The Clash of Information Orders: The Polyvocal and Translingual Administered South China Coast in an 1811 Qing Memorial

In 1811, the Qing Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi Songyun submitted a routine memorial to the Jiaqing Emperor’s court reporting the repatriation of shipwrecked foreigners off the South China coast. Songyun described the circumstances leading to the shipwrecks and the efforts that local officials undertook to interrogate, escort, and provide for the survivors before their return voyage home. Narrating the journeys of mariners from as far away as India and Brunei, and detailing the contributions of interpreters, merchants, and Macanese officials, the report is a window into a non-state littoral world—within the territory of the state—as it was interpreted through state prerogatives. Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper proposes a method of reading late imperial Chinese routine memorials to reconstruct inter-Asia connections within individual documents that are often overlooked. First, I show how the administrative revolutions and the overlapping crises of the mid-Qing bureaucracy expanded and compressed the content of the memorial. Second, by teasing apart multiple layers of reportage and comparing the memorial's Chinese and Manchu components, I identify coastal information orders wherein the peoples and languages of the Guangdong ‘contact zone’ became incorporated into imperial knowledge, but also manipulated and restricted the information the state received. Finally, I detect multiple chronotopes and character zones within the memorial that retell the shipwreck incidents from both the perspective of the foreigners and those of the state. This case study demonstrates how the heterogeneity of Qing maritime governance simultaneously strengthened and restricted the state's control over the South China coastal world.