A Q+A with Asia Center Authors He Bian and Mårten Söderblom Saarela

This week, we’re speaking with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘩𝘶 𝘔𝘪𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘒𝘯𝘰𝘸𝘭𝘦𝘥𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘈𝘯𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘏𝘪𝘨𝘩 𝘘𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘢 co-authors He Bian and Mårten Söderblom Saarela. Their book is the first systematic study of how the Qing court sought to codify Manchu and Chinese words for animals and plants throughout the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on Manchurian and other Inner Asian species.
 

Could you give us an overview of your book? 

As the territory of Qing China expanded, so evolved the ways in which birds, beasts, fish, trees, and flowers came to be known in the multilingual empire. This book is a history of how knowledge of plants and animals figured centrally in 18th-century court-commissioned scholarly texts, including but not limited to Manchu lexicography. 

What drew you to this area of research? 

The Manchu Mirrors had primarily been seen as neutral repositories of Manchu words, but we thought that they were better studied as products of a specific scholarly milieu—the mid-Qing court—in which they existed together with other books, many of which were written in Chinese. 

What was the question (or questions) that were driving the writing of this book? 

We realized back in 2018 that in 1708 the first monolingual Manchu lexicon (the Kangxi Mirror) was completed at the Kangxi court, but in the same year, a Chinese treatise on plants (the Expanded Catalogue of Myriad Flowers) was also presented to the emperor. We decided to investigate to what extent the knowledge of plants can be seen as mutually entangled across linguistic divides and began the research that ended up becoming a book. 

 If you had to distill it, what’s the central argument or theme readers should take away?

Dictionaries are cool primary sources for the history of knowledge. There was no ethnically-demarcated boundaries of knowledge encoded in Chinese encyclopedia or Manchu lexicography. The High Qing “order of things” is not fixed but instead highly flexible and plurilingual. 
 

How did you structure the research in this book? (Chronologically, by theme ect) Why did you decide to structure this way?

The book is “bookended” by two editions of the Manchu “Mirrors” of 1708 and 1772, respectively; the chapters follow rough chronological order but also shift from the imperial court to the “fields” of inner Asia/Manchuria before shifting back to the Qianlong court. We end the book by opening up the topic to international sinology in Japan and in Europe. 

What was the most challenging part of the research or writing process? 

To move from the very nitty gritty detail of the encyclopedic dictionaries to bigger issues of relevance to the Qing historiography at large was somewhat challenging. On many days, we found ourselves knee-deep in the details of the classification of birds, the bilingual terminology for deer, or the specific referent of obscure passages on raspberries (?) and marine mammals. 

Who do you imagine as the audience for this book?

Scholars of Qing history, Manchu studies, history of science, or actually anyone who might enjoy investigating words about plants and animals across cultural and linguistic contexts. 

What do you hope readers will be thinking about after finishing it? 

That plants and animals mattered as much for court scholars as ordinary students of the Manchu language; that lexicons are lively and shifting cultural artefacts that can reflect the larger world in creative and fun ways. 
 

Do you have any stories from the process—fieldwork, archival finds, or even how you chose the title/cover—that give readers a glimpse of how the book took shape?

The cover of the book actually has an interesting story behind it. We were hesitant to just use a piece of a document for our cover—the Manchu Mirrors did not have any illustrations in them, and the books that did were not central to our study—and then it so happened that we knew an artist who had painted abstract landscapes and had an interest in language issues. We found that the painting that is pictured on the book cover presented an image that fit perfectly with what we wanted to convey. To us, it evoked a lush northern landscape in which the individual plants and animals are not clearly visible, but sure to be present. 

** He Bian and Mårten Söderblom Saarela will be at Harvard on March 4, 2026, for a Book Talk about The Manchu Mirrors and the Knowledge of Plants and Animals in High Qing China. For more information, click here **