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The plurilingual Qing government, headed by a Manchu dynastic and military elite, operated in several written languages, and its representatives had to deal with an even greater linguistic diversity whenever they interacted with local populations across the empire. Language, especially the dynastic language of Manchu, was an issue of governance.1 This article will examine instances in which the choice of language rose to the level of discussion in two related genres of official documents that emerged in the eighteenth century: palace memorials and court letters. Toward the end of the article, to expand discussion to language use within the bureaucracy as a whole, I will bring these genres to bear on the issue as it appeared in lateral communications. I will argue that the coexistence of the two written languages of Manchu and Chinese within the government, a fait accompli after 1644, posed a constant problem for official communications. Various attempts were made to solve this problem, with limited success.
Translation, institutionalized in the late seventeenth century, with time lost favor as the primary strategy for handling the concurrent official use of two languages. A system instead developed whereby top-level communications took the form of generally monolingual palace memorials and court letters. Instead of connecting writers and readers of Manchu and Chinese through translation, the court tried to compartmentalize the two languages within different parts of the bureaucracy that then communicated through their high officials using the new genres. This article is a study of this attempt at linguistic compartmentalization by means of the palace memorial system.
Looking at language choice in palace memorials allows me to make interventions in two ongoing debates surrounding the Manchu language in Qing China. The first intervention relates to the historical trajectory of Manchu usage in the Qing state and society.2 The sources that I will discuss suggest that the use of Chinese rather than Manchu in government documents often had little to do with a weakened ability to write Manchu among those who were expected to do so. Rather, the use of Chinese was an expedient that was motivated by the collaboration of institutions with different working languages.
The second intervention concerns Manchu's role as a security language or as a secret language, which has been...