CONFUCIANISM.

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The Four Books: Parallel Chinese-Manchu Version. An uncommon bilingual edition of the four canonical works at the heart of Confucianism: the Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean. This translation, first published in 1755, was sponsored by the munificent Qianlong emperor - China's Louis XIV - and thought to surpass the work of all previous exegetes. WorldCat records just over a dozen copies of different Qing dynasty editions, with only three located in the United Kingdom (SOAS, Cambridge and Leeds).The Four Books of Confucianism were first translated into Manchu in the 1640s and 1650s by Asitan and Miao Cheng, two scholar-officials working at the behest of the Qing court. The first full translation appeared under Miao's direction in 1654, but in the Qianlong era (1735-1796), in the words of a contemporary essayist, "the way of the sage kings... reappeared in the unified mind of the emperor" (Crossley, p. 230). For Qianlong, "translating China's classic texts became an important way to master the art of dominion over a large empire and a crucial means of disseminating this political worldview to subordinates" (Xu, p. 70).Under Qianlong's fiat, Ortai (1680-1745), the most powerful official in the imperial court, supervised the revision of former Manchu translations of the Four Books to remedy many inaccuracies, adopt more explanatory vocabulary, and align the result with the linguistic evolution of Manchu during the preceding century. The project, complete

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