Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (27 page)

Mongol control of China did not last much longer. Although Kublai was famous for his civility, his successors were less distinguished. It is worth mentioning the last of the dynasty, Togan Timur (1333-1369), since among much anti-Chinese legislation he passed laws forbidding Chinese to read or write Mongolian. It is evident that a strict racial policy was being followed. One would have expected, by comparison with the Manchu who were to follow much later—or the contemporary, but of course quite unknown, example of the English in Ireland
^*
—that the elite would be passing laws to prevent their own members from taking up the language of the conquered people.

In 1369 Togan Timur and his Mongols ended up chased out by a popular Chinese warlord turned national hero, who established himself as the first Ming emperor. There was then for three centuries no interference by outsiders in the government of China.

Then the Tungus-speaking Jurchen people, now to be known as the Manchus, gained a second chance to dominate China. This invasion was the last permanent penetration of China by speakers of a foreign language.

In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had been reorganised, under two able leaders, and advanced into the northern marches of Chinese territory to establish a capital at Mukden. Then, in 1644, they had the luck to be invited into Beijing as a tactical move in a struggle between two generals contending to replace the Ming. The Manchus took the opportunity to install themselves, styling their new dynasty with the name
Qīng
(
, ‘Pure’), and by 1651 had put down all resistance in the rest of China. Although they came speaking their own language, and it remained an official written language of the Chinese state until the end of the dynasty in 1911, it had died out in speech even at court by the eighteenth century. The language did not survive even in Manchuria itself, a curious victim of its people’s successful takeover of China and its way of life. Today it is only spoken, under the name of Xibo, by the descendants of a detachment of troops dispatched from the Manchurian capital Mukden to Xinjiang in 1764—a north-eastern language now spoken only in the Chinese north-west.

It was into the north that the invaders came, and the Chinese spoken in the north went on to become the standard language for the country. But although the northern dialect underwent significant changes, they can only partly be put down to the particular difficulties that Xiongnu, Tabgach, Jurchen, Mongol or Manchu would have encountered as they tried to get by in Chinese.
^*
There is the interesting fact that Mandarin Chinese can distinguish
wômen
, ‘we (excluding you)’, from
zšnmen
, ‘we (including you)’, just as Mongol and Manchu do; this is an innovation since Middle Chinese. And perhaps one can point to the absence of consonant clusters in modern Chinese, some of which were allowed in Middle Chinese. For example,
sniwər
, ‘appease’, and
t’nwšr
, ‘secure’, have become
sūi
and
tŭo.
Altaic languages cannot abide more than one consonant at the beginning of a syllable.
^†

There are in fact a few written relics of the kind of Chinese that was spoken in one of the intermediate periods before the invaders were absorbed. The thirteenth-century Chinese translation of
The Secret History of the Mongols
is full of Altaic patterns such as postpositions instead of prepositions, verbs following the object, and existential verbs at the end of the sentence, all weird in Chinese, whose basic word order is much more like English:

And there is copious evidence for mixtures of Manchu and Mandarin in the
zî-dì-shū
, ‘Son’s Books’, which are a written record of the narrative entertainment the Manchu enjoyed in their early days in Beijing (1736-96), though they are written more with Chinese word order scattered with Manchu vocabulary.

In northern dialects there is still a tendency for direct objects to occur rather often before the verb, and for
than
-phrases to occur before comparative adjectives, features that might be attributed to Altaic influence. But in general this mixed style of Chinese did not establish itself.
¹⁷
Later generations of invader families picked up Chinese naturally from their Chinese mothers, nurses and schoolmasters; probably the Altaic patterns were just too far opposed to Chinese for any compromise to develop. This is typical enough of Chinese linguistic relations: in general, there are not many loan words in Chinese borrowed from other languages in any direction, and certainly no structural influences;
dú
, ‘calf, does seem to have come from Altaic, characteristically enough since its peoples lived by stockbreeding (cf. Mongol
tuγul
, Manchu
tukšan
, Evenki
tukučən
, all meaning ‘calf), but the many Mongol words that are found in the drama of the Yuan dynasty have since been lost again.
¹⁸

Although Chinese has spent its three and a half millennia almost wholly confined to East Asia, it did put out some feelers across the sea to its south. In the last thousand years, this led to some permanent residence of Chinese abroad; in the last two hundred, partly as a reaction to—or exploitation of—European settlement, serious overseas communities have grown up, which may be significant in the future spread of the language.

The earliest inklings of Chinese in
Nán-yáng
, ‘the Southern Ocean’, as the Chinese called the shores of the South China Sea, are visits of merchants to Tongking (northern Vietnam) in the third century BC.
¹⁹
They were followed up in 111 BC by troops, and China annexed Tongking, along with Nan-yue
^*
(modern Guangxi and Guangdong). China was to hold Tongking for over a thousand years, in fact until AD 938, despite sporadic and increasing resistance. China attempted to assimilate it culturally, with Chinese classics for the local elite, competitive examinations for administrators, and official use of
wényán.
There was Chinese immigration, and some married into Vietnam’s princely families, providing many later leaders. Mahayana Buddhism, introduced under the Tang dynasty, became the majority religion.
²⁰
Despite all this, the Chinese language did not spread permanently to this part of the world.

Somewhat later than the advance into Tongking, Chinese proceeded farther south, though apparently with instincts more scholarly than materialist. In the third century AD, two Chinese envoys, Kang Tai and Ju Ying, wrote a report on the foundation of Funan (in modern Cambodia).
²¹
There is little more to be said of it, or what the Chinese were doing there; but the route via Śri Vijaya (in Sumatra) to India became quite well travelled by China’s Buddhist scholars a little later, in the fifth to eighth centuries. (See Chapter 5, ‘Outsiders’ views’, p. 192.)

After the eighth century, trade comes to the fore as a motive, but the links seem to have been maintained by foreign merchants, Arabs, Persians and Indians, and it is only in the eleventh century that we find the first reports of capital-raising by Chinese merchants to finance their own expeditions. This was under the Song dynasty, which actively backed the traders. Thereafter government support for overseas expansion wavered, the Mongol Yuan staunchly in favour, even making a failed endeavour to invade Java in 1293, the Ming who succeeded in 1368 preferring isolation: private trade was banned, and all contacts had to be made through diplomatic channels. There was a brief resurgence during the famous global voyages of Admiral Zheng-He (in the period 1405-33); but after that episode resident Chinese merchants had, for a time, to go underground.

Most of the Chinese who had taken to this life came from Fujian, with a smaller contingent from Guangdong, a fact which is explicitly recorded in a fifteenth-century report,
Yíngyái Shènglšn: The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores
, by Ma Huan, one of the sailors with Zheng-He. Ma writes, of two states in Java, ‘Many people from Guangdong and Zhangzhou are staying there,’ and he mentions many other exiles from Fujian elsewhere in the island.
²²
The truth of this stands out very clearly in the predominance of Min, Hakka and Yue, south-eastern dialects, in the speech of overseas Chinese to this day.
^*

From the sixteenth century until the present day, the Chinese government has increasingly come into contact with Japan and a series of European powers, culminating in the first approaches of the USA; these resulted in wars, and the planting of foreign communities in trading colonies. For overseas Chinese communities, the effects were complex: they sometimes suffered from China’s measures aimed at impoverishing and disarming foreigners; but they also profited from opportunities that were provided by the foreigners’ enterprising new developments, especially those of Britain.

In the early sixteenth century, Japanese pirates were a persistent problem. China imposed an embargo on Japan. For good measure, in 1522 it also banned all commercial voyages to the Nan-yang, converting all overseas Chinese into smugglers or pirates. Meanwhile, European explorers were increasingly nosing about China’s seas, looking for trading concessions. In 1557 the Portuguese were granted an enclave on the coast at Macao; this turned out to be sufficient to fob off their intrusions in the long term. But it added a further burden to the overseas Chinese, who seemed now to be at a disadvantage even as against the dastardly European
folangji;
^*
the ban on Chinese voyages to the Nan-yang was finally lifted in 1566.

Although the advent of the Spanish and Dutch, following the Portuguese, provided capacious new markets for the now long-resident Chinese traders of the East Indies, lack of clear support from China meant that Chinese traders were always at a disadvantage. In Luzon, in their newly Spanish colony of the Philippines, the Chinese population was massacred in 1602 and again in 1639, with utter impunity. Nevertheless, the trader community was beginning to be seen as a useful force: when the Ming dynasty was toppled by the Manchus in 1644, the last loyalist strongholds were found in the maritime communities of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong, and later, until 1682, offshore in Vietnam and the Philippines. They suffered for their loyalty, of course, with the Manchus literally ‘clearing the coasts’ of all their inhabitants, moving them miles inland to prevent any support to mariners. Perhaps also—since the Manchu invaders through victory became the legitimate authority, the Qing dynasty—they laid the basis for a certain distrust felt ever since by China’s central government towards its overseas community. This was the seed time for the Chinese Triads, and secret societies.

But there were new forces loose in the Nan-yang, and the Chinese were ready to profit from them. When Europeans were banned from Thailand in 1688, the Chinese became its principal traders and economic consultants through the eighteenth century. They were also well ensconced in the Malay kingdom of Johore. But in the same era, they found abundant opportunities for profit in collusion with the new Dutch VOC (East India Company); so much so that they suffered another major massacre at Dutch hands, in Java in 1740. And when the British started their own East Indian enterprise, on the empty Malayan island of Penang in 1785, it was the Chinese who volunteered to populate it. Likewise, they were in the forefront in Raffles’ development of Singapore after 1819. As British power spread across Malaya and northern Borneo, and the Dutch interest farther south, into Sumatra, southern Borneo and Celebes, the Chinese interests accompanied them. They liked very well the British institution of free ports.

Pressure was now building up from trading interests in France and Britain on China itself. The French concern centred on Chinese possessions in Vietnam, but the British dealt more directly, and fiercely, with the Qing government, in defence of their opium trade out of Bengal: the result was the cession of Hong Kong (1842, enlarged in 1860 and 1898) and foreign access to five more treaty ports, including Shanghai (1842). Although the most prominent of these were not in Fujian, their classic recruiting area, the overseas Chinese now had guaranteed access to the mainland. Links grew, and for the first time since the seventeenth century direct involvement with the mainland became an important part of overseas Chinese trade. Nan-yang was coming home.

Now that we have surveyed the full course of the histories of Egyptian and Chinese, we can consider what the major properties could be which might explain their unshakeable stability in the face of time and invasion.