The interpretation of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of
Chinese characters in the West, the belief that written Chinese was
ideographic prevailed. Such a belief led to
Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the
Egyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt.
John Webb, the British architect, went a step further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or
Adamic language. In his
An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the
confusion of tongues. Inspired by these ideas,
Leibniz and
Bacon, among others, dreamt of inventing a
characteristica universalis modelled on Chinese. Thus wrote Bacon: Leibniz placed high hopes on the Chinese characters: The serious study of the language in the West began with
missionaries coming to China during the late 16th century. Among the first were the Italian
Jesuits,
Michele Ruggieri and
Matteo Ricci. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and are often viewed as the first Western
sinologists. Ruggieri set up a school in
Macau, which was the first for teaching foreigners Chinese and translated part of the
Great Learning into
Latin. This was the first translation of a
Confucian classic into any European language. He also wrote a religious tract in Chinese, the first Chinese book written by a Westerner. Matteo Ricci brought Western sciences to China, and became a prolific Chinese writer. With his wide command of the language, Ricci impressed the Chinese literati and was accepted as one of them, much to the advantage of his missionary work. Several scientific works he authored or co-authored were collected in the
Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, the imperial collection of Chinese classics. Some of his religious works were listed in the collection's bibliography, but not collected. Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother
Sebastiano Fernandez (also spelled Fernandes; 1562–1621), are thought to have created the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary some time between 1583 and 1588. Later, while travelling on the
Grand Canal of China from
Beijing to
Linqing during the winter of 1598, Ricci, with the help of
Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640) and Sebastiano Fernandez, also compiled a Chinese-Portuguese dictionary. In this latter work, thanks to Cattaneo's musical ear, a system was introduced for marking the tones of
romanized Chinese syllables with diacritical marks. The distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants was also made clear through the use of apostrophes, as in the much later
Wade-Giles system. Although neither of the two dictionaries were published—the former only came to light in the
Vatican Secret Archives in 1934, and saw publication in 2001, while the latter has not been found so far—Ricci made the transcription system developed in 1598, and in 1626 it was finally published, with minor modifications, by another Jesuit
Nicolas Trigault in a guide for new Jesuit missionaries. The system continued to be in wide use throughout the 17th and 18th century. It can be seen in several Romanized Chinese texts (prepared mostly by
Michael Boym and his Chinese collaborators) that appeared in
Athanasius Kircher's
China Illustrata. , one of the first Westerners to learn the Chinese language The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the Spanish
Dominican missionaries. The earliest surviving one is by
Francisco Varo (1627–1687). His
Arte de la Lengua Mandarina was published in
Canton in 1703. This grammar was only sketchy, however. The first important Chinese grammar was
Joseph Henri Marie de Prémare's
Notitia linguae sinicae, completed in 1729 but only published in
Malacca in 1831. Other important grammar texts followed, from
Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat's
Élémens (sic)
de la grammaire chinoise in 1822 to
Georg von der Gabelentz's
Chinesische Grammatik in 1881. Glossaries for Chinese circulated among the missionaries from early on.
Robert Morrison's
A Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815-1823), noted for its fine printing, is one of the first important
Chinese dictionaries for the use of Westerners. Due to the status of Guangzhou as the only Chinese port open to foreign trade and exchange in the 1700s,
Cantonese became the variety of Chinese that came into the most interaction with the Western world in early modern times. Foreign works on Chinese were largely centered around this variant until the opening up of other Chinese regions for commerce through
unequal treaties, which exposed European scholars to a much larger number of
Chinese varieties. In 1814, a chair of Chinese and
Manchu was founded at the
Collège de France, and Abel-Rémusat became the first Professor of Chinese in Europe. In 1837,
Nikita Bichurin opened the first European Chinese-language school in the
Russian Empire. Since then sinology became an academic discipline in the West, with the secular sinologists outnumbering the missionary ones. Some of the big names in the history of linguistics took up the study of Chinese.
Sir William Jones dabbled in it; instigated by Abel-Rémusat,
Wilhelm von Humboldt studied the language seriously, and discussed it in several letters with the French professor. Local Chinese variants were still widely used up until a
Qing dynasty decree in 1909 that mandated Mandarin as the official language of China. After this period, only Cantonese and Mandarin remained as the most influential variants of Chinese, the former due to the importance of maritime trade in Guangzhou and the emergence of Hong Kong as a key economy in East Asia. Chinese departments in the West were largely centered on Cantonese due to
British colonial rule over Hong Kong until the opening of communist-ruled China starting in the 1970s. The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in the
People's Republic of China started in 1950 at
Tsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with
Bulgaria in 1952, China also dispatched Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers afar as the Congo,
Cambodia,
Yemen and
France. In 1962, with the approval of the
State Council, the Higher Preparatory School for Foreign Students was set up, later renamed the
Beijing Language and Culture University. The programs were disrupted for several years during the
Cultural Revolution. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 330 institutions teaching Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language, receiving about 40,000 foreign students. In addition, there are almost 5,000 Chinese language teachers. Since 1992 the State Education Commission has managed a
Chinese language proficiency exam program, which tests has been taken around 100 million times (including by domestic ethnic minority candidates). Within China's
Guangdong Province, Cantonese is also offered in some schools as optional or extra-curricular courses in select Chinese-as-a-foreign-language programs, although many require students to be proficient in Mandarin first. ==Difficulty==