Was There a Qing Administrative Revolution?
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just curious, why are you certain about quality of essay from the post?..
for example I tried to track first of his claims about archivals. He complained that author of the book referred on some database, which she titled with some name. Apparently database is some Taiwanese site, and name was letterhead of the document on that site, and he made conclusion that she invented nonexistent database from this, which makes me think he was nitpicking to find reason for drama, because such database totally could exist since documents printed on stationaries with such name.
This is the most damning critique of a book I have ever read though, if it is itself accurate.
As an observer with no competence in the field itself, I feel fairly confident of the quality of the essay because it appears to be exhaustively detailed and minimalist in the examples it quotes. I can't evaluate (for example) the accusations of license in translation, but Quiao provides enough context to permit the casual bilingual reader to evaluate the claims, and detailed citations to permit the casual scholar to validate the quote.
This rings to me as doing the math and bringing the receipts. :) It could be nonsense and I wouldn't have the competence to falsify it. But it sounds good. I tossed a link to my son, who at least reads some mandarin (is that the right word for the written language?) hoping for an opinion.
It's the right word for the written language of today. Traditionally documents would have been written in Classical Chinese, which is not the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese indicates that literature was mostly written in Classical Chinese until 1919, though it is definitely true that there was a lot of vernacular literature before then. I don't know what language was used for government documents, but it seems like a good bet that Qing Dynasty documents are also written in Classical Chinese.
quoted from wikipedia: The English word "mandarin" (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrī, mantrin, meaning 'minister or counsellor') originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires.
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The confusion here is that traditionally the educated Chinese write and speak in different “languages”. Classical Chinese was the standard and proper form of formal writing, whereas Mandarin was the lingua franca of the imperial court and among officials. (People had their own native dialect as well. )
This only changed in the early 20 century with the May Fourth Movements where intellectuals sought to write the spoken language verbatim.
The relationship between Classical Chinese in writing and the spoken forms of Chinese is not unlike the relationship between classical Latin and the spoken romance languages in Europe.
That said, a proper education in the Chinese language should include both modern Mandarin and classical Chinese, but the classical Chinese part could well be skipped if one is just learning Chinese for basic communication in a modern non academic context.
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PS: the line between classical Chinese and spoken Mandarin can be a bit blurry during the Qing period, apparently it was acceptable to incorporate elements of spoken Mandarin into these court communications documents. So called “classical Chinese” lasted more than 2000 years so the language itself has varying styles and forms too in different context and era
> So called “classical Chinese” lasted more than 2000 years so the language itself has varying styles and forms too in different context and era
That is also true of Latin; the parallel is pretty exact.
It's striking how much easier it is to read documents written a few centuries ago in "Latin as the language of international communication" than to read documents written a couple thousand years ago in "Latin as the author's native language".
my reading is that there are documents on taiwanese website, with letterhead of some database (Ming-Qing Historical Sources from the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica), and author of the book put the name from letterhead to citation why author of essay said he never heard of such database, and claims that database is non-existing.
Documents with letterhead certainly exist, we don't know about database. I found this issue is very insignificant and low quality, which brought shadow on potential quality of essay.
In a way it is healthy to have this sort of frank and aggressive back and forth.