The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories—of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator—serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.

"Illegible Cities is an important work of history, arguing against the temptation in Sinology to reduce pre-twentieth-century China to what occurred in one language alone" - Lucas Klein, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

"This reading exemplifies the most admirable characteristics of Nappi's book: its richness, interdisciplinarity, and postmodern spirit. Translating Early Modern China is not a strictly academic book that only scholars could read and appreciate." - Elisa Frei, Catholic Theology and Church History, Goethe-Universität Frankfurtam Main, Comitatus

"This book highlights the strategic linguistic tactics Chinese rulers continue to employ to control a nation of diverse religions and cultures. Unique but difficult to categorize, this book is a welcome addition to scholarship on not only Chinese history but also the art of linguistics and translation theory." - K. Liu, CHOICE