IT'S a good time to be a Manchu on television. Costume dramas such as
“Palace” and “Bu BuJing Xin”, which feature modern-day protagonists flung back in time to the days of the Qing emperors, rank among the most-watched programmes on China's video-sharing sites. And while these series would seem to mine every possible fish-out-of-water plot element for effect, nobody seems to question that a young woman speaking modern Mandarin would have any trouble communicating with her new Manchu boyfriend.
清宫剧的黄金时代来临，《宫》《步步惊心》等讲述现代人穿越回到清朝宫廷的古装电视剧，成为了中国网络视频点击率最高的节目。然而，这些电视剧里充满了各种不合逻辑的情节，但却没人质疑说一口现代普通话的年轻女孩能和她的满族新男友毫无障碍地交流。
On yet another popular programme, the breathy 76-episode epic
“Hou Gong Zhen Huan Zhuan”, the warring wives and battling concubines of the Yongzheng emperorhave sparked their own internet meme. Fans of the show have taken to converting short messages, microblog posts, and even government pronouncements into the elegant and stylised speech of the show's characters. Yet even with that attention to detail, all of the fighting, wailing, and backstabbing is done ina language that is perfectly understandable to the modern-day urbanites who tune in nightly on their laptops.
另一部热播的76集长篇连续剧《甄嬛传》，情节紧凑，描述了雍正王朝期间后宫妃嫔之间如何勾心斗角、尔虞我诈，剧里的台词更受到了网络热捧。剧迷们使用剧中的“甄嬛体”发短信、写微博，甚至连政府公告也使用了这些优雅风范的文体。但是，所有的宫廷斗争、哭天抢地、背后插刀的情节都用同一种语言表达出来，这些细节问题很好地阐释了现代一族用笔记本电脑熬夜看剧的现状。
It'sa distinction with a difference. The Manchus were a Tungusic people from beyond the Great Wall, distantly related to the Jurchens, who conquered northern Chinain the 12th century to form the Jin dynasty. In the early 17th century various groups who claimed descent from the Jurchen came together under the leadership of a chieftain named Nurhaci and his family, who had grown wealthy as tributaries of the Ming emperors in Beijing. They had provided the court with ginseng and furs while building their own state in what is today north-eastern China. They spoke a language decidedly different from that of the Chinese. By the time of Nurhaci his people had begun to develop a written script for their language that was derived from written Mongolian, rather than from Chinese characters. By the middle of the 17th century, this nation
—now calling themselves the Manchus—were strong enough to challenge the decrepit Ming state. They seized their chance to sweep beyond the Great Wall in 1644 when a Ming general, Wu Sangui, agreed reluctantly to ally with the Manchus. Bandits had already stormed the capital and the last Ming Emperor had committed suicide. With few options left, General Wu turned to the Manchus to support his troops and help restore order. The Manchus readily agreed, annihilating the bandit army and then staying on forthe better part of three centuries as the Qing dynasty.
然而当中差距相当之大。满族人是来自长城以外的通古斯民族，系属女真一脉，女真人曾在12世纪称霸中国北方，建立金朝。17世纪初，首领努尔哈赤和他的家族集聚了女真后裔的各个部落，作为明朝的附属逐渐变得强大起来。他们边向明朝进贡人参和皮毛等物品，边在现中国东北建立自己的王朝。他们说的语言与中原人的决然不同，当时，努尔哈赤命人根据蒙古文字而非汉字造出满文。到了17世纪中期，这个民族——现自称为满族——已有足够的实力与腐朽不堪的明朝对抗。1644年，他们把握好时机，横扫关外，明朝总兵吴三桂勉强同意与清兵结成联盟，因为当时的寇贼已经扫荡了北京城，明朝亡国皇帝也自尽了。无奈之下，吴总兵转而投降清兵，并协助恢复秩序。满族人亦已同意消灭寇贼军队，留在关内，并建立大清王朝，为其接下来三个世纪的统治奠定了良好的基础。
Mark Elliott, the Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard,is the author of
“The Manchu Way”, one of the first studies in any language to use Manchu sources in the research of Qing history. Is he bothered by TV's monolingual Manchus?
欧立德是哈佛大学中国与亚洲内陆史教授，他的著作《满洲之路》是首部基于满文文献而成的清史研究著作，他是否也纳闷电视剧里的满人只会说一种语言？
I'd say there is little doubt that the Manchu emperors could all speak decent Chinese. Kangxi's was almost certainly not as good as that of his son and grandson, but he could get by just fine. Still, it seems he was more comfortable speaking Manchu, and preferred communicating with the Jesuits at court in Manchu rather than in Chinese. So the issue is not so much that the emperors are speaking Chinese, but that they are never found speaking Manchu,which they most definitely could and did do, especially in dealings with Manchu officials.
我认为满清皇帝能说一口正宗的汉语这点毫无疑问，可以肯定康熙的汉语还不如他的子孙好，但是他也不差。然而，他更习惯说满语，他和天主教传教士交流的时候更多使用满语而不是汉语。因此，问题并不在于皇帝说汉语，而是他们从未说过满语，他们肯定会说，也曾经这么做，特别在与满族大臣交流的时候。
Nowwe can hardly blame the writers and directors of period pieces for taking creative licence with their linguistics. Actors in Chinese film and television productions routinely speak standard Mandarin, even when portraying historical figures, such as Chairman Mao or Sun Yat-sen, who are well known for their colourful dialects and accents. Although most Chinese TV and film productions have Chinese subtitles anyway, few directors would choose to inflict an impenetrable
—if historically accurate— Babel of dialects, regionalisms and dead languages on their audience. “Julius Caesar”probably wouldn't have been quite the same play had Shakespeare been forced to write all the dialogue in Latin.
现在，我们不能责怪历史剧的编剧和导演，他们的语言能力只能带来这种程度的创作。在中国电影和电视剧里，演员们通常都说标准的普通话，即便是如毛主席和孙中山这样众所周知带着浓厚口音的历史人物也是如此。尽管大部分中国电视节目和电影都有中文字幕，但很少导演会选择挑战难以克服的困难——如果遵照历史，那么各种各样的口音、宗教主义、死语都会困扰观众。如果莎士比亚被迫用拉丁语写所有对白，《凯撒大帝》可能就极为不同了。
Yet most Britons would have no trouble identifying the native languages of a Mark Antony or Marcus Brutus with that of Ancient Rome. Many Chinese today however assume that the Qing emperors, and all Chinese emperors before them, spoke Chinese. The erasure of Manchu language from period dramas is of course amatter of artistic expedience, but it is also one of the many small and subtleways the educational and media environment in the People's Republic of China reinforces an orthodox interpretation of Chinese history, one which emphasises continuity and unity. For most viewers, the assumption is that what the Manchus spoke doesn't matter, because, in the end, the Manchus were Sinicised: seduced bythe splendour of Chinese civilisation into abandoning their own language, culture and identity. How else could a small population of barbarians have ruled over so many Chinese for such a long time?
但是，大部分英国人还是知道古罗马的马克•安东尼说什么语言，然而许多当代中国人却以为满清皇帝们，甚至历朝历代的皇帝说的都是汉语。古装剧对满语轻描淡写当然是出于艺术创作的便利，但这也是众多细微之处之一，反应出中华人民共和国下教育和媒体环境正不断强化的正统中国历史，这种正统的历史强调连贯性和统一性。对于大部分观众来说，满人说什么语言并不重要，因为最后他们都被汉化了：由于他们受到汉人璀璨文化的吸引，因此放弃了自己的语言、文化和身份。一个野蛮的少数民族部落怎么可能长时间统治大部分的汉人呢？
Supporters of the
“Sinicisation” theory point to the decline in the use of the Manchu language that began in the mid-18th century. It's true that by the time of the 1911 revolution, which swept the Qing from power, few people spoke Manchu on a daily basis. Today,only a century later, spoken Manchu is in danger of dying out altogether. But language is not the whole story.
“汉化”理论的支持者指出，满语从18世纪中期就开始衰落。事实上，辛亥革命推翻清王朝时，就已经很少人把满语作为日常用语了。仅仅在一个世纪后的今天，满语就几近消亡。但是语言并不代表全部。
In the 1990s, historians in China, as well as international scholars such as Mr Elliott, began to challenge old theories of Manchu assimilation and Sinicisation. A new way of thinking about the Manchu emperors began to emerge.They are depicted not merely as a bunch of house broken barbarians, but as the universal rulers of a multi-ethnic empire, of which Ming China was to become just one (very large and important) part. They grafted Inner Asian styles of rule onto Chinese political traditions, and were equally content to play the role of Son of Heaven according to Chinese ideals of Confucian piety as they were to present themselves as the Great Khans of the steppe or as patrons of Tibetan Buddhism.
上世纪90年代，中国的历史学家以及诸如艾略特先生等的国际学者都开始挑战满族同化和汉化的旧理论，着手展开研究满清皇帝的新门路。满清皇帝不再仅仅被描述成一群入侵中原的野蛮人，而是多民族帝国的统治者，而明朝时期的中国只有其中的部分民族（非常巨大而重要）。他们把亚洲内陆的统治模式嫁接到中国政治传统上，而且同样被尊奉为中国儒家传统所描述的天子，就如他们在大草原被尊崇为大可汗，在藏传佛教中是圣人一样。
Adherents of this
“New Qing History”argue that Manchu success actually lay in their ability to maintain adistinctive group identity, separate from the Chinese they ruled. On their view, despite the Manchus' acculturation, including the gradual demise of their own spoken language, their separate identity persisted even after the end of the empire in 1912.
