Abstract
T his amazement at modern Western science came from Feng Kuei-fen (1809–74) in 1860, a man who had seen firsthand the military strength of the West while taking refuge in Shanghai during the last days of the Taiping Rebellion. A native of Suzhou, the city somewhere in between Nanjing and Shanghai, Feng had obtained jinshi [“presented scholar,” comparable to the doctoral degree in the West] through the imperial examination (administered in the capital every three years) in 1840, the year the British warships sailed half way around the world to attack Guangzhou and other coastal cities in retaliation for the massive amounts of opium China had confiscated from British traders and dumped into the sea.
The world today is not to be compared with that of the Three Dynasties (of ancient China) … Now the globe is ninety-thousand li around, and every spot may be reached by ships or wheeled vehicles … According to what is listed on the maps by the Westerners, there are not less than one hundred countries. From these one hundred countries, only the books of Italy, at the end of the Ming dynasty, and now those of England have been translated into Chinese, altogether several tens of books. Those which expound the doctrine of Jesus are generally vulgar, not worth mentioning. Apart from these, Western books on mathematics, mechanics, optics, light, chemistry, and other subjects contain the best principles of the natural sciences. In the books on geography, the mountains, rivers, strategic points, customs, and native products of the hundred countries are fully listed. Most of this information is beyond the reach of our people … 1 [ellipses added]
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Notes
Ssu-Yu Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West (New York: Atheneum, 1966), 51–52.
Xie Tianzhen, et al., Zhongxifanyi jianshi [A Brief History of Translation in China and the West] (Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2009), 46.
André Lefevere, “Chinese and Western Thinking on Translation,” in Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (Bristol, UK: Multicultural Matters, 1998),13–14. Some scholars believe that when Buddhism began to arrive in China shortly before the Christian era, Confucianism had enjoyed supremacy for well over a hundred years and the teachings of Laozi (the sixth century, bc) and Zhuangzi (369 BC-286 BC) were going very strong too. See Wing-Tsit Chan, “Transformation of Buddhism in China,” Philosophy East and West 7, no. 3–4 (Oct. 1957-Jan. 1958): 107–16.
For a fuller account of China’s early encounters with “Western” texts see Shen Fuwei, Cultural Flow Between China and Outside World Throughout History (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1996), 100–13, and Xie Tianzhen, A Brief History of Translation, 141–48.
Kenneth J. Saunders, “Buddhism in China: A Historical Sketch,” The Journal of Religion 3, no. 2 (Mar. 1923): 157–69.
C. P. Fitzgerald, China: A Short Cultural History (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 473–74.
Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1990), 38–40.
Jessie Gregory Lutz, Opening China: Karl F. A. Gutzlaff and Sino-Western Relations, 1827–1852 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eredmans Publishing Co., 2008), 202–14.
Much of the factual information for this section and the section immediately following draws from Shen Fuwei, Cultural Flow, 298–318; Xie Tianzhen, et al., A Brief History of Translation, 19–139; and Meng Chaoyi and Li Zaidao, eds., Zhongguo wenxue fanyi shi [History of Chinese Translation Literature] (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2005), 13–38.
A treaty was signed in Tianjin in June 1858 at the end of the Second Opium War (1856–60). With the victorious France, United Kingdom, Russia, and United States as signatories, this treaty opened 11 more Chinese ports to the foreign powers, allowed foreign legations in Beijing, the capital, and lifted the ban on Christian missionary activity and opium trade. See Article L of “Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between Her Majesty the Queen of the Great Britain and Ireland and the Emperor of China,” in William Frederick Mayers, Treaties between the Empire of China and Foreign Powers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 11–20.
Talal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology,” in Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 21–24.
Wang Kefei and Fan Shouyi, “Translation in China: A Motivating Force,” Meta: Journal des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal 44, no. 1 (1999): 19.
Known as the Chinese Educational Commission and organized by Yung Wing (1828–1912), the first Chinese student in the United States, who had studied and graduated from Yale University, the program sent 120 young Chinese students to study in the New England region beginning in 1872. Bowing to mounting pressure from conservative forces in China, who, among other things, were alarmed by reports of how fast these young boys were losing their Chinese-ness and becoming Westernized, the Educational Mission was disbanded in 1881. Many of the students who returned became China’s first generation of Western-trained scientists and engineers and made marked contributions to China’s self-strengthening endeavors during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Some, such as Zhan Tianyou (1861–1919), who became the chief engineer of the first railway ever built in China, are still remembered today as national heroes. See Teresa Brawner Bevis and Christopher J. Lucas, International Students in American Colleges and Universities: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 42–53.
Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 48.
This section of discussion draws from Mao Guotao and Hu Hui, “Li Hongzhang wei zhongguo jindai hua de diyi ren” [Li Hongzhang as the First Mastermind of China’s Modernization: Toward a Reappraisal of Li Hongzhang and the Self-Strengthening Movement], Nanchang jiaoyu xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Nanchang College of Education] 23, no. 1 (2008): 4–28, and Ma Xuelei, “Chongping Li Hongzhang” [Reappraising Li Hongzhang], Lanzhou jiaoyu xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Lanzhou Institute of Education] 26, no. 1 (Feb. 2010): 20–26.
For a fuller and more vivid account, see Chapters 1–5 of Jonathan D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Norton, 1996), 3–55.
Xie Tianzhen, et al., A Brief History of Translation, 71–77. Some scholars believe that frequent reference to “the fabled insularity of the Chinese” doesn’t square with the fact that many Chinese did respond to the information brought them by the European missionaries. See David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West: 1500–1800 (2009), 17.
David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West: 1500– 1800, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009), 20–21.
For a fuller discussion of Hong Xiuquan’s cultural and ideological confusions and contradictions, see Philip A. Khun, “Origins of a Taiping Vision,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19, no. 3 (July 1977): 350–66, and Chen Yongkui, “Bai shangdi jiao zhongguo hua tedian fenxi: jianping taiping tianguo de fankong xianxiang” [On the Chinese Characteristics of the God-Worship Society and the Anti-Confucius Predisposition of the Heavenly Peace Uprising], Huanggang shifan xueyuan xuebao [Journal of Huanggang Normal University] 29, no. 4 (Aug. 2009): 104–07.
Eugene P. Boardman, “Christian Influence upon the Ideology of Taiping Uprising,” The Far Eastern Quarterly 10, no. 2 (Feb. 1951): 115–24.
This discussion on the introduction of Aesop’s fables in China and their intertextual links with classic Chinese fables draws from Mei Xiaojuan, “Kuang yi de fanyi yu zhongxi yuyan de zaoqi jiechu” [The Translation of Kuan Yi and the Early Encounter between Western and Chinese Fables]. Nanjing ligong daxue xuebao: shehui kexue ban [Journal of Nanjing University of Science and Technology: Social Sciences Edition] 21, no. 5 (Oct. 2008): 71–74.
For the purpose of this book I am adapting from George Tyler Townsend’s Aesop’s Fables: Complete, Original Translation from Greek ([1887; Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2007], available at http://www.forgottenbooks.org/) instead of using the original texts circulating at the time—which is all but impossible to find—and Trigault and Zhang Geng’s renditions in classic Chinese available in Mei Xiaojuan, “The Translation of Kuan Yi,” 71–74.
Which, literary historians today believe, is the penname for Jiang Qizhang, an editor for the first literary magazine in China entitled Yinghuang suoji [World Miscellany]. See Zhou Guoyi, “Diyi bu fanyi xiaoshuo xinxi xiantan yishi kaozheng” [An Inquiry into the Authorship of the First Novel Translation Night and Morning Idle Talk], Zhonghua wenshi luncong [Chinese Literary History Forum] 4 (2008): 285–348. In the preface to the book, Hermit Li Shao made it clear that his purpose of translating political novels was to spread Western ideas of democracy because there was no way to save and strengthen China other than serious political reforms. He was probably the first one to have put forth such a “radical” idea at the time.
Ge Guilu, Zhongying wenxue guanxi biannian shi [The Annals of Sino-British Literary Relations] (Shanghai: Shanghai Sanlian Press, 2004), 87–116.
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© 2012 Shouhua Qi
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Qi, S. (2012). The Rude Awakening (1840s–1896). In: Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011947_1
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