From South China to Australia: Sources Surrounding 19th-century Cantonese Bilingual Lexicons

The talk explores a series of Chinese-made English-Chinese lexicons published in the 1850s and 1860s in Canton and Hong Kong, which represented the first local attempts to systematically facilitate English language learning among Chinese communities, and which brought my archival search to Australia in July 2024. These lexicons show two key characteristics. First, the authors were native Cantonese speakers who followed similar life paths, starting as businessmen in South Chinese ports before becoming part of the influential Shanghai and Guangdong merchant-official circles crucial to the modernisation efforts of late-Qing yangwu era. The lexicons themselves reflect the authors' budding modern ideas, conceived at a young age. Second, the lexicons were unequivocally made in written Cantonese for Cantonese native speakers, a transatlantic community encompassing traders and merchants in South China ports, school students on China Education Mission (1872–1881) in the United States, and the broader, ordinary but increasingly engaging Chinese diaspora, whose demand for practical language aids were thoughtfully anticipated and whose abilities were considered mobilisable by the lexicographers. Recently discovered manuscripts of one of the authors, housed in the Yale archives, reveal that his English reference series reached audiences not only in China, Japan, and U.S. Chinatowns but also in Australia, garnering mixed reviews from overseas scholars. Intriguingly, oral histories from this lexicographer's descendants suggest that he may have briefly resided in Melbourne as a herbalist storekeeper before creating his first bilingual lexicon in Hong Kong in 1868. My investigation in Australia led me to one of the three surviving copies of his initial lexicon at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, as well as passenger records in the Public Records Office Victoria. These findings shed light on the potential ties between early Chinese modernizers and Australia.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.