By Annie Zhanling Wang, Harvard University[1]
How might a person living during the Qing talk about women? One way to approach this question is to think about women-related vocabulary. Manchu dictionaries shed light on how people conceptualized and described women-related practices and ideals in Manchu. Among those, Manchu-Chinese dictionaries – which use Chinese to explain the meaning of Manchu words – show possible gaps between the conceptualization of women-related practices and ideals in Manchu and that in Chinese, since certain Manchu words do not have equivalents in Chinese and have to be explained in full Chinese sentences, while certain Chinese words do not have equivalents in Manchu and require the invention of new Manchu words.[2] In this blog post, I discuss one language book – Qingwen buhui 清文補匯 [Manchu words supplemented and collected] (1786, 1802) – that reflects the changes in Manchu vocabulary over time, which in turn reflects ways in which the Manchu language gradually borrowed from the Chinese language ideas about women but also preserved words that embody distinctive gender practices in the Manchu traditions.
As its title suggests, Qingwen buhui is a supplement to an earlier work called Qingwen huishu 清文匯書 [The book of collected Manchu words] (c.1750), a popular dictionary compiled by Li Yanji 李延基 (fl. 1693-1724), a Hanjun bannerman serving as a magistrate in Sichuan.[3] Basing his work on Kangxi’s monolingual dictionary Han-i araha Manju gisun i buleku bithe “Yuzhi Qingwenjian” 御製清文鑑 [Mirror of the Manchu language] (1708) but replacing the Manchu explanations with Chinese explanations, Li produced one of the most popular dictionaries in the Qing.[4] After the commercial publication of Li Yanji’s dictionary, the Qianlong emperor commissioned numerous language books that brought new words to the Manchu lexicon. It was these new words that made Ihing/Yi-xing – an imperial clansman who served as the vice president of the Board of Rites in Mukden – feel the need to create a supplement for Qingwen huishu, which became Qingwen buhui.[5] According to the preface, the words in Qingwen buhui come from the newly added vocabulary since the publication of the Yuzhi Qingwenjian.[6] In principle, therefore, what we see in the following paragraphs are women-related Manchu words that were present in the Qianlong emperor’s commissioned dictionaries but absent in Li Yanji’s work which was based on the dictionary commissioned by Kangxi that was published in 1708. In other words, the vocabulary discussed below made their appearance in imperially commissioned dictionaries between 1708, when the Kangxi dictionary was published, and 1802, when the second edition of Ihing’s work was published. What changed as people used Manchu words to talk about women?
This blog post will give four examples: bohimbi which reflects the change in the meaning of “footbinding” from a gender-neutral practice in the physical environment of the steppe to a women-specific practice in China proper; akdun and jekdun that came to take on the Chinese meaning of “chastity” zhen 貞; daruha urun which came to represent the practice of tongyangxi 童養媳 “daughter-in-law taken into her marital family as a child”; and a few words – tukiyeme gaiha hehe “midwife,” hehe doose “Daoist nun,” and hehe feyesi “female coroner,” and memeniye “wetnurse of a noble family” – that came to describe women-specific professions.
First, let us look at an example of how the meaning of a Manchu word changed to fit Han gendered practices: the word that refers to “footbinding.” On the thirty-fourth page of the third volume of Qingwen buhui, there is the term bohimbi, after which follows the Chinese note, “婦人裹腳。此舊男裹腳同用，今改成專用 Women binding their feet. In the past, this term applied to men wrapping up their feet, too. Now it applies exclusively to women.”[7] The term underwent such a change because women’s footbinding was a custom that the Manchus did not have and was only gradually incorporated into their conception and their vocabulary. Moreover, by “men wrapping up their feet,” the definition is likely referring to the practice of using ula grass to wrap up one’s shoes. According to Gao Shiqi 高士奇 (1645-1703) – an expositor in the Hanlin Academy whom the Kangxi emperor often summoned to be in company[8] – when he visited Manchuria with the emperor in 1682, he noticed that since the roads of the frontier territories were covered with stones, or were rather marshy, it was not possible to travel along them wearing leather shoes, and people used shoes wrapped in ula grass instead.[9] Therefore, we can surmise that bohimbi originated from the practice of wrapping up one’s feet in the environment of the steppe; it was after the Manchus settled in China proper – with a decreasing proportion of them staying in the steppe and an increasing proportion being exposed to the Han practice of women’s footbinding – that the term acquired its gendered meaning.
Another example is the Chinese idea of zhen 貞“chaste,” for which we see two expressions in Manchu in Qingwen buhui: akdun and jekdun. Whereas jekdun exclusively refers to women’s being chaste– where the definition says 貞節之貞[10] “chaste as in ‘women’s chastity’” – akdun can mean other things like “strong, firm.”[11] It is only in set phrases – such as akdun jurgangga sargan 節烈女, akdun sargan jui 貞女, and akdun acangga貞符[12] – that akdun acquires the meaning of women’s chastity.
What are we to make of these Manchu expressions of zhen 貞? First, the idea that zhen is distinctive to Chinese but not Manchu culture needs some explanation. Indeed, all patriarchal societies – Chinese as well as Manchu – tend to police women’s sexuality; where they differ is the precise ways in which they conceptualize and practice that policing. For example, in the realm of conceptualization, while both the Chinese and the Manchus sometimes had their widows commit suicide (a practice that seemed the same), their rationales differed in that whereas the Chinese emphasized a woman’s chastity towards her husband as a form of Confucian philosophy, the Manchus emphasized a woman’s following her husband in death as a kind of Altaic tradition.[13] In the realm of practices, one practice that was distinctive to the Chinese in late imperial times is that of zhennü貞女, where a widow who had been engaged but never married stayed chaste for the rest of her life. The Manchus did not have a similar custom, and in the preconquest era, there was no word that meant precisely zhennü貞女. It was only in Qingwen buhui that there came to be a phrase specifically for that: akdun sargan jui.[14] Therefore, we can say that even though the broad conception of women’s chastity was not distinctive to the Chinese, the specific conceptions and practices of zhen 貞was something that the Manchus did not comprehend or borrow until they settled in China proper.
Moreover, if we examine the two words in Qingwen buhui that correspond to the Chinese conception of zhen 貞, we can make some observations about the methods with which Qing people revised the Manchu language to speak to Chinese conceptions. One way – as seems to be the case with akdun – is to add a new meaning to a relevant existing word. Indeed, aside from “chastity” when placed in phrases like akdun jurgangga sargan 節烈女 and akdun sargan jui 貞女, akdun can mean something that feels similar: it can mean strength, intensity, and stubbornness, as in the tenacity of a root.[15] Another way – as seems to be the case with jekdun – is to make up new words. What was the logic behind creating the word jekdun? According to Hauer, the word is itself a hybrid of zhen 貞 (thus the j sound) and akdun.[16] Therefore, we can see that finding an existing Manchu word of relevant meaning, and then combining the sound of that Manchu word with the sound of the Chinese word is a way to make up new Manchu words.
Another Manchu term created to describe Chinese practices is daruha urun, followed by the explanation “童養媳婦 a daughter-in-law taken into her marital family as a child.”[17] Here, daruha is the past tense of darumbi which means “to buy on credit.” Therefore, daruha urun literally means “loaned wife” or “indentured wife,” which accurately captures the economic essence of the practice: the little boy’s family buys his future wife when she is still a child and uses the day-to-day expenses on her as a form of payment.
Next, let us look at some words that describe female-specific professions. For example, on the thirty-eighth page of the fifth volume, there is the term tukiyeme gaiha hehe 收生婆 “midwife.”[18] On the thirty-seventh page of the seventh volume, there is hehe doose 女冠 (女道士) “Daoist nun.”[19] On the same page there is also hehe feyesi 穩婆，驗屍之婦人 “female coroner.”[20] Although these terms do not necessarily refer exclusively to female occupations (for example, there should have been many more Daoist monks than nuns), at least we can surmise that there were enough women participating in these professions that they received their special terms, even just by simply adding hehe “female/woman” to the construction. Within this category, of special interest is memeniye 奶母，贵人之乳母，又曰jeme, “wetnurse of a noble family, also called jeme”[21] – a term that comes from the combination of meme which literally means “breast, nipple” and eniye which means “mother” – which also carries a connotation of high class and status.[22] The most striking point about this word is that it has a corresponding word that means “the husband of the wetnurse” which in Qingwen buhui is memema 奶公，注見下 “see below.”[23] (Of course, here what comes below is the term memeniye, quoted above.) Here we have an incident of defining a man in terms of his wife, which is the opposite to how patriarchy usually works. In fact, this is not the only case where status outweighed gender in the definition of one’s identity in the Qing: in the case of imperial princesses’ marriages to Mongol nobles, because of the primacy of the princess’ imperial status, the husband and his parents had to bow to the princess to greet her despite her being a woman of a younger generation.[24] The words memeniye and memema – just like the prescribed rituals in the marriage alliances between Manchu princesses and Mongol noblemen – show incidents where imperial/noble status privileged certain women over their husbands socially, ritually, and epistemologically. Indeed, as a genre of sources, dictionary can tell us about not only the history of the Manchu language and education, but also women’s history and gender history.
Bibliography
Elliot, Mark C. “Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 1999 Vol. 41 (No.1): 33-71.
Hauer, Erich. Handwörterbuch der Mandschusprache. 3 vols. Tokyo, 1952-55. Revised edition, edited by Oliver Corff. Wiesbaden, 2007.
Hummel, Arthur. Eminent Chinese of the Chʻing period (1644-1912). Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943.
Idema, Wilt L. Two Centuries of Manchu Women Poets: An Anthology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.
Ihing/Yi-xing 宜興. Qingwen buhui 清文補匯 [Manchu Collected and Supplemented]. TMA 5806.05 4424. Rare Book Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library. Cambridge, MA.
Norman, Jerry. A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013.
Rawski, Evelyn. The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Söderblom Saarela, Mårten. The Early Modern Travels of Manchu:A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Stary, Giovanni. “A Manchu word-list from 1682”, in: Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz, eds. E.H. Kaplan and D.W. Wisenhunt. Bellingham, WA, 1994, pp. 577–586.
[1] I want to thank Mårten Söderblom Saarela for bringing Qingwen buhui to my attention and for pointing out that the dictionary reflects changes in the Manchu vocabulary over time.
[2] Thanks to Elvin Meng for pointing out that there are also trickier pairs of Manchu and Chinese words where the meanings are close enough that dictionary compilers just say they mean the same thing, but the actual equivalence is performed as much as it is discovered.
[3] Mårten Söderblom Saarela, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu:A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 108.
[4] Söderblom Saarela, 108.
[5] Söderblom Saarela, 109.
[6] Ihing, Qingwen Buhui 清文補匯 [Manchu Words Supplemented and Collected] (1786, 1802), Rare Book Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge MA. Vol.1, p.1.
[7] Ihing, Vol.3, p.34.
[8] Arthur Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Chʻing period (1644-1912): (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943): 413-414.
[9] Giovanni Stary, “A Manchu Word-List from 1682,” Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz, eds. E.H. Kaplan and D.W. Wisenhunt (Bellingham, WA, 1994): 582. Gao compiled these notes in order to record the sounds of daily objects that the local (Manchurian) population used and it was in this process that he noted down the word hüwaitame gülha foyo which means “ula grass,” transcribed its sound in Chinese as 兀貴他姑兒哈非, and gave the above explanation. See Stary, 577.
[10] Ihing, Vol.7 p.3.
[11] Jerry Norman, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013) 12.
[12] Ihing, Vol.1, p.15.
[13] Mark Elliott, “Manchu Widows and Ethnicity in Qing China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1999 Vol. 41 (No.1), 45.
[14] Ihing, Vol.1, p.15.
[15] Norman, 12.
[16] Erich Hauer, Handwörterbuch der Mandschusprache. Tokyo, 1952-55. Revised edition edited by Oliver Corff. (Wiesbaden, 2007): 526-7.
[17] Ihing, Vol.5 p.10.
[18] Ihing, Vol.5, p.38.
[19] Ihing, Vol.7, p.37.
[20] Ihing, Vol.7, p.37.
[21] Ihing, Vol.6, p12. In Qianlong’s dictionary Han i araha nonggime toktobuha manju gisun i buleku bithe of 1771, the Manchu explanation of the word is wesihun niyalma de huhun ulebuhe hehe be memeniye sembi.
[22] Norman, 262.
[23] Ihing, Vol.6, p12.
[24] Evelyn Rawski, The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 149.