Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica 中央研究院近代史研究所

Home > People > Research fellows

Self-introduction

Education

Resumé

Research fields

Research projects

Publications

Mårten Söderblom Saarela

Position
Associate research fellow

Room
1402

Tel
886-2-2789-8236

Email
saarela at-sign

gate.sinica.edu.tw

Self-introduction

I am a historian of late imperial China with an interest in the cultural and intellectual history of language. My dissertation and first research project focused on the Manchu language, particularly its script's influence on language studies in Qing China (1644–1911). The Manchu language was nothing like Chinese, but it was used in the Qing empire—of which China was part—as the language of the ruling house and parts of the hereditary military elite until the early twentieth century. My second research project focuses on the history of Mandarin Chinese: Manchu’s partner, antagonist, and successor as the language of power.

The early modern travels of Manchu

The forthcoming book that will mark the conclusion of my first project considers how Manchu was developed as a written language by the early Qing rulers and subsequently studied or discussed by individuals in China, Korea, Japan, Russia, Germany, and France.
I argue that Manchu, which thus far has primarily been studied within the context of the expanding Qing empire’s imperial and military institutions, is also a topic for cultural and intellectual history both inside and outside China. At both ends of Eurasia, the study of Manchu was not just contemporaneous, it was connected. In the writing of textbooks, compilation of dictionaries, and printing, Manchu emerges as intimately related to the globalization of the early modern world.

Mandarin Chinese in Qing China

The fact that Manchu was studied within a largely Chinese literary culture drew my attention to the relationship between Manchu and Chinese and led me to a second research project.
What heritage did Manchu language studies leave in China? What effects did the centuries-long experience of promulgating, regulating, and understanding the Manchu language have on the later standardization of Chinese by scholars and government representatives?
The generally assumed but poorly understood decline of Manchu coincided with the emergence of a normative (and, later, standard) form of Chinese—Mandarin—out of an earlier imperial multilingualism.
My second research project investigates the history of Mandarin Chinese in the late imperial period, paying special attention to this kind of cross-linguistic connections. My ambition is to shed new light on the history of language, scholarship, and power in China during the transition from empire to republic.

Education

Ph.D, Princeton University
MA, School of Oriental and African Studies

My Website

Resumé

Postdoctoral fellow, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Assistant research fellow, Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica

Academic honors

Research fields

History of the study of language in China; History of Chinese scholarship and education; The Qing empire in its global context.

Research projects

Manchu language standardization and Qing institutions during the eighteenth century(MOST，2019.08.01~2021.07.31)

Publications

Monographs, Collected Essays

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe, 288 pages, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Edited monographs

Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices, 330 pages, London: Routledge.

Journal articles

Mårten Söderblom Saarela，2020，〈Public Inscriptions and Manchu Language Reform in the Early Qianlong Reign (1740s–60s)〉，《Saksaha》，16, 31-53。
Mårten Söderblom Saarela，2020，〈Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace Memorial System in the Eighteenth Century〉，《Late Imperial China》，41.2: 131-179。
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, “Joshua Marshman and the Study of Spoken Chinese”, TOUNG PAO, 106(3-4), 401-457.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2019, “A Guide to Mandarin, in Manchu: On a Partial Translation of Guanhua zhinan (1882) and Its Historical Context”, East Asian Publishing and Society, 9, 1-28.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2018, “'Shooting Characters': A Phonological Game and Its Uses in Late Imperial China”, JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN ORIENTAL SOCIETY, 138(2), 327-359.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2017, “Mandarin over Manchu: Court-Sponsored Qing Lexicography and Its Subversion in Korea and Japan”, HARVARD JOURNAL OF ASIATIC STUDIES, 77(2), 363-406.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2016, “Alphabets avant la lettre: Phonographic Experiments in Late Imperial China”, Twentieth-Century China, 41(3), 234-257.
馬騰，2014，〈《十二字头》与清代满文语学〉(Shi'er zitou yu Qingdai Manwen yuxue)，《清史研究》，3, 1-11。
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2014, “The Qing Tradition and the Return of Manchu Lexicography to China (1970s-1990s): The Example of Alphabetical Order”, HISTORIOGRAPHIA LINGUISTICA, 41(2/3), 323-354. (SSCI) (IF: 0.409; SSCI ranking: 83.5%)
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2014, “Shape and Sound: Organizing Dictionaries in Late Imperial China”, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 35, 187-208.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2014, “Shier zitou jizhu (Collected notes on the twelve heads): A Recently Discovered Work by Shen Qiliang”, Saksaha, 12, 9-31.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2010, “Scholarly Discourse in Chen Li's (1810-1882) Letters”, Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, 10(2), 169-189.

Book chapter

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2021, “Manchu Language”, editor(s): David Ludden, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, pp. 1-20, New York: Oxford University Press.
Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, “Introduction: Language Diversity in the Sinophone World”, editor(s): Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices, pp. 1-10, London: Routledge.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, “Manchu, Mandarin, and the Politicization of Spoken Language in Qing China”, editor(s): Henning Klöter, Mårten Söderblom Saarela, Language Diversity in the Sinophone World: Historical Trajectories, Language Planning, and Multilingual Practices, pp. 39-59, London: Routledge.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2020, “Lexicography of the Entrenched Empire: Banihûn's and Pu-gong's Manchu-Chinese Literary Ocean (1821)”, editor(s): Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran, The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 218-235, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2019, “The Chinese Periphery to c. 1800”, editor(s): John Considine, Cambridge World History of Lexicography, pp. 202--22, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2014, “The Manchu Script and Information Management: Some Aspects of Qing China's Great Encounter with Alphabetic Literacy”, editor(s): Benjamin A. Elman, Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000-1919, pp. 169-197, Leiden: Brill.

Dissertation

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2015, “Manchu and the Study of Language in China (1607-1911)”, 625 pages, East Asian Studies, Princeton University.

Book review

Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2019, “Review of "China's Philological Turn: Scholars, Textualism, and the Dao in the Eighteenth Century" by Ori Sela”, History of Humanities, 4(2), 499-501.
Mårten Söderblom Saarela, 2012, “Review of China in European Encyclopaedias, 1700-1850 by Georg Lehner”, Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, 12(1), 96-99.