Reading Chinese in Oxford - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 53

rain extending across Siberia to Bei Hai , 'the North Sea' - Mare Septentrionalis to
Hyde, the Arctic Ocean to us. I took this to signify that Hyde had a keen interest in
the physical geography of Siberia, perhaps because this was the zone from which
theManchushadinvadedin1644,aftertheSeldenmapwasdrawn.Myhypothesis
collapsedwhenDavidHelliwellshowedmeapairofextraordinaryChineseprinted
maps, also in the Bodleian, also from the seventeenth century and also annotated
by Michael. Michael had simply hand-copied the northern section of one of these
mapssothatheandHydecouldmakeannotationswithoutmarkinguptheoriginal.
My sense is that Hyde was struggling to understand not China as a place but
Chinese as a language. His notes on the map and the word lists in his file of notes
at the British Library suggest someone trying to build up a vocabulary in a new
language. But there is nothing whatsoever about how the language works gram-
matically.Toput this pursuit a little starkly,he was collecting words, not language.
But what else could he have done in barely six weeks?
A nineteenth-century scholar who knew no Chinese credited Hyde with having
'madegreatprogressinthelanguageofChina',buttheevidencedoesnotpersuade
me. That he tried at all is to his credit. He even used it in his publications. Chinese
charactersappearinhisbookonPersianreligion,astheydoinhisbookonOriental
board games, which includes several pages of characters in Michael's calligraphy.
One character is printed upside down, but that would be the fault of the printer. On
one page where Hyde demonstrates how Chinese characters are formed, the char-
acters look as though they had been written by a beginner copying someone else's
handwriting: the student copying the teacher, Hyde copying Michael.
In his own mind Hyde believed that he had enough of a grasp of the language
to go into print with it. The most curious sheet of paper in the British Library
file is the one on which Hyde has mocked up a notice or maybe even the title-
page of a book he would like to publish. The long-winded title begins: 'Adversaria
ChinensiaàscriptoetorenativiChinensisexcepta,inquibussuntDecalogus,sym-
bolum Apostolicum, Oratio Dominica, Ave Maria, Grammaticaliae et Formulae.'
We might translate this as: 'Observations Taken from the Writing and Speech of
a Native Chinese, in which are Rendered the Ten Commandments, the Apostles'
Creed, the Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary, with Grammar and Phrases.' Some, but
not all, of the texts the title-page promises can be found among Hyde's papers:
not enough to complete the planned book. As I was writing this topic, however,
Frances Wood, an old friend from student days in China who now heads the
Asian section of the British Library, wrote to say that more documents in Michael