Imagining History/Writing Late Imperial China

We can imagine them sitting in a room around a table, enjoying a lazy dinner. The translators, the movers of words, the anatomists of language, the architects of broken and breakable structures. The Siamese interpreter, Women La and his colleagues. Wang Zilong, the student of Mongolian language, and Qoninci, the author of his textbook. (They’ve come as a couple, though they lived more than two centuries apart.) The Jesuit missionary and grammarian Ferdinand Verbiest. The Manchu teacher and textbook author Uge, and his colleague Cheng Mingyuan. And the Qing poet and Manchu-Chinese translator, Bujilgen Jakdan, accompanied by his quiet collaborator Hai Yu.