Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents.

• Author: Wadley, Stephen
• Position: Book review

By Gertraude Roth Li. 2nd ed. Honolulu: national Foreign language resource center, 2010. Pp. xii + 418. $43.50.

It has been ten years since Gertraude Roth Li published her Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents. It was clear at that time she intended to produce a second edition. When the book was first published she established a web-group for readers to sign in and ask questions about the text, communicate and exchange ideas with fellow readers, and suggest corrections and/or improvements in the text for some future edition. That future edition has now arrived with this new volume. With this book Professor Roth Li continues her invaluable service to the field. As Jerry Norman said in a review of the original edition: "This book is the first adequate text for the teaching of Manchu written in English. ... The author ... has done a valuable service to the field" ("Review of Manchu: a Text [sic] for Reading Documents," in Saksaha: A Review of Manchu Studies 5 [2000]: 41-42).

I have to admit I did not think it would go to a second edition. Not because it isn't a wonderful and valuable text, but because the field in the United States and even in Europe, always very small, seems to be shrinking day by day, ironically so since in China there has been a resurgence of interest in Manchu in the past ten years. In the United States however, only one university continues to teach it on a regular basis, even though the latest generation of Qing dynasty scholars has produced a number of important works providing new insights into the government and the society of the Qing by employing Manchu documents from the archives, only recently open to scholarly study. This new generation of history professors almost all trace their academic lineage either from the late Joseph Fletcher who taught at Harvard or from James Bosson, emeritus professor of the University of California at Berkeley. It is all the more amazing that this is so since Fletcher only taught two classes in Manchu at Harvard, once in 1967 (with only two students, one being Roth Li herself) and then again in 1984. (Nicola DiCosmo, another important Qing scholar now in the United States, received his training in Manchu from Giovanni Stary in Venice, Italy.)

Roth Li does not provide any notes in the second edition indicating what was changed from the first and in fact only minor changes have been made. For those unfamiliar with the original edition, it is composed of a lengthy introduction, which provides information on Manchu sources, gives a short introduction to the history of Manchu, and has another lengthy section on the Manchu script, explaining where it came from and how it is made up, as well as some exercises for the learner to practice reading the script. This section is valuable since, though the script can be read as an alphabet, the individual elements vary depending on where they appear in the word: initial, medial, final, or in isolation. In part two one finds the actual reading selections, themselves divided further into historical narratives and...