Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [84]
The case of India was different. Once Buddhism had reached China (in the first century AD, through Indian initiative) and begun to establish itself, Chinese monks starting with Fa-Xian in the late fourth century were drawn to make the journey from China themselves, sometimes in stealthy disregard of the law. The most famous of them, Xuan-Zang, had to depart illegally and furtively in 627, but was able to return to an official welcome from the emperor Tai Zong in 644.* It became fashionable to fund large-scale centres for translation of Buddhist literature. There was also a series of expeditions by Chinese monks to study and gather literature in India—fifty-six are known before the tenth century, of whom thirty-four travelled by sea from Guangzhou (Canton) and twenty-two overland past the Taklamakan desert and the Hindu Kush.33 All this must represent the greatest sustained initiative that China undertook before the modern period to make contact with outside civilisations.
There was a lasting effect on Chinese from the many thousands of new terms which the translations produced, usually building on existing simple Chinese words but combining them in new ways. Three characteristic examples are guò-qu, ‘past’, xiàn-zài, ‘present’, and wèi-lái, ‘future’, each built of two elements: passing/go, appear/be-there, not-yet/come. Each precisely reflects the metaphor of a corresponding Pali word: atīta, paccuppanna, anāgata.† Such words became central to active Chinese vocabulary.
There is an irony here, or rather a significant correspondence between grammar and government. Other countries and languages may simply have borrowed some mangled version of the Sanskrit or Pali words, and supplemented the language that way. This is what was happening all over South-East Asia, even though its languages were just as different from the Indian languages as was Chinese. (See Chapter 5, p. 183.) But the fact that new words were reconstructions in Chinese of the concepts derived from Sanskrit or Pali words is of a piece with China’s general strategy in conducting its foreign relations: to attempt always to keep them under domestic control.
This attempt to maintain control was also a feature of China’s management of its front and back doors, the ‘Silk Roads’ round the Taklamakan desert to Dunhuang and the ports along the eastern seaboard. Although China was prepared to defend the security of the Silk Roads against the neighbouring barbarians from Roman times onward, the importance of the route was gradually eclipsed by the growth of the maritime trade. The maritime route was actually closed to private trade during the three centuries of the Ming period from around 1368, but when allowed this trade was concentrated mostly at Guangzhou (Canton), with some competition allowed from the more northerly port of Quanzhou in Fujian. From 1757 to 1842 and 1949 to 1979, Guangzhou enjoyed a monopoly, continuing the Chinese government preference for monitoring and easy taxation. This was forcibly broken open by European and American interests in the intervening century.
A strange exception to the general policy of the Chinese—which was to admit foreign trade on terms, but not to initiate it or to seek diplomatic contact with foreign powers—comes in the apparently unique case of Admiral Zheng-He, who undertook