A Faithful Interpreter? Li Zibiao and the 1793 Macartney Embassy to China

Abstract

This paper is about the interpreter of the first British embassy to China. Li Zibiao was a Chinese Catholic priest who Lord Macartney recruited in Europe and brought with him to China. This account of his participation in the embassy aims to help us understand the role of the interpreter in intercultural negotiations in the late 18th century. Interpreting is something we tend to think of as invisible, but in these negotiations, where only a single interpreter was present, the interpreter had significant power. In effect, he acted as a mediator, shuttling between the two parties to enable each to accept the positions of the other so that the negotiations could come to a more or less successful conclusion. This position of power meant that the interpreter’s own institutional and personal interests could also be important to the negotiations. Thus loyalty was crucial to how interpreting worked. Li’s achievement during the negotiations was to create a situation where both Lord Macartney and the Qing officials were willing to accept him as a mediator and where he survived to tell the tale.     

MAPPING THEM 'OUT': EURO-CANADIAN CARTOGRAPHY AND THE APPROPRIATION OF THE NUXALK AND TS'ILHQOT'IN FIRST NATIONS' TERRITORIES, 1793–1916

As social constructions of reality, maps embody the values, truth-claims and power-structures of the cultures that make them. Using a variety of interpretive methodologies, geographers and cartographers have developed the thesis that, through selective 're-presentation', maps 'work' at a discursive, symbolic level. In focusing on the artifact itself, however, they have tended to forget that maps are made by someone. Indeed, as part of a wider institutional network, organized and reified by people in pursuit of certain goals, maps serve to create and sustain territories. In a colonial context, moreover, maps arrest and de-legitimize the territorialization of some cultural groups even as they enfranchise and legitimize that of others. Maps are, in this view, ideological weapons. In this paper I use a materialist hermeneutic to investigate the way in which maps helped to actualize the territorial dispossession of the original inhabitants of what is now British Columbia. Beginning with the charts of George Vancouver and Alexander MacKenzie, and ending with the Indian Reserve maps of the 1916 Royal Commission, I illustrate this thesis by tracing the cartographic encirclement of the Nuxalk and Ts'ilhqot'in First Nations. As an essential adjunct in the Euro-Canadian colonization of the region, the analysis has implications for our understanding of the social, political, and juridical function of maps within contemporary land claims discourse.     

Printed Maps of the District and State of Maine, 1793–1860: An Illustrated and Comparative Study. By Edward V. Thompson

Mapamundi. The Catalan Atlas of the year 1375. Edited with commentary by Georges Grosjean. Dietikon‐Zurich : Urs Graf Verlag, 1978. Colour facsimile on 6 panels. Pp. 93.

Vesconte Maggiolo: Atlante nautico del 1512 (Der Seeatlas vom Jahre 1512). Edited with commentary by Georges Grosjean. Dietikon‐Zurich : Urs Graf Verlag, 1979. Colour facsimile. Pp. 88.

La géographie de la renaissance (1420–1620). By Numa Broc. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1980. (Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques: Mémoires de la Section de Géographie, no. 9). Pp. 252.

Wall‐maps of the 16th and 17th centuries. A series of full‐size facsimiles of wall‐maps published in the Low Countries. Edited by Günther Schilder. Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1977‐. 1: The world map of 1624 by Willem Jansz. Blaeu and Jodocus Hondius (1977). Pp. 17, pl. A‐U. 2: The world map of 1669 by Jodocus Hondius the elder and Nicolaas Visscher (1978). Pp. 35, pl. 20.

The compleat plattmaker. Essays on chart, map, and globe making in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Edited by Norman]. W. Thrower. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Pp. 241.

County atlases of the British Isles 1579–1810. A bibliography compiled by ?R. A. Skelton. Folkestone: Dawson, 1978. Pp. viii+262.

Christopher Saxton and Tudor map‐making. By Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy. London: The British Library, 1980. Pp.64.

The A to Z of Elizabethan London. Compiled by Adrian Prockter and Robert Taylor. Introductory notes by John Fisher. Lympne: Harry Margary, in association with the Guildhall Library, London, 1979. Pp. 62.

Plan of the parish of St. Marylebone in the county of Middlesex, by Peter Potter, c. 1832. London: Westminster City Libraries in association with the St. Marylebone Society, 1979. Pp. 2, 6 sheets.

Yorkshire maps and map‐makers. By Arthur Raistrick. Clapham, North Yorkshire: Dalesman Books, 1979. Pp. 72.

Ireland from maps. Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 1980. Pp. 20, 16 sheets.

Abriss der Kartographie des Fürstentums Kalmbach‐Bayreuth. By Hans Vollet. Kulmbach: Stadtarchiv, 1977. Pp. 175. (Die Plassenburg. Schriften für Heimatforschung und Kulturpflege in Ostfranken, vol. 38).

Die Pläne von Berlin von den Anfängen bis 1950. By Paul Clauswitz and Lothar Zögner in collaboration with Elke Günther and Gudrun K. Zögner. Berlin: Verlag Richard Seitz, 1977. Pp. 241.

Romancero del topónimo fueguino. By Juan E. Belza. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones historicas Tierra del Fuego, 1978. Pp. 239.

[Agrave] la découvert de la terre. Dix siécles de cartographie. Trèsors du Départment des Cartes et Plans (mai‐juillet 1979). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1979. Pp. xvi + 122. Ill.