What Was Standard Chinese in the Nineteenth Century? Divergent Views in the Times of Transition

Abstract

In late imperial China, the most widely spoken form of the Mandarin lingua franca called Guānhuà was the Nanjing-type southern Mandarin language with five tones. Prior to the nineteenth century, Western students of spoken Chinese generally studied this five-tone Mandarin, a practice which had started with the efforts of the Jesuit missionaries to learn Chinese. But in the mid-nineteenth century, many Westerners began to advocate that the language of Beijing should be the focus of their study. In the same period, however, the dialect of Beijing carried little prestige among the general Chinese population. By the end of the nineteenth century there was still strong resistance to a Beijing pronunciation standard among Chinese. By analyzing a complex interplay of ideological and social factors, this chapter counters the widespread view that the standard followed the location of the capital.