This text was written by Dr Sally K Church and uploaded by Tina Schivatcheva
The Bureau of Interpreters (Siyi guan 四夷館) was founded in 1407 by the Chinese government in Ming times to train diplomats in foreign languages. It was part of the Hanlin Academy and produced vocabularies for a number of languages, including Mongolian, Persian, Japanese, Siamese, and others.
Persian was the lingua franca for diplomatic relations in Central Asia. Attached here is an early Qing facsimile copy of a Persian vocabulary, entitled Huihui guan zazi 回回館雜字. It was published together with another edition of the same work, Huihui guan yiyu 回回館譯語, in Beijing tushuguan guji zhenben congkan 北京圖書館古籍珍本叢刊, jing bu 經部 (Beijing: Shumu wenxian, n.d.). The Huihui guan zazi is uploaded here with the permission of the Cambridge University Library.
For each word in the vocabulary, the Persian is given first, then the Chinese character for that word. This is followed by a set of smaller characters which are Chinese transliterations for the Persian word, indicating how the word should be pronounced in Persian by a Chinese-speaker. For example, for the word “bazaar” (market, shi 市 in Chinese), three small Chinese characters are provided, one for each syllable of the word. They are pronounced ba-za-er 把咱兒.
To access the early Qing Persian-Chinese dictionary, please click on the link below: