Jonathan Spence Lecture: “When Minds Met: China And The West In The Seventeenth Century”

[wushijiao]

I'd encourage people to read Spence's lecture about the interaction of Chinese intellectuals and foreigners in the 17th century. One paragraph, between A Mr. Shen - who was from Nankin and well versed in Latin, and the famous scientist Robert Boyle stand out:

We do know, from an entry that Boyle made in his work diary, that the letter of introduction had its hoped for effect, and that Boyle and Shen did meet and talk. Brief though the surviving evidence may be, the work diary shows us Boyle’s curiosity at work. Boyle reports that he asked Shen—identified simply as “the Chinois I was visited by yesterday”—two sets of questions. The first question for Shen was whether in China the number of Chinese written characters that an educated man needed to know was really as huge as it was rumored to be. Shen replied “that the number of their characters was really incredibly great, & that he himself was master of between 10 and 12 thousand of them.” The second question Boyle asked was how many Chinese people really knew such a range of characters. Shen responded by explaining the differences that distinguished classical Chinese from colloquial. “The language of the Mandarins (or Magistrates)” he told Boyle, “was very different from that of the Common people, & also from that of the clergy, and some of the Literati: insomuch that few understood the mandarins Language, or could make any use of it; tho, for his part, he had made some progress in it.” Boyle and Shen must have had this conversation about language in Latin, since despite Hyde’s cautionary remarks we can tell from Shen’s extant letters that he could read and write Latin comfortably. Boyle, for his part, was widely known to be a talented linguist, and Hyde wrote in a letter to a colleague that “Mr. Boyle besides his skill in the modern Languages, was excellently versed in the reading and speaking of the Latin tongue which I have heard him do to my admiration.”

This kind of shows that: 1) many of the questions about Chinese (how many Characters does one need to know?) seem to be perennial, and 2) it confirms, to some extent, the notion that classical Chinese was a good medium of interaction.

Anyway, the speech, and Spence's work in general, is certainly worth a read.