27 – Trade, Embassies and Communication: The English in China, 1715-1842 – Part I

The Canton Linguists

Their Chinese names were Tan and Tung, but these words not being readily distinctive to the foreign ear, they both became Tom, while ‘ Old ‘ and ‘ Young ‘ were added to suit their respective ages.¹

The difference between [Cantonese Pidgin English] and proper English was once unconsciously and wittily expressed by a Cantonese shop-keeper, who, finding himself at a loss to understand the correct English spoken by a new arrival, turned to his friend, an American, and said: ‘ Moh bettah you flen talkee Englishee talk, my no sabbee Melican talk.’²

Another functionary remains to be mentioned, under the name of linguist, who seems to be so called rather on  account of the absence, than the presence, of those accomplishments which are usually implied by the term;  for these persons cannot write English at all, and speak it scarcely intelligibly.³

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The Canton System

There were many constraints imposed on foreign merchants trading in China in the eighteenth century, when English ships started sailing there regularly to pick up cargoes of silk, porcelain, and China tea. They had to report to Macau for clearance, pay for a pilot as well as a permit to proceed up the Pearl River to Whampoa (Pazhou Island) where they had to wait for their cargoes.⁴ They could trade in Canton (as Guangzhou was known to them) only, and exclusively between November and March, the tea season.  Contact with local people was kept to a minimum: foreigners were not allowed to learn Chinese, nor were they were not allowed to enter the city itself. While their ships were in the area, sailors stayed on board their vessels, while commanders and officials had to request permission to go ashore. 

The Thirteen Factories

The only men allowed to stay on land were the supercargoes, the agents of the ships’ owners, and they had to stay in the accommodation provided by the licensed Hong merchants in charge of foreign trade.  Mid-eighteenth-century Chinese imperial decrees restricted foreign residence to a set of Chinese built dwellings on the banks of the Pearl River known as the Thirteen Factories (in Mandarin, Shisan Hang).⁵The Factories were on the waterfront in southwestern Canton. Foreign merchants had their accommodation there, as well as their warehouses and offices.

The Linguists

These merchants’ activities were carefully regulated and they had to deal with a series of intermediaries. In addition to their servants and the compradors who kept the ships supplied with provisions, these traders had linguists.  These go-betweens held lifetime appointments to guide foreign merchants through their dealings with local officials: the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces, the governor of Guangdong Province and the Hoppo, or Customs Superintendent.  They ensured that formalities were respected, appointments kept, paperwork completed, payments made and goods exchanged.  There were three to four linguists working at any one time in the 1720s to the 1780s; the number rose to five in the 1830s.  They came to rely on a growing number of secretaries and assistants.⁶

These linguists might be better described as “facilitators”.  They were responsible for ensuring that trade took place with minimal contact between foreigners and local people; they had to make sure that everything was done by the book while keeping communication to a minimum.  One of the strongest signs of the relatively minor role played by language in their activities is the development of a patois that allowed for basic communication: Cantonese Pidgin English (CPE).

Cantonese Pidgin English

CPE appears to have been the first “English jargon”. The word “pidgin” is allegedly the Chinese pronunciation of “business”.  J. Dyer Ball, an old China hand, has this account of this version of English based on Cantonese pronunciation and syntax:

When foreigners settled in China, finding the language difficult to learn, and the Chinese finding English nearly equally difficult for them to acquire, a middle course was struck, and the outcome was the mongrel talk, called pidgin-English. We say a middle course was struck, for the words employed are generally English modified to suit the defective pronunciation of the Chinese. For example, the letter r is dropped and substituted, while the idiom is Chinese, and, in the absence of inflection and declension, the Chinese is again copied.⁷        

In some respects CPE is an unusual pidgin language: while it may have developed initially as a way for traders to communicate with the servants made available to them, it became a means of exchange “between two “high” cultures whose members, whilst willing to engage in mutually beneficial trade relations, were very reluctant to extend these to cultural and other non-material exchanges.”⁸

It is easy enough to imagine that CPE enabled exchanges in clear-cut situations like buying, selling, giving orders, living, or dying. Foreigners were actively discouraged from learning Chinese languages and the linguists were not in a position to learn English, so this pidgin language with its limited vocabulary, simplified grammar and Cantonese pronunciation became the vehicle of communication for trade in Canton. With a large volume of trade to be carried out between people with no common language, one party of whom were only permitted to remain for a few months each year, and the other party of whom faced the death penalty if they taught their own language to foreigners, clearly a certain compromise was required.⁹

Modern work on CPE is dependent on a corpus of examples from sources in English that date from the nineteenth century.   The linguistic analysis of CPE shows that many CPE structures are shared by both English and Cantonese or can be considered as simplification from both languages. There are however, quite a number of structural features that can only be seen as contributions from Cantonese.¹⁰ The transcripts we have show how the language used terms from English – with some Portuguese and Indian input – with Cantonese pronunciation.  They show how Cantonese speakers could not say the letter “r”, used a “b” instead of a “v” and added vowels to break up English consonant clusters.

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CPE was the language used by the linguists and foreign traders.  An English trader who knew what was expected of him with respect to clearances, paperwork and dates would be able to follow instructions from his linguist, talk to him directly and use his services at meetings with officials.  CPE allowed trade to run smoothly while keeping foreigners at arm’s length from anyone outside the system.   

Diplomacy

There were times when linguists did have to interpret at meetings between foreigners and officials, on visits to ships or during audiences, for instance.  Here too, however, their organisational skills were as important as their interpreting.  When it came to the visits, they had to see to the protocol.

 “Foreign officers needed to be dressed in their proper formal attire, captains needed to position their crews in proper formation aboard the ships to receive dignitaries, ship’s officers needed to be informed of whether or not their bands were to play and whether the crew was to give the visitors a shout of three cheers in their honour.” ¹⁴

The officials who toured the ships exchanged greetings, and raised toasts; much of what went on during those visits would have been predictable.  The same was true of formal meetings with the Hoppo.  The Hoppo only granted audiences if he knew what was to be asked of him; he and the relevant linguist worked out his response ahead of time. 

The American trader W C Hunter’s recollections of the Canton System reveal his awareness of the demands made of linguists:

The senior Linguist, popularly known as ‘Old Tom’ was a remarkable man, both physically and mentally, one whose calmness and self-possession never forsook him. Whether threatened by the authorities or scolded by foreigners, he never gave way to ill-humour. He was wonderfully adroit in making everything smooth with the mandarins and pleasant to the ‘outside barbarians’ even in questions the most irreconcilable.¹⁵

Hunter’s description hints at ways in which diplomacy and efficiency were privileged over engagement.  To the authorities, the linguists’ ability to make sure business was concluded was more important than their interpreting skills.¹⁶There were times, however, when irreconcilable issues caused tension and there are instances of threats by the authorities and complaints by traders that show how difficult a linguist’s life could be.

Compromises and stress

In 1747 Dutch supercargoes were so unhappy with their linguist Ja-qua’s reluctance to draft a complaint against a Chinese merchant that they threatened to hold him under house arrest.¹⁷ Some years later, three linguists working for the Dutch were put in chains by the authorities to encourage the traders to sail to Macao.  An account of the East India Company’s trade in China reports that in 1728 EIC traders thought that the linguists “were in such in awe of these great Mandareens they dare not tell [the authorities] our true Sentiments for fear it should be thought they instruct us”¹⁸On another occasion, they felt the linguist must have misinterpreted the Hoppo’s answer to their request for a reduction in fees.  He said that it had been granted but the petitioners did not think the Hoppo looked like an official who had just made a concession so they were not confident in their linguist’s accuracy, possibly thinking he was reluctant to give them bad news.¹⁹

Linguists using CPE to communicate with foreign traders could cope with routine exchanges but were vulnerable to reproach or chastisement if miscommunication occurred.  If problems could arise in day-to-day trade, more ambitious occasions put a strain on the linguists’ interpreting skills. It is hard to see how successfully they dealt with lengthy formal presentations such as those made by the viceroy visiting from Beijing in December 1783. At his farewell banquet, he made a long speech which the linguists reportedly put into “English” – in other words, CPE.  A basic language like CPE does not lend itself to the register of formal language so it is not surprising that such events were deemed stressful for the linguists.²⁰

Over time, some foreign traders became less accepting of the Canton System.  In 1793, the British authorities decided to send an embassy under George Macartney, 1^st Earl Macartney to the Court of the Qianlong Emperor to negotiate different terms of trade. It is not surprising that part of the preparatory work for the embassy involved investigating the availability of interpreters who could sail from England with the mission.

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1. Hunter, W. C., 1882 The “Fan Kwae” {foreign devils’} at Canton before treaty days 1825-1844 by an old resident. London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co,1882, p.53.
2. Dyer Ball, J.,1903, Things Chinese or Notes Connected with China, p. 508.
3. Davis, Sir J. F., 1844. The Chinese: A General Description of China and Its Inhabitants, Volume 3. Charles Knight & Company, p. 199.
4. Hayes, J., Canton Symposium: The World of the Old China Trade: The Locales and The People. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2003, Vol. 43 (2003) pp. 29-62, p. 30.
5. Farris, J. A., Thirteen Factories of Canton: An Architecture of Sino-Western Collaboration and Confrontation. Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Vol. 14 (Fall, 2007), University of Minnesota Press, pp. 66-83. p. 66.
6. Van Dyke, P.A., 2005. Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700 – 1845.  Hong Kong University Press, p. 82.
7. Dyer Ball, Op. cit. p. 508.
8. Baker, P. and Mühlhäusler, P. ‘From Business to Pidgin’. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication. Vol. 1, No.1 (1990). pp. 87–115, p. 87.
9. Selby, A., Selby, S. and Tong Ting-shue. China Coast English. Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 35
   (1995). Published by: Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch pp. 113-141, p. 117.
10. Dingxu Shi and 石定栩 Chinese Pidgin English: Its Origins and Linguistic Features / 洋泾浜英语的起源及 语言特征. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, January 1991, Vol. 19, No. 1. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press on behalf of Project on Linguistic Analysis, pp. 1-41, pp. 12-15.
11. Ibid. p. 28. I have sold (this) for ten dollars. Now I am going to sell it to you for one dollar.
12. Ibid. p. 21. I see a wife inside. Is that your wife? Quite true. Last month, on the most proper day I married that wife.
13. Ibid. p. 23. Where did Ho-a-luh go? Has he lost his head? He was not killed (his head was not cut). He ran away as I did.
14. Van Dyke., P.A., The Canton Linguists in the 1730s: Managers of the Margins of Trade. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch /Vol 57 (2017), pp. 7-35, p. 16.
15. Hunter. Op. cit. p. 51.
16. Van Dyke, 2005. Op. cit. p. 78.
17. Ibid.
18. Morse, H. B. LLD., 1926.  The Chronicles of the EIC Trading in China 1635-1834.  Oxford Clarendon Press.  p. 187.
19. Ibid. p. 223.
20. Van Dyke, 2005. Op. cit. p. 89.