[inkyoto]

> Did that letter suggest the British were seen as equals?

No. Chinese emperors saw every other state outside the Celestial Empire as a tributary state and expected a full submission to the Chinese emperor, hence the language.

> The phrase "barbarian" is used 16 times in the text

«Barbarian» (蠻夷) was a term to refer to anyone else other than a direct subject of the Chinese Empire. Only the Chinese people were considered to be civilised, everyone else outside the Celestial Empire was not. As the opium wars progressed, one of the clauses in the follow-up treaty of Tianjin was forbidding the Chinese from the use of the 夷 character (meaning «a barbarian») to refer to the Westerners.

The word for «barbarian», 野蠻人 / 蠻夷 are still occasionally used as an insult between some Northern and Southern Chinese to refer to each other (as some Southern Chinese consider themselves to have descended from the true Tang Han Chinese and consider the Northerners to be bastard children of Mongolians, Manchu and the Han Chinese whereas some Northern Chinese consider the Southern Chinese to have descended from barbarian tribes, or Baiyue (百越) – the human history gets unpleasantly messy at times). Or as a pejorative to refer to Westerners, although mostly in the domestic nationalistic narrative.

> The constant, repeated subtext is that Britain is merely a far flung tributary nation of China […] The Imperial Qinq court was completely delusional.

Very much. In the historical context, the First Opium War was a disaster that had been waiting to happen and the British happened to be the trigger. The Daoguang Emperor was an exceptionally backward individual who flatly refused to grasp the understanding that the world had changed and self-imposed Chinese isolationist policies could not longer work, and that the Celestial Empire had fallen behind the progress. Most of his successors were just as myopic and delusional.

[darkerside]

It's a little funny because a word like barbarian carries so many connotations to us today, which is so different from even what Westerners back then would have known. And the connotations of the Chinese word might never have shared any of them.

[inkyoto]

Chinese characters do not always have a clearly defined, unambiguous, meaning when gazed upon on their own in isolation. But they do acquire a specific meaning when used in a specific context. Typically, when complemented with other characters (it varies across Chinese languages, e.g. Chinese words tend to be shorter in spoken Cantonese as opposed to spoken Mandarin due to the historical loss of multiple finals in the latter as the former has retained many original sounds from Middle Chinese, hence also the historical divide). The context is very important in the Chinese languages.

For example, 夷 (the main character compounding the word 蠻夷, a «barbarian») – on its own – means «wild» or «ferral»; it can also be used to refer to a massacre (夷族 or 夷戮), but it can also be used to mean «calm», as in 夷然 (a fringe written word).

Most translations to European languages have historically used approximations due to the lack of the comprehension of a culture unfamiliar to Europeans. Therefore, the Greek word for «barbaric» / «barbarian» has been used as the closest appoximation of the meaning of 夷, but not it does not equate to its true semantic meaning for a native speaker.

[masswerk]

BTW, barbarians were originally the non-Greek from the West, i.e. Europeans.

[LAC-Tech]

Thanks for this breakdown. Do you have confirmation that 蠻夷 was what was used in the original text?

[inkyoto]

I had not consulted the original text prior to replying, so I used a collective 蠻夷 as a guess. 蠻 and 夷 both translate as barbarian, an adjective and a noun (so to speak). 夷 is the character used in Archaic (Classical) Chinese that was used to write the letter (Archaic Chinese, which had a very different grammar and vocabulary was used for all written communication in China, Korea, Japan and Viet Nam until the early 20th century) to refer to barbarians whereas 蠻 has been used more recently.

In the text being referenced further down the thread the following words are used:

  眾夷 – crowd(s) of barbarians
  夷人 – barbarian(s), literally «barbarian person(s)»
  夷船 – barbarian ships
  外夷 – foreign barbarians
  夷 – barbarian(s)
  奸夷 – wicked / evil barbarians
  國夷 – barbarian countries/states, literally «country/-ies of barbarians».

蠻 is not found anywhere due to not being used in Classical Chinese.

Curiously, in Viet Nam, being written as 越南, the 越 refers to Baiyue or «one hundred yue (tribes)» (百越 that had formed an ancient Yue Kingdom and were considered barbarians at the time). And therefore 越 has had pretty strong barbaric connotations in the historical context for a long time. The actual name of the Viet Nam is, in fact, Nam Viet 南越, but words had to be swapped around at the behest of the Jiaqing Emperor of Qing to conform with the Classical Chinese grammar.

[websg-x]

No, 夷人(foreigner)，was used.

[LAC-Tech]

Source? It's probably classical chinese and I barely read any mandarin, but still curious :)

[websg-x]

"擬諭英吉利國王檄", https://kknews.cc/zh-tw/history/ybvzq2k.html has original and pretty good "白話文" translation.