page_title: Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: First page of (the main text of) the Portuguese-Chinese dictionary manuscript, compiled by Fr. Matteo Ricci, Fr. Michele Ruggieri, and the Chinese (Macau) Jesuit lay brother Sebastian Fernandez in Zhaoqing, Guangdong.
context_page_description: Mandarin was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, to circumvent the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects, initially those spoken around Nanjing but later switching to Beijing, and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century. In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect.
context_section_description: By the late imperial period, local varieties of Chinese had diverged to the extent that people from different provinces could not understand one another. In order to facilitate communication between officials from different provinces, and between officials and the inhabitants of the areas to which they were posted, imperial administrations adopted a koiné based on various northern dialects. Until well into the 19th century, this language was based on dialects spoken in the area of Nanjing, the first Ming capital and a major cultural centre, though not identical to any single dialect. The standard language of the Ming and early Qing, when it was based on lower Yangtze dialects, is sometimes called Middle Mandarin.
  In 1375, the Hongwu Emperor commissioned a dictionary known as the Hóngwǔ Zhèngyùn (洪武正韻) intended to give a standard pronunciation. The dictionary was unsuccessful, criticised on one side for departing from the tradition of the Song dynasty rime dictionaries and rime tables, and on the other for not accurately reflecting the contemporary standard of elegant speech.
  The Korean scholar Sin Sukchu published the Hongmu chông'un yôkhun in 1455, augmenting the Zhengyun by giving the Chinese pronunciation of each word using the Hangul alphabet. In addition to these "standard readings", he recorded a rather different body of "popular readings", some of which are also preserved in the works of Choe Sejin.
  Kim Kwangjo, in his extensive study of these materials, concluded that Sin's standard readings constitute an idealized phonology of the earlier dictionary, while the popular readings reflect contemporary speech. In contrast, Yùchí Zhìpíng and Weldon South Coblin hold that the two readings reflect different versions of 15th-century standard speech.
  The term Guānhuà (官话/官話), or "language of the officials", first appeared in Chinese sources in the mid-16th century.
  Later in that century, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci used the term in his diary:
  Besides the various dialects of the different provinces, the province vernacular so to speak, there is also a spoken language common to the whole Empire, known as the Quonhoa, an official language for civil and forensic use. [...] The Quonhoa dialect is now in vogue among the cultured classes, and is used between strangers and the inhabitants of the province they may visit.
  The missionaries recognized the utility of this standard language, and embarked on its study. They translated the term Guānhuà into European languages as língua mandarim (Portuguese) and la lengua mandarina (Spanish), meaning the language of the mandarins, or imperial officials. Ricci and Michele Ruggieri published a Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary in the 1580s. Nicolas Trigault's guide to Mandarin pronunciation was published in 1626. Grammars of Mandarin were produced by Francisco Varo (finished in 1672 but not printed until 1703) and Joseph Prémare (1730).
  In 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation (正音書院, Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation.
  Although Beijing had become the capital in 1420, its speech did not rival the prestige of the Nanjing-based standard until the middle of the Qing dynasty. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on the lower Yangtze koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. The new standard was described in grammars produced by Joseph Edkins (1864), Thomas Wade (1867) and Herbert Giles (1873).
  In the early 20th century, reformers decided that China needed a national language. The traditional written form, Literary Chinese, was replace
caption: First page of Ricci and Ruggieri's Portuguese-Mandarin dictionary
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