Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. Nicholas Ostler
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Dealing with foreign devils
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.
Whys and wherefores
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.
Certain obvious possibilities can be eliminated at once, since in them Egyptian and Chinese are at opposite extremes.
In the most evident linguistic aspect, the structural type of their languages, Egyptian and Chinese were intrinsically always very different, and have developed in different directions over their recorded histories. And looking at them a little more abstractly, we can see too that they were also quite unlike in another aspect of their linguistic environments: their degree of similarity or difference to their neighbouring languages.
Egyptian remained throughout its history a highly inflected language with complex verbal morphology, and flexible word order, though it did develop somewhat over the millennia into a more analytic structure, with separable articles and personal pronouns becoming constituents of noun and verb phrases, and more rigid word order. Furthermore, the languages that might have been expected to influence or replace it, especially Libyan and Aramaic, were typologically similar to it—just as was its ultimate nemesis, Arabic. There seems no reason in linguistic structure, absolute or relative, to explain its stability.
Old Chinese, by contrast, was an extreme example of an isolating language, its roots, monosyllabic and marked with significant tone patterns, largely functioning as independent words, and using word order as the most significant aspect of syntax. Again, there was some change visible over the millennia: but Chinese moved to become less analytic, with longer words developing on the basis of the previously detachable roots, and some of the roots changing into grammatical morphemes, marking such things as plurality, copular links between subject and predicate, or markers of relative and subordinate clauses. Unlike Egyptian, which was challenged by languages of its own type, the threat to Chinese came from the Altaic languages, which were, as we have seen, fundamentally different in type. In fact, where it was in contact with languages of similar type (in the south), Chinese was the incoming language, and tended to replace them.
Religious outlook is another important aspect of cultures, where we might look for a clue to their stability, which might then be reflected in language. We have seen (Chapter 3, ‘Second interlude: The shield of faith’, p. 86) that especially in the Middle East attachment to a religion could preserve a language against the odds. But here again, Egypt and China diverged.
Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God. And paradoxically, when the Christians suppressed the Egyptian cult, Egyptian as a language took on a new life as the local language of Christianity. Egyptian religion was certainly favourable to the survival of the Egyptian language, but the two became detached long before the end.
The Chinese attitude to religion was very different, mostly characterised by down-to-earth practicality. There were two major traditions. One followed Confucius (Kung Fu-zi, ‘Master Kung’), taking a highly socialised and worldly definition of virtue; the other followed the Dào (