:The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire

Abstract

The Macartney (1792 – 94) and Amherst (1816 – 17) embassies to the Qing have often been studied as a clash of institutions or imperial cultures, or the competing interests of two empires. Henrietta Harrison ’ s new book peers into these encounters through a side door — the lives of the translators who played vital, yet often invisible roles in mediating between two cultures. She focuses not on the official performance of the embassies, but rather on the behind-the-scenes negotiations by linguists employed by both sides — sometimes over a drink, but often under the imminent danger of political threat. The prose is pictorial and vivacious, effortlessly carrying the reader into a new domain of empathy and historical awareness. The unique and intimate stories of translators offer an antidote to simplistic accounts of the missions presupposing rigid bound-aries between China and the West. The result is a book that thoroughly transforms what we know about Sino-British encounters leading up to the Opium War. The book tells the stories of the encounters between the Qing and England by trac-ing the parallel lives of two translators. One is Li Zibiao, a Catholic priest who spent years training as a missionary in Naples and served as the official translator of the Macartney Embassy. The other is George Thomas Staunton, a boy of twelve when his father brought him on board the embassy ’ s warship, HMS Lion . Staunton acquired fluency in Chinese during the mission and went on to play an enormous role in the Canton trade and Opium-war era diplomacy. The twenty chapters, arranged in four parts, follow a chronological order to reconstruct the main stages of the two men ’ s lives: the eclectic cultural currents shaping their transcultural upbringing (Chapters 1 – 4); how Li Zibiao served as the mediator between the Qing court and the Macartney Embassy (Chapters 5