Incarnating Antiquities through Translation: Naming, Images, and Language Reform at the Qianlong Court

日期： 2026/01/08

時間： 10:00~12:00

地點： 檔案館第二會議室

主持人： 謝歆哲教授（本所助研究員）

主講人：賴毓芝教授（本所副研究員）

評論人： 林士鉉教授（國立臺北大學歷史學系副教授）

主辦單位： 近史所

Abstract：
Around 1750, major illustrated bilingual projects—Official Tributes (Zhigong tu 職貢圖), Album of Birds (Niao pu 鳥譜), and Album of Beasts (Shou pu 獸譜)—emerged in tandem with the reform. My previous research has demonstrated that these three albums were conceived as a unified encyclopedic project initiated under the direction of the Qianlong emperor; however, what has been overlooked is the fact that their production closely overlapped with the court’s language reforms and with intensified efforts to standardize Manchu–Chinese correspondences.
Taking the Album of Birds and Album of Beasts as primary case studies, this article shows that these were not simple compilations of natural knowledge, but imperial laboratories of translation in which naming, alignment, and classification were tested across linguistic and cultural boundaries. By tracing how new Chinese terms for Manchu species (and vice versa) were coined through image–text comparison, it demonstrates that images—more precisely, form—operated as epistemic and linguistic agents capable of stabilizing meaning across incommensurable systems. Bilingual nomenclature, therefore, became a mechanism through which the Qianlong court articulated a distinctly Qing regime linking words, things, and imperial order. While recent scholarship by He Bian and Mårten Söderblom Saarela has shown how the bilingual captions of these albums fed directly into Manchu lexicography and natural-history classification, this study shifts the focus to the symbolic maneuvers activated in the gaps of translation, where linguistic uncertainty, visual standardization, and imperial ambition converged.