Is the quantum duality of cultural experience the exclusive property of the smaller polity? Obviously not, and for an example of the macro-cosmopolitan we want to mention, however briefly, a number of episodes from Chinese translation history.

Eugene Chen Eoyang in his 'Borrowed Plumage': Polemical Essays on Translation warns against overly simplistic views of Chinese language and culture:

Chinese, despite its apparent monolithic character in the West, is a polylingual and multicultural language, involving elements of Mongol, Turk, Tungusic, Thai and Tibeto-Burman. There are manuscripts in Tun-huang, dating from the fifth to the tenth century, with texts that contain Chinese and Tibetan in interlinear configuration as well as texts in Sogdian, Uighur, and other Central Asian languages.

                                      (2003: 60)

Notwithstanding the complex set of influences on the language, from the first millennium BCE to the early half of the twentieth century Classical Chinese remained the dominant form of written expression. As ideographs were not based on a phonetic script, they were not subject to the laws of phonological evolution, and this allowed the characters to remain largely unchanged through the centuries (Hung and Pollard 1998: 365). However, the relative stability of the language as a formal written medium did not produce cultural closure and it is notable that it is intense and sustained periods of translation contact that allow for the elaboration of a Chinese culture that is as networked outwardly as it is connected inwardly.

The first major example of the transformative impact of translation is the large-scale translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. The enterprise begins around 70 CE and continues for almost nine centuries. The three phases – Eastern Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms Period (148–265), Jin Dynasty and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (265–589) and the Sui Dynasty, Tang Dynasty and Northern Song Dynasty (589–1100) – see literally thousands of texts translated, mainly from Sanskrit, into Chinese (Hung and Pollard 1998: 366–68). As Lin Kenan points out, the effect on Chinese culture was profound: 'Because Buddhism was introduced into China through translation, the commingling of and conflict between the exotic Buddhism and the native Confucianism and Taoism have set the foundation of Chinese thought' (2002: 162–3).

A second significant moment in the history of Chinese translation will be the arrival in numbers of Christian missionaries from the West, and in particular of Jesuit missionaries from the late sixteenth century onwards. The missionaries themselves saw the translation of Western texts into Chinese as a way of securing influence over the Chinese administrative elite with a view to eventual religious conversion. Among the keen native supporters of the translation project was Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), a native of Shanghai, a senior court official and Catholic convert (Kenan 2002: 163). It is estimated that over seventy missionary translators were involved in this work at various stages and that they were responsible for the translation of over 300 titles into Chinese. Significantly, a third of these titles related to scientific matters reflecting the growing prestige of the new science of the West (Hung and Pollard 1998: 368–9), with translators like Johann Adam Schall von Bell and Jacobus Rho translating works on astronomy into Chinese which facilitated the reworking of the Chinese calendar by the Ming government. A third translation movement will be triggered by growing political instability in China due to the incursions of foreign powers around the period of what have become known as the Opium Wars in the 1840s. The interest in translation was prompted by a feeling that the country must either translate or perish. There was no way Western powers could be opposed if you did not understand the science behind their warfare or the politics behind their foreign policy. The establishment of a College of Languages in Beijing in 1862 and the creation of a translation bureau in the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai in 1865 led to a marked increase in the number of scientific translations. Later in the century it was translation of texts from the humanities and the social sciences that was advocated by reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. One translator, Yan Fu, for example, translated works by T.H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Edward Jenks and William Stanley Jevons. In Kenan's view, 'this translation movement ideologically paved the way for the 1911 revolution that eventually overthrew the last feudal dynasty of China' (Kenan 2002: 164). These different translation moments in Chinese history can be seen as corresponding to perceived 'gaps' in the culture, whether religious, scientific or political, but the difficulty with the concept of the 'gap' is that it carries with it a notion of the occasional and the provisional ('filling in a gap') and also the sense that once the gap is plugged, cultures can recover a sense of lost wholeness. However, what historical research into translation points to, whether at a macroscopic or a microscopic level, is that in many instances it is the permanent quantum duality of cultural experience that is the norm rather than homogenous national or imperial continuums occasionally disrupted by foreign adventures.

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