Errata

2025-07-31

The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor (Leiden: Brill, 2024).

p. 158: Zhang Xuecheng 張學成 should read Zhang Xuecheng 章學誠.

I thank Chen Kuan-chieh 陳冠傑 for this correction.

He Bian and Mårten Söderblom Saarela, The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China.

pp. 52-54: In our discussion of the Manchu sea monster edeng, we speculated that it might have been influenced by the European sea monster xiphias. In this context, we showed and discussed an image taken from Ferdinand Verbiest’s Kunyu tushuo 坤輿圖說. We would have been better served using the illustration of a similar monster on Verbiest’s map Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (1674), seen here:

“Introduction” (to the section on Lexicography), 229-39, in Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues, ed. by Glenn W. Most, Dagmar Schäfer, and Mårten Söderblom Saarela.

p. 237: In the quote from Gaubil’s letter, I had written

“with the Chinese sounds expressed in the sounds of these languages.”

This should read

“with the sounds of these languages expressed in Chinese sounds.”

That is, the opposite of what I wrote. I thank Eugenio Menegon for this correction.

“Linguistic Compartmentalization and the Palace Memorial System in the Eighteenth Century,” Late Imperial China 41.2 (2020): 131–179.

p. 156: The translation of Yarhûda’s memorial contains a mistake. I misread šeo ben for šuban.

The quote should read: “…for lateral communications, if one relies only on [quasi-official] šeo ben [< Ch. shouben 手本 ‘handy copy’] with Chinese-script sticky notes [ja(n)dan < Ch. zhandan 粘單 ‘sticky list’], then the malpractices of the sly and cheating unranked clerks will begin to proliferate.”

Please see the revised version, which appeared as chapter 3 in The Manchu Language at Court and in the Bureaucracy under the Qianlong Emperor.

The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020):

pp. 22-24: The translations from the Jinshi 金史 (History of the Jin) and Yuanshi 元史 (History of the Yuan) contain mistakes. Corrected versions appeared in “Inventing or Adapting Scripts in Inner Asia: The Jin and Yuan Histories and the Early Manchu Veritable Records Juxtaposed (1340s-1630s),” in Plurilingualism in Traditional Eurasian Scholarship: Thinking in Many Tongues, ed. by Glenn W. Most, Dagmar Schäfer, and Mårten Söderblom Saarela (Leiden: Brill: 2023), 444-53.

p. 133: “1780s” should read “1680s.”

p. 168: “It seems that the article on the Manchu transcription of Chinese never appeared.” It did appear: “On the Manchu Mode of Expressing the Sound of Chinese Characters”.

“Mandarin over Manchu: Court-Sponsored Qing Lexicography and Its Subversion in Korea and Japan”:

p. 371: “The emperor’s preface to the Manchu-Chinese Mirror states that the book uses ‘vernacular glosses’ (Mnc. sesheri suhen; Ch. sujie 俗解).” In fact, the preface says the exact opposite, that “vulgar” glosses had been excised from the new Mirror.

p. 399, note 122: “Plants are in Yakugo shō, v. 5″ should read “v. 6.”

These mistakes were corrected in the Chinese translation (by Tsai Ming-che 蔡名哲), which appeared as “Guanhua er bu shi Manyu: Qianlong Yuzhi zengding Qingwenjian ji qi zai Chaoxian he Riben de gaiyi” 官話而不是滿語：乾隆《御製增訂清文鑑》及其在朝鮮和日本的改易, Zhongguo bianzheng 中國邊政 230 (2024): 119-54.