| Abstract |
As the Manchu came to dominate China and with the ambition for long-term governance, they had to face the dual quest of how to implement efficient dominating measures as well as to maintain their ethnic features. To cater for the needs of dominion and consolidation of regime, they established schools for the bannermen and promoted translation education. The system of Bannerman schools, which had started in Shun-chi period and then followed the pattern of the Han imperial college, provided the eight banners with opportunities to learn languages, such as Manchu, Mongoloan or Chinese, translation, archery, and so on; hence, it was an official education system of Manchu features. Proceeding during K’ang-hsi period, the system had developed into three patterns: particular sources of students, specific areas and effective function of supplement. The government established schools for the bannermen coming from different social status and regions, making her people have the opportunities to accept education, while rules concerning instructor selections, periods of duty and expirations were also strictly defined, for the purpose to guarantee the quality of learning. Although the results were less than adequate, the emperors’ concerns of education were obvious. On the other hand, all the textbooks for the bannermen were translation versions of Chinese classics, it was inevitable that the Han ways of thinking and value judgments would permeate through the bannermen as they used the same classics and historiography as in the Han tradition, no matter what versions—the Manchu edition, the Mongolian edition, the Manchu-Han edition, or even the Manchu-Mongolian edition—they adopted. According to the records, the bannermen’s performances in learning languages and doing translation works are not satisfying, and yet these conditions could be related to the defects in education system and ways of selecting elites as well as the interactions between the youths’ learning attitudes and the bannermen’s official mentality; therefore, the issue of the cultivation of qualified translators under the system in effect depends on different individual cases. |
