NOTE ON TRANSLATION

We chose to render the names of people Cai Tinglan describes as Fujian natives in the Hokkien pronunciation. It is possible that these people had been living in Vietnam for a generation or more, so transliterating the names in the Vietnamese quốc ngữ script would have been an equally good choice. Likewise, we transliterate some names into Cantonese. When Cai describes something as “Tang pronunciation,” we transcribe it into Modern Standard Mandarin. Pronunciation and transliteration systems are not stable, so our efforts almost certainly contain inaccuracies. Moreover, characters can be read and pronounced in any number of dialects and languages; there is no intrinsically standard, correct, or authentic way. Attentive readers may notice other inconsistencies. For example, we chose to render 海幢寺, a monastery in Guangzhou, in Cantonese pronunciation as Hoi Tong Monastery rather than the Mandarin pinyin Haiyinsi. This reflects the most common usage in English, our target language. For the same reason, we render 澎湖 as Penghu, not Phêⁿ-ô., the Hokkien transliteration. Likewise, to maintain consistency with other secondary works, we designate the author in pinyin as Cai Tinglan. Careful readers may object to some of our choices, but we hope to provide a relatively seamless experience for general readers. Our aim in transliterating the characters of the original text into multiple languages is to highlight the diversity of the communities Cai Tinglan encountered and the multiple linguistic registers he moved through. This diversity is not as apparent in the original, written in Chinese characters, which can be pronounced multiple ways, or in the Vietnamese translation, which renders all names in Vietnamese pronunciation.

Take, for example, the title Hainan zazhu. The Chinese reprint gives no clue as to the meaning of this title, and the Vietnamese translation simply transliterates the sounds into Vietnamese. Zazhu, “miscellany,” is uncontroversial, though it could be translated in other ways. Cai surely chose this word to reflect the different genres of his three chapters: shipwreck narrative, travelogue, and historical outline. But what did Cai Tinglan mean by Hainan? Hainan is the large island off the coast of Guangdong that was an important transshipment depot between Fujianese and Southeast Asian ports. But Cai did not travel there or even mention it in his account. The common phrase for coastal and maritime Southeast Asia inverted the term, Nanhai, or more commonly Nanyang, the Southern Seas. But Cai clearly chose Hainan intentionally and did not simply mistake it for the term Nanhai. Cai intended to cross the Taiwan Strait but ended up much farther south. This suggests that by hai he means the Taiwan Strait. Given his love of poetry and frequent forays into a literary register, we see that the title can be read as romantic and evocative, a “miscellany of the sea and the south.” The first chapter deals with the sea; the final two chapters deal with the south. Nonetheless, we have chosen to render it instead as Miscellany of the South Seas, attempting to capture the general meaning.⁹¹

Translators make innumerable decisions, choosing between literal translation or more loosely conveying the sense. Cai Tinglan refers to all the officials he met by a formal title, though it is not always clear if he is always using their real titles or employing titles of his own devising. We chose to render these titles in English to promote readability. We have used Charles O. Hucker’s Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China when we could, consulted Đỗ Văn Ninh’s Từ Điển Chức Quan Việt Nam (Dictionary of Vietnamese official titles), and made our own translations for more unusual titles. In some cases, such as prefect, we translated more than one title the same way to avoid unwieldy phrases like “prefect of a superior prefecture.” The original terms can be found in the glossary. Cai Tinglan uses gong as a salutation for officials and jun for degree holders or teachers who do not hold official positions. We translate them both as “Mr.” Interestingly, Cai Tinglan uses “Vietnam” throughout his text, not the Chinese name “Annan” or the Vietnamese name Đại Nam, “Great South” (officially adopted only in 1839). He uses “China” (Zhongguo) to designate his own country, but he also uses “Tang” to designate Chinese people or pronunciation.

Some terms deserve special attention. Cai Tinglan uses the character 庯 to designate trading settlements dominated by overseas Chinese. Following Li Tana’s suggestion, we transliterate this word as phố and translate it as “market town.”⁹² Vũ Đường Luân refers to phố in the northwest frontier zone as “trading posts,” noting that these border trading nodes were not extensive enough to justify being called “town.”⁹³ Based on the appearance of the term in the 1806 imperially commissioned gazetteer of Vietnam, Hoàng Việt Nhất Thống Dư Địa Chí, phố, or market towns, were closely associated with populations of Chinese traders and served in part as transshipment depots for sending products from mines and other forest products abroad.⁹⁴ Cai Tinglan mentions three phố: Quảng Ngãi market town, located thirty li outside of Quảng Ngãi city; Hội An market town, located twenty li outside of Hội An; and Khâu Lư, in Lạng Sơn near the Chinese border. All three are clearly dominated by Chinese traders and led by Chinese headmen. Khâu Lư is more of a border trading post, and Cai explicitly notes that traders from Guangdong and Guangxi are allowed there. The distance from other towns is not surprising; at this time, the Chinese trading center Chợ Lớn (literally, “Big Market”) was some distance from Bến Nghé.⁹⁵ It was only later that the city of Saigon, now renamed Hồ Chí Minh City, grew to absorb both areas.

It is also noteworthy that Cai Tinglan refers to the southern country as “Vietnam” throughout the text. As mentioned above, Vietnam was first adopted as the official name of the country at the beginning of the Nguyễn dynasty as a compromise. Initially, the Gia Long emperor had proposed Nam Việt (Ch. Nanyue). This name was rejected by the Qing court because it evoked the rebellious Han-era kingdom of the same name. Despite the compromise, Qing sources continued to refer to Vietnam as Annan (“the Pacified South”), while later Vietnamese sources tended to prefer Đại Nam.⁹⁶ Cai Tinglan’s use of “Vietnam” suggests either that the term was more widely used than scholars have assumed or that Cai was trying to use the most correct and official name of the country. Indeed, when the American war sloop Peacock, sent by President Andrew Jackson, arrived in Vietnam just a couple of years before Cai, the Vietnamese would not accept the letter from President Jackson because Vietnam was mislabeled as “Annam” and the emperor was mislabeled as “king.”⁹⁷

Cai Tinglan frequently provided definitions and made asides. To mark out the secondary nature of these comments, as was common practice, they were carved in script half the size of the main text. To preserve this sense, we have set the subscripts in italic font and enclosed them in parentheses. When we insert our own definitions, dates, or updated names, we use square brackets. We have organized the index alphabetically using pinyin for ease of use and to follow scholarly convention.

Cai Tinglan may have felt that he was treading the world’s wild edges during the fearful days adrift at sea, but once he landed on solid ground, he found fellowship. He indeed gained a fuller view of the world from his interactions with Nguyễn officials and Fujianese merchants, giving his work a tone of sympathetic understanding that sets it apart from other contemporary works on Vietnam by foreigners. For us, one of the most enduring aspects of Miscellany of the South Seas is the importance of conversations and friendships that cross linguistic and national boundaries.