Compiler's Note 按語

Believing in the power of print in converting and “educating” the Chinese, nineteenth-century European traders and missionaries invested significant amounts of energy and money in the dissemination of tracts on the China coast. One of these ephemera was 大英 國人事略說, "Brief Account of the English Character." It was first drafted in English by Charles Marjoribanks, president of the English East India Company’s Select Committee in Canton. Robert Morrison (馬禮遜), a missionary-cum-sinologist, translated the manuscript into Chinese and printed hundreds of copies at his 英華書院 (Anglo-Chinese College) in Malacca (Melaka). In 1832, despite his colleagues’ objection, Marjoribanks engaged Charles Gutzlaff (郭士立 or 郭實腊), a German missionary, and Hugh Hamilton Lindsay, the Company’s supercargo, to make an illegal voyage to China’s coastal waters in order to “ascertain how far the northern ports of the Chinese empire may be gradually opened to British commerce” (Ship Amherst, p.3). He asked the voyagers to load a ship with English products for sale as well as cases of his pamphlet for distribution.

What follows is a side-by-side bilingual e-text of the tract. On the left is Marjoribanks’s English manuscript, anonymously edited and published in The Canton Register dated July 18, 1832 (廣州紀事報). On the right is a complete transcription of the Chinese tract with punctuation added. Typographical errors in both texts were not corrected. Please scroll down to see page images of each document; the Chinese tract’s images are courtesy of Harvard-Yenching Library Chinese Rare Books Digitization Project.

Besides the edited one in The Canton Register, there is another extant, unedited manuscript of Marjoribanks's, housed in the British Library. My earlier work, “Representing ‘Great England’ to Qing China in the Age of Free Trade Imperialism: The Circulation of a Tract by Charles Marjoribanks on the China Coast” provides the full text of this manuscript and an introduction; please visit NINES (Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online): http://www.nines.org/exhibits/Representing_Great_England?page=1

Ting Man Tsao, Ph.D.