurasian continent. The Early Modern Travels of Manchu should be of interest to readers interested in global history, Qing studies, and the history of science.
In recent decades, particularly in North America and China, an increasing number of scholars have studied Manchu to access previously underutilized sources for the study of early modern East Asia and the Qing Empire. The basic assertion made by students of Manchu today is that previous ideas about the Sinicization of the Manchus were overstated. Manchu materials are not merely translations of Chinese materials (and, of course, translations are themselves important texts worthy of scholarly attention), and Manchu-language materials reveal unique and important aspects of Manchu rule. In other words, the argument goes, Manchu is important because scholars can learn more about the Qing world through it. This concept, that the study of Manchu is important as a tool to reach another type of knowledge about the Qing, is exactly the topic of The Early Modern Travels of Manchu and makes this book a timely contribution to the field of Qing studies. By shifting the question from “what can Manchu materials tell us about the Qing” to “why and how did people learn to read Manchu in the first place,” Söderblom Saarela opens new avenues of analysis and inquiry about the place of Manchu in global history.
The chapters are ordered chronologically, extending outward in distance from the northeastern origin of the Manchu script to Beijing and North China, then moving to south China, Japan, and Europeans in Europe and in the Qing Empire, Korea, Russia, and France. The logic of the organization imparts a temporal and geographic depth to the book and suggests the “travels” referred to in the title: the script was conveyed on paper, carried by people who traveled to all these places. As Söderblom Saarela points out, the chapters can be read out of order as separate essays, but for those of us reading cover to cover, the organization provides a logical flow to the book.
The world, or at least Eurasia, engaged Manchu through the script. This was true even within the Qing Empire because many people with access to books and education had little or no access to native Manchu teachers. The dizzying lists of Manchu syllables that make up early pedagogical materials were intended as memorization aids to be used with a teacher, but scholars outside Beijing had to decipher these texts without native speaker explanations. As a result, some of the earliest pioneers of Manchu studies were non-Manchu Qing subjects who wanted to understand more about the people ruling them, and their access point was the Manchu script. To cite one example, the southern Chinese scholar Xiong Shibo (fl. 1642–1713) interpreted the Manchu script through a comparison of two Manchu syllabaries with the Siddhaṃ abugida, the Roman alphabet, and Chinese phonological tables. Despite the paucity of Manchu resources at Xiong's disposal and no familiarity with Mongolian, he developed a strikingly accurate tabular notation of Manchu based on comparative phonological analysis.
Scholars across Eurasia pursued similar but never identical methods of interpreting the Manchu script in the following centuries, developing new ways of analyzing and understanding the Manchu script through phonology, orthography, and other sciences such as typesetting. Much of the knowledge produced about Manchu began with elementary students of the language trying to make sense of the script, and therefore the linguistic background of the students played an important role in interpretation: the Japanese scholar Ogyū Sorai modeled his analysis of Manchu on Japanese kana tables, and the Prussian scholar Gottlieb Bayer created an alphabetical table of Manchu.
Söderblom Saarela supports his exposition with an extremely rich base of sources such as multilingual Qing dictionaries; Manchu pedagogical materials; linguistic treatises on Manchu in Chinese, Japanese, European languages, and Korean; and archival materials. The multilingual source base highlights the global depth of the early modern study of Manchu. Söderblom Saarela deftly pivots between introducing the authors of the works he analyzes, the content and conclusions of their writings, and the legacy, parallels, or echoes of that knowledge in other places and times. Through his analysis, the intellectual and transnational genealogies of Manchu syllabaries, categorical Manchu-Mongol dictionaries, and linguistic treatises in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and European languages are ordered for the reader. As such, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu is less a history of the Manchu script and more a history of the printed materials that conveyed the Manchu script.
This is a novel and important intellectual contribution that draws the focus of the study of Manchu away from the Qing court and reorients it globally, with a strong sense of physical books moving around the world. Students of Manchu today would be remiss not to read this work, but there is a much wider audience for this book among historians of early modern world history, intellectual history, and anyone interested in the history of language and the attendant science of linguistics.
