Jonathan Spence
Reith Lectures 2008: Chine Vistas
Lecture 2: English Lessons
Recorded in St George's Hall, Liverpool, broadcast on 10 June 2008.
THIS TRANSCRIPT IS ISSUED ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IT IS TAKEN FROM A LIVE EVENT. THE NATURE OF THE EVENT MEANS THAT NEITHER THE BBC NOR THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE PROGRAMME CAN GUARANTEE THE ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION HERE.
SUE LAWLEY: Hello and welcome to the Victorian splendour of St. George's Hall in Liverpool. Built as a concert hall and as a law court, it was possibly the only place in 19th century Britain where you could listen to Beethoven and be tried for murder under the same roof. Historically, the port of Liverpool was the hub of much of Britain's imperial expansion and has many links with China. Chine merchant amen, initially hired by Liverpool's Blue Funnel Line, supported Britain in two World Wars and some then ttled here. Today it's twinned with one of China's biggest and most important cities, also a great
port: Shanghai. So it's an appropriate place in which to hold one of this year's ries of Reith Lectures, which is entitled
'Chine Vistas'.
The lectures are focud on the history and the culture of China, an explanation of how the development of a country that's emerging as one of the world's great economic powers is inextricably bound up with its past. Last week, we heard about Confucius, the great Chine philosopher, who ideas still influence his country today. This week, our lecture is called 'English Lessons' and will explore what happens when Chine and British ideas meet. The relationship between China and Britain has never been an easy one. Our lecturer is a man who's better placed than most to try to help us understand how that relationship will unfold as our future in the United Kingdom becomes increasingly dependent on what happens in China.
He's a historian who books about China are regarded as the leading works in their field. It's his belief that the country's history holds the key to its prent. Ladies and gentlemen, plea welcome the BBC's Reith Lecturer 2008, Professor Jonathan Spence.
how much
(APPLAUSE)
JONATHAN SPENCE: Thank you, Susan, for that wonderful introduction and welcome everybody. I'm delighted to be giving this cond Reith Lecture in Liverpool. As Sue mentioned, not only becau it's home to such a vibrant Chine community - it was one of the earliest significant communities in Europe - and also becau this year you are the European Capital of Culture. And so not only is this the 60th Reith Anniversary, which is a particularly happy event in Chine customary
thinking, but we also now have this cond perfect connection with a wider cultural world as well.
In my first lecture, as Sue said, I took a long view, trying to bring Confucius into the prent era - a long scamper as it were of a lecture from the 5th century BC down to the year 2008; but in this lecture, I want to be not quite so bold, but to look at the interconnections between China and especially the West, which I'm interpreting here in terms of the United Kingdom and the United States. So I call this 'English Lessons', in some ways playfully, in some ways perhaps trying to remind us of the difficult side of the relations. Who is the pupil, who is the teacher in such lessons? What are you passing on and why? What kind of lf-esteem do you feel that you think should be shared? When are you making perhaps rious mistakes in the way you try to project yourlf in another country?
漂亮的英文单词
And I'll bring us up to the prent just for a cond to remind us how many Chine students are now from China, studying in the United Kingdom; how many of our students, British students are studying Chine language. I've been told that just over 2000 at this moment are preparing for their O Levels in Mandarin Chine. This is a formidable venture and I salute tho - I know some of them are in this room - I salute tho of you who are making this leap.
级别的英文
So in the name of the Chine visiting here and our students getting ready to go there, this lecture is kind of directed in a way to you.
So my feeling then is that the English lessons started round about the year 1620 -that's about where we'll start our story - when foreign contacts developed with China, initially through traders; partly government controlled traders through the East India Company, which had been given a monopoly by the Crown of some of the more adventurous essays into fortune building in the Far East, bad in India itlf and also increasingly in China. British ships - some of them from here - pushed their way through the South East Asian peninsulas and areas to land in Ningbo, in Macau (Macao), in Guangzhou, and other cities on China's East Coast itlf.
Now the early trading ventures were in fact violent - full of clashes, full of misunderstandings - and
I'm afraid there's no doubt that the British sailors on tho ships and their commanders acted violently when they were not given the trading privileges that they sought. How they expected to be treated, I'm not sure. And yet they reprented some other sort of mixture of values that we've en at other times ever since that period. At the same time, they admired the Chine. There was violence in the air, but there was also strong admiration. And there was admiration for what the British already saw was the size of China and the apparent sophistication of its administration over such an enormous territory and so many people. Though scholars still argue a lot about the nature of Chine population and its size, I think most of the people who study population figures would feel that in the 1630s period China's population was probably over about a hundred and venty, a hundred and eighty million people and was growing.
So there was admiration, there was violence. There was also difficulty learning the language becau the Chine government was unwilling to let Westerners learn Chine. Language was en in other words as a protection of your curity, and we
know from some records that early Chine who offered to tutor Westerners in Chine language could be imprisoned or even executed. So Westerners wanting to learn Chine in this period had to do so in crecy if they were in the Chine world or in one of the Chine cities near the coast.relation是什么意思
atmosphere
They were forbidden to travel inland, they were forbidden to move inside the gates of China's cities, so the Westerners had to camp outside - outside Guangzhou in the marshy area near the Pearl River, outside Shanghai in the marshy areas along the Huangpu - many of you may have en.
加州旅馆歌词大意It was an uneasy period. And the countries groped towards each other in terms of language by developing a curious hybrid mixture of language, which we now call Pidgin English. I don't know how many people know Pidgin English now, but it was a kind of newly coined language form in which, using Chine grammatical ntences and a mixture of English and Portugue and Indian and other words, a simplified trading language was developed that let the two countries communicate. And it had an extraordinary life as a language. It let people very rapidly deal in goods and tariff issues and a few basic legal issues and some problems of the exact nature of the trade items you were dealing with. It let you handle all the things with the vocabulary of only a few hundred words. I'm not saying we should add this to our curriculum in our overburdened schools, but still it is a fascinating linguistic structure.
One group I'm particularly drawn to were tho among … particularly among early British traders in China and a few of the early missionaries who after learning Chine for a few months decided that the Chine language was a plot, an extraordinary plot to baffle Westerners and make it completely i
mpossible for them to understand or do dealings with the Chine. They decided that the Chine were keeping an impeccable front and pretending to understand their own language (LAUGHTER) when strong and stalwart Englishmen knew of cour that that was not the ca and they, therefore, tried to crack the system that the Chine were using. And using that word 'to crack', I was thinking particularly that perhaps the greatest crackpots, as we now call them, were tho who sought a key to the Chine language and offered increasingly short spans of learning that would give you the mastery of the language. My favourite is the man who in the 17th century suggested that China could be learned if you bought his key in less than three weeks. (LAUGHTER) So this in fact never happened, but some of the keys and the arches for them have been maintained. We can actually study some of them in libraries.
Now in this period, after that opening up the rather tentative difficult period between particularly British traders and the Chine themlves, without going through dynastic dates and all this sort of thing, a ries of sort of puls can be en coming into this relationship between China and the Western countries. One was the beginning of memoir writing. This was the world of early traders, early travellers, early missionaries who were in China anywhere from the 17th to the early 19th century and they became memoir writers. They were spellbound with what they saw in China and th
ey tried to share this with us. So we begin to get … we might call it a foreign witness, foreigners bearing witness to the realities of Chine life and politics and religion and everyday family affairs. There were births of a new kind of fiction, a fiction about China or fictions using Chine characters, fictions telling us stories (in as much as we were able to understand them) of what Chine life must be like. And,
加班英文again, tho writers in the English language covered this with great skill, I think, and great subtlety.
One of my favourites is Oliver Goldsmith, and Goldsmith wrote an entire two-volume novel called 'Citizen of the World' - a beautiful title, 'Citizen of the World' - in which he wrote the entire novel through the eyes of a Chine man visiting London. And so it was a kind of double joke in a way: he created a Chine fictional visitor to a very real city and had him write home letters and had the respons coming from Chine back home. He added one phra - I'll just throw this into the lecture, it just came into my head - that may have resonance with tho Chine visiting us now from China. Goldsmith wrote in this novel, has a character say in this novel:
'You know, I think the British people are trying to reason me out of my own country. They're trying to push their pressure on me to get me to lo my n of what it is to be Chine.'
unknown是什么意思
And I thought if I had more rearch time, I'd like to know if people in the 18th century read that ntence and saw that it had the power that I think it does now. How often do we try to reason people out of their own cultures becau of our analytical stance or our feeling of superiority or our n that we have a different kind of skill than they do.
So then okay memoirs are a aspect of this, fictions are a part of this, and the growing u of diplomacy is a part of it, and a new generation of diplomats began to experience the complexity of trying to deal with this very powerful nation as they began to understand its very restrictive ideas about trade and access and openness and its insistence that foreigners coming to China do the unbelievable thing of obeying Chine law and thinking through Chine reasons for limiting trade, limiting access, learning the certain cities who are out of bounds, learning that certain kinds of descriptions of territory had military significance and might be confiscated. I won't belabour that point, but diplomats began to study and learn. Religion began so spread as Protestant missionaries began to move ahead of the Catholic missionaries. From about 1805, 1806 onwards, we began to get a new generation of Western missionaries going to China, many of them British, having learned basic Chine from Chine in London and they were pretty well prepared when they got there. Some of them took their tutors with them on the boats becau the boat journey was so long, so why
trick or treat是什么意思waste that six months when you could be learning Chine? And so the tutors came with them to the country and ttled there with them.
It's a period of translation and of the key backing to the idea of translation, the first composition of a good Chine English dictionary in which the languages were shared and pulled together by, actually, missionary scholars at the same time as they compiled their dictionary to translate the whole of the Bible into Chine. And this feat was finished with the first draft version around about 1830.
And then there was the problem of trade imbalances as the West tried to find trade goods that the Chine wanted, so that they could pay for their export goods in terms of porcelain and silk and other precious manufactures from China. And the story of the 18th century and the early 19th century in this term of lessons learned from other countries was that the British were spectacularly unsuccessful in finding trade goods
that the Chine wanted or needed. They couldn't find either. And it is this melancholy failure of the balance of trade that leads to the under girding, as it were, of the opium business in China. Opium started to be sold by British traders and later by American traders to the Chine becau the West simply could not find enough products to attract the Chine in a sort of barter exchange at the time.
Opium trade led to war, as many of you will know. The first, and properly called, I think, Opium War was between 1839 and 1842, what I think we could call a sorry war, which the Chine lost to successful British firepower. And it led to the first of bitterly unfair exchange treaties between China and foreign powers, what was called the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, after which the Chine were forced to yield major concessions financially to the West and major areas of territory. Such treaties rarely succeed becau you do not get what you want - that's what happened to the British - and so you fight another war to get a better treaty, by which of cour for the Chine is a wor treaty. And the British did that in turn between 1856 and 1860. Then the French did the same later in the 19th century and the Germans did the same at the very end of the century. So you get a ries of unfair wars linked to unfair treaties, all in the name of the expansion of trade and all covered with a delicate veneer of diplomatic language and treaty obligations and agreements. And as part of tho treaties, the Westerners won the right - as they called it - they won the right to live in Chine cities of their choosing under foreign treaty protection and to be allowed to u their own law in China instead of Chine law. This is obviously still a very vexed and complicated area, but the tension in the discussions of this particular problem can be dated very much to about the 1840s, 1850s, that kind of period.
And then there was migration. The beginning of large scale migration comes from Eastern China, particularly from Guangdong and Fujian Provinces. Probably the first wave of major immigration was in fact to South East Asia and then there was also fairly steady movement to Latin America and the Caribbean, which has been much less studied. But by the 1850s, large numbers of Chine were going from Eastern China to California, as we know, in the gold rush, but many more were going to Washington State and to Oregon and to the Deep South in fact: Mississippi and Alabama in the United States. And by the 1870s, as we know from Liverpool's history, larger numbers were beginning to move to this country as well. And Sue referred to the Blue Funnel Line, the famous shipping line bad in Liverpool, that increasingly crewed its ships with Chine skilled engineers and mechanics as the Blue Funnel became famous for the technological advances of its own ships' engines, as I understand it, bringing new levels of efficiency and profitability to the shipping lines between Liverpool and the Far East.
And it was the Chine with their technical knowledge who were able to work on the ships, often ttling in Liverpool in the first versions of Chinatowns I think anywhere in the United Kingdom, so they would be conveniently near the harbours when new Blue Funnel fleets were getting ready and were trying to get their engine room staffs together. And so it became customary for the agents for th
e Blue Funnel Line to scour the little areas I've been trying to look at today, around Pitt Street and Nelson Street, and so on, where the Chine had their boarding hous and their hostels, and where they also began sometimes to marry or live with Western women from the same areas and to start small Chine families or communities of their own.
>my heart will go on 歌词
