Qīndìng LiáoJīnYuán sān shǐ Guóyǔ jiě 欽定遼金元三史國語解
The Imperially Approved Glossary of National Languages in the Three Histories: Liáo, Jīn, and Yuán by imperial command of 高宗弘曆 (the Qiánlóng emperor, 1711–1799), compiled by the Sìkù quánshū guǎn in Qiánlóng 46–47 (1781–1782).
About the work
A 46-juǎn imperial work that systematically corrects, on the basis of authentic Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongolian phonology, the corrupt transliterations of personal, place, official, and ethnographic names that appear in the Yuán-court compilations of the Liáo shǐ (KR2a0033), Jīn shǐ (KR2a0035), and Yuán shǐ (KR2a0036), and in the appended Guóyǔ jiě of each. Composed by Qiánlóng-era court Sinologists, Sinological Manchurists, and Mongolists working under the Qing emperor’s personal direction. The work draws on the Qīndìng sānhé qièyīn Qīngwén jiàn 欽定三合切音清文鑑 (the imperial Manchu-Mongol-Chinese trilingual lexicon) for its phonological framework.
Tiyao
By imperial commission of Qiánlóng 46 (1781). Considering transliteration of language: ancient practice. The Gōngyángzhuàn says “place and thing follow Central country city; person follows host”. To translate-and-explain its name and meaning is also ancient: the Zuǒzhuàn says “Chǔ-ren call milk gòu, call tiger yútù”; the Gǔliáng says “Wú calls ‘good’ yī, calls ‘rice’ huǎn”. “Number from Central country, name from host.” There may be cases of same-sound-different-character: like Tiānzhú = Juāndú / Shēndú / Yìndù, Wūhuán = Wūwán — just like Chinese characters incidentally borrowed: like the Eastern-Hàn epigraphy has Ōuyáng written Ōuyáng (with a different yáng character), the Bǎoxū of the Zhànguó cè writing Bósū — never to be valued or scorned by character beauty.
From the Wèi shū changing Róurán to Rǔrǔ — comparing them to creeping things — already meant nothing. The Tang shū says Huíhé changed itself to Huíhú — taking the meaning of “qīngjiàn rú hú” (light and quick like a falcon) — even more far-fetched. Down to the Sòng with their slack military and frontier-shame they could not retaliate, they took to picking quarrels in the realm of words. Further, well-versed in transliteration, they sought-out external meanings via Chinese: so [XīXià] Zhào Yuánhào called himself Wùzú, transposed as Wúzǔ, then “Wúzǔ wèi wǒ wēng” (calling me ‘old man’); Xiāo Zhēbā being a foreign name was paired in couplet with Zēng Chúnfǔ as “zhēbā, chúnfǔ” — vulgar joke. The accumulated habit was endless.
When the Yuán Toqto’a et al. compiled the three histories, they mostly inherited old text without correction. Examining the work compiled in the late Yuán: even Tàibùhuā 泰不華 (a literary man) — in the Nàxīn 納新 Jīntái jí he had front-page seal-script title-page — signed himself as Tàibùhuā — corruption already; not just to the colour-eyed peoples but even Mongols had broken the language. So the histories’ corruption is no surprise.
When Sòng Lián etc. compiled the Yuán shǐ in eight months: events-omissions hard to enumerate; previous-dynasty translations even less in scope; the three histories’ appended Guóyǔ jiě — turned-around and split-and-confused — out of one mould. Naturally so.
We the Saintly Imperial Highness of clear sage natural endowment, walking past antiquity and embracing the present, comprehensive in all the languages of the various states, clear about the previous compilations’ errors. Especially commanded the Hall ministers to make a detailed re-determination, with His Majesty’s personal pointing-out of every entry, that the truth be obtained. With Solon language correcting the Liáo shǐ — 10 juǎn: first imperial names, with consorts and princes and princesses appended; next imperial guards, with army names appended; next tribal divisions, with vassal-state names appended; next geography; next official titles; next personal names; next material names — 7 categories. With Manchu language correcting the Jīn shǐ — 12 juǎn: first imperial names, with consorts and princes; next tribal divisions; next geography; next official titles, with army names appended; next surnames; next personal names, with material names appended — 6 categories. With Mongol language correcting the Yuán shǐ — 24 juǎn: first emperor names, with consorts and princes and princesses; next imperial guards, with army names; next tribal divisions, with state names; next geography; next official titles; next personal names; next material names — 7 categories. Each entry has its name and meaning and its character sound; for sounds with no Chinese-character equivalent, two-character or three-character combinations are used; the analysis is at the most subtle level, the explanations at the most profound.
Even one without translation training, following the explanation, perceiving the sound-shift, will feel clearly aligned in the heart and suddenly enlightened about the old histories’ errors. So that since the Qīndìng Sānhé qièyīn Qīngwén jiàn came out, guóyǔ’s essential refinement is clear; with this work out, the previous histories’ divergences are also clear. Not only the Sòng and Míng histories can be revised by it; even the Sìkù’s every text — whose personal-name, place-name, official-title, material-name touches the three dynasties — can all be revised. Sound and meaning all reach truth. The Sage Court’s kǎowén canon in truth surpasses ten thousand years.
Abstract
The Qīndìng LiáoJīnYuán sān shǐ Guóyǔ jiě is the Qiánlóng emperor’s imperial corrective to the systematically corrupt transliterations of Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol names in the three Yuán-court dynastic histories. The Sìkù-era political context: the Manchu Qing court, drawing on the imperial Sānhé qièyīn Qīngwén jiàn 欽定三合切音清文鑑 (the trilingual Manchu-Mongol-Chinese lexicon), set out to demonstrate Inner Asian linguistic competence by re-establishing accurate transliterations for all the non-Hàn names and terms across the three earlier dynasties. The work was also a vehicle for Qing dynastic legitimation by tracing direct cultural-linguistic continuity from the Khitan and Jurchen to the Manchus.
The work is organised by language and by category. For the Liáo shǐ, 10 juǎn using Solon (a Tungusic language preserved in northeastern Manchuria, treated by the Qing court as the closest extant relative of Khitan); for the Jīn shǐ, 12 juǎn using Manchu (treated as a direct continuation of Jurchen); for the Yuán shǐ, 24 juǎn using Mongolian. Within each language section, names are organised by category: imperial names, consorts and princes, tribal divisions, vassal states, geography, official titles, personal names, material/cultural terms.
The work was completed in 1781–1782 and incorporated immediately into the Sìkù as the standard apparatus for reading the three histories’ non-Hàn names. The political-cultural framing — the Sìkù tíyào’s celebratory rhetoric about the Sage Court restoring linguistic order across ten thousand years — is the most aggressive of all Sìkù tíyào prefaces and signals the work’s status as a flagship Qing dynastic-cultural production.
The reception has been mixed. The transliterations adopted by the Sān shǐ Guóyǔ jiě — Tuōtuō → Tuōkètuō 托克托, Yēlǜ Yǎn → Yēlǜ Yǎn (mostly preserved), Chángchūn (Daoist) → Chángchūn — were imposed by imperial edict on every Sìkù text. Modern scholarship (especially since the late 19th century) has largely returned to the older transliterations or adopted scholarly modern reconstructions of the original languages, treating the Qiánlóng-era retransliterations as a frozen Manchu-court artefact rather than as authoritative reconstructions of the actual sound-systems. Modern Mongolian and Manchu studies have substantially revised the work’s etymologies, especially for Mongol terms.
The Wényuāngé text is the imperially-presented copy. Catalog meta gives lifedates of the Qiánlóng emperor as 1711–1799 and the date as 乾隆四十七年 (Qiánlóng 47 = 1782).
Translations and research
No translation. The work has been the subject of extensive critique in Mongolian, Khitan, and Jurchen historical-linguistic scholarship since the late 19th century: see Paul Pelliot’s “Notes sur le Touen-houang fang-yu chih,” T’oung Pao 23 (1924); Karl Heinrich Menges, “Glossar zu den volkskundlichen Texten aus Ost-Türkistan” (1933); Daniel Kane, The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters (Indiana, 1989); Daniel Kane, The Kitan Language and Script (Brill, 2009). Standard Chinese-language critique: Liú Pǔjiāng 劉浦江, Liáo Jīn shǐ lùn (Liáoníng Dàxué, 1999) — section on the Sān shǐ Guóyǔ jiě’s methodological limitations. The work itself remains useful as a documentary record of late-eighteenth-century Qing Manchu-Mongol etymological scholarship and as the source-text for the standardised retransliterations adopted across the Sìkù corpus.
Other points of interest
The work establishes the Qiánlóng-era convention by which Sìkù-text references to Mongol-Yuán and earlier non-Hàn personnel are uniformly retransliterated — Tuōtuō → Tuōkètuō, etc. — making it a unique feature of all Sìkù-mediated text traditions and a complication for cross-referencing between Sìkù-period and pre-Sìkù-period editions of the same texts.