Western Culture and Linguistic Innovation: a Study on XIX century Chinese Travel Accounts

The present paper will analyse one of the aspects involved in the cultural transmission between China and the West, in particular the transmission of Western science and the related linguistic innovations. As many studies have already pointed out, modern Chinese lexicon wouldn’t be the same without the contributions of respectively Jesuit and Protestant missionaries between XVI and XIX century. I will try to see how these contributions made their way in XIX century China through the analysis a of a travel diary written by Guo Liancheng 郭连城, a young Chinese converted, in 1860s. His account, entitled Xiyou bilüe (西游笔略), contains a great number of neologisms and new terms taken from both Jesuit and Protestant sources on Western learning, but it is also enriched by the author’s own linguistic innovations. Xiyou bilüe is in fact an interesting example of synthesis between Jesuit and Protestant sources and its originality lies also in the fact that the author was out of literati circles and didn’t occupy any public position. Moreover, his travel account was written about five years before Qing government first official mission to the West and describes, for the most part, XIX century Italy.