Romanizing Chinese: word–tone relations in Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata

Abstract

Abstract When Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit missionaries landed in China in the late 16th century, they heard a language they could not readily reproduce in their own tongue. Unlike Latin and the Romance languages, Chinese is a tone language, in which the meaning of a word varies according to its relative pitch level. In order to Romanize Chinese, the Jesuits applied their knowledge of music theory and assigned solmization syllables to the Chinese tones. Although their manuscript musical dictionary remains lost, the essence of it is preserved in print in the most widely disseminated treatise on China of the time: China illustrata (1667), by the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. To date, sinologists have generally dismissed Kircher’s musical Chinese as unintelligible. Musicologists, meanwhile, having long poured over Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (1650), have yet to offer a detailed critique of China illustrata. In reapproaching this singular source in Sino-Western history, this article argues that the Jesuits’ musical representation of the Chinese language should not be rejected a priori. Kircher’s cryptic description of Chinese can, in fact, be clarified by a letter from Beijing in which a Jesuit spelled out the Chinese tones in musical staff notation. A musical analysis of the lead illustration in China illustrata—the Nestorian Stele of Xi’an—indicates that the Jesuits’ solmizations were closer approximations of Chinese than one might assume. Off-tone though it might at first appear, China illustrata is a valuable record of how the Jesuits Romanized Chinese.