The present article reinterprets the history of polyglot lexicography and encyclopedic language projects in late imperial China from the Yuan and the Ming through the Qing periods by tracing a three-stage transformation. The Yuan period inaugurated a foundational regime of phonetic transcription anchored in the ’Phags-pa script (Ch. Basiba zi 八思巴字) while already experimenting with semantic pairing in the early Sino–Mongol glossary conventionally known as Zhiyuan yiyu (至元譯語). The Ming consolidated that legacy into a state curriculum centered on the Huayi yiyu (華夷譯語) corpus, together with frontier manuals such as Beilu yiyu (北虜譯語), which systematized domain-based vocabulary and coupled it with documentary templates for tribute, diplomacy, and administration. The Qing, finally, reconceived multilingual lexicography as a project of imperial integration, recentering Manchu as the pivot language in the Qing wen jian (清文鑒) series and culminating in the five-language Wuti Qing wen jian (五體清文鑒). Specialized compendia such as Xiyu tongwen zhi (西域同文志) normalized toponyms across scripts in newly incorporated territories. Complementing official compilations, market-facing handbooks—including Menggu zazi (蒙古雜字)—and the dialogic textbooks Nogeoldae (Ch. Lao qida 老乞大) and Bak Tongsa (Ch. Piao tongshi 朴通事) produced within Joseon’s translator-training institutions reveal a multi-sited ecosystem in which court, frontier, marketplace, and foreign language schools co-produced the infrastructure of interlingual governance. By following the shift from “how to read” (phonetic) to “what it means” (semantic) and ultimately to “what it governs” (administrative integration), this article argues that polyglot lexicons were not merely repositories of words but instruments that made a multilingual empire legible, speakable, and governable.
- polyglot lexicons
- Huayi yiyu
- Wuti Qing wen jian
- Xiyu tongwen zhi
- multilingualism
- Sino–Inner Asian Communication
Late imperial China governed vast, multilingual spaces of Inner Asia in which merchants bargained, envoys exchanged gifts and documents, troops patrolled frontiers, and monasteries mediated ritual diplomacy. Under such conditions, dictionaries were never just scholarly crutches; they were components of administrative machinery. They trained personnel, standardized terms and formats, and stabilized correspondences among languages that did not share scripts or orthographic conventions. Read in this light, the history of polyglot lexicography is inseparable from the history of state formation, for it exposes the techniques through which officials transformed the babel of borderlands into files, tables, and procedural speech.
This study develops a narrative in three movements—Yuan, Ming, and Qing—while also seeking to trace the development of multilingual encyclopedic works beyond dynastic periodization. In addition to the celebrated ’Phags-pa script (Ch. Basiba zi 八思巴字) experiments, the Mongol-Yuan empire contributed the Sino–Mongol glossary known as Zhiyuan yiyu (至元譯語), which organized the polyglot world into conceptual drawers [1,2]. The Ming installed that conceptual habit into a durable curriculum, producing the Huayi yiyu (華夷譯語) corpus together with frontier manuals such as Beilu yiyu (北虜譯語), which paired semantic fields with documentary templates [2–5]. The Qing reanchored the stack, the descriptive metaphor employed by the present article, in Manchu and multiplied it across languages in the Qing wen jian (清文鑒) series, culminating in the five-language Wuti Qing wen jian (五體清文鑒), while specialized works, including Xiyu tongwen zhi (西域同文志), standardized toponyms [6–8]. Alongside these official projects, civilian and market manuals such as Menggu zazi (蒙古雜字) and the Qingyu lao qida (清語老乞大) dialogic textbooks [9,10], as well as the Joseon’s Nogeoldae (Ch. Lao qida 老乞大) and Bak Tongsa (Ch. Piao tongshi 朴通事) [11,12], supplied scripts for trade, travel, and interpreter training. Together, these materials illuminate the double life of polyglot books: they were aids to cross-lingual communication and, at the same time, blueprints for bureaucratic procedure.
The argument proceeds by reconstructing the functional design of key corpora rather than cataloging titles for their own sake. The questions are simple but revealing: Which language sits at the center of a given work, and what does that centrality do? What kinds of entries—phonetic, semantic, and/or dialogic—dominate a compilation, and how do they map onto the tasks of the users for whom the book was made? How do classification schemes—heaven, earth, and human affairs; flora and fauna; weapons and tools; as well as offices and laws—encode assumptions about what a multilingual state must know? Taken together, the answers realign our periodization and recalibrate our sense of where lexicographic innovation occurred.
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6010005