Polyglot Lexicons and Encyclopedic Works in Late Imperial China

The present article reinterprets the history of polyglot lexicography and encyclopedic language projects in late imperial China from the Yuan and the Ming through the Qing periods by tracing a three-stage transformation. The Yuan period inaugurated a foundational regime of phonetic transcription anchored in the ’Phags-pa script (Ch. Basiba zi 八思巴字) while already experimenting with semantic pairing in the early Sino–Mongol glossary conventionally known as Zhiyuan yiyu (至元譯語). The Ming consolidated that legacy into a state curriculum centered on the Huayi yiyu (華夷譯語) corpus, together with frontier manuals such as Beilu yiyu (北虜譯語), which systematized domain-based vocabulary and coupled it with documentary templates for tribute, diplomacy, and administration. The Qing, finally, reconceived multilingual lexicography as a project of imperial integration, recentering Manchu as the pivot language in the Qing wen jian (清文鑒) series and culminating in the five-language Wuti Qing wen jian (五體清文鑒). Specialized compendia such as Xiyu tongwen zhi (西域同文志) normalized toponyms across scripts in newly incorporated territories. Complementing official compilations, market-facing handbooks—including Menggu zazi (蒙古雜字)—and the dialogic textbooks Nogeoldae (Ch. Lao qida 老乞大) and Bak Tongsa (Ch. Piao tongshi 朴通事) produced within Joseon’s translator-training institutions reveal a multi-sited ecosystem in which court, frontier, marketplace, and foreign language schools co-produced the infrastructure of interlingual governance. By following the shift from “how to read” (phonetic) to “what it means” (semantic) and ultimately to “what it governs” (administrative integration), this article argues that polyglot lexicons were not merely repositories of words but instruments that made a multilingual empire legible, speakable, and governable.