![\"Meeting](\"http:\/\/localsources-china.efeo.fr\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/chinesee_council_minutes.jpg\")
<\/a>Minute in Chinese (<\/span>http:\/\/www.kongkoan.nl\/gallery\/nggallery\/kong-koan-gallery\/minutes-in-chinese\/<\/span><\/a> )<\/span><\/p>\nThe Chinese Council of Batavia was a semi-self-governing institution set up by the Dutch colonial government in Dutch East Indies for the purpose of overseeing affairs relating to the Chinese population in the colony. The Council members were constituted by the top leaders of the Chinese community who held official titles (e.g. Majoor, Kapitan, Luitenant) and who were appointed by the Dutch colonial authorities. The Council met on a regular basis in the Chinese Council building to go over cases brought by the Chinese in Batavia (similar to a county-level magistrate\u2019s court on mainland China). The Council would conduct hearings by summoning the different parties of a legal case (the plaintiff, the accused, witnesses, lawyers, etc.) and pronounce their verdicts. These cases related to civil affairs such as financial conflicts, divorce, witch-craft accusations, etc. Sometimes a more complicated case would drag on over many months because certain key person could not appear in front of the Council or because of other complications (as exemplified by the case I chose for the workshop).<\/p>\n
These Chinese Council minutes have been transcribed and published in a series of books entitled\u516c\u6848\u7c3f (Records of Legal Cases) within the series entitled \u5427\u57ce\u83ef\u4eba\u516c\u9928(\u5427\u570b\u516c\u5802)\u6a94\u6848\u53e2\u66f8, compiled and edited by a team of Chinese and Dutch scholars (\u4faf\u771f\u5e73, \u5433\u9cf3\u658c, Leonard Bluss\u00e9, \u8076\u5fb7\u5be7) and published by the Xiamen University Press (\u5ec8\u9580\u5927\u5b78\u51fa\u7248\u793e).<\/p>\n
Below is an excerpt from the text (p. 61):<\/p>\n
All of the hearings and decisions were recorded as Council meeting minutes in literary Chinese (wenyan), even when the original languages used during the hearings could be a mixture of languages (most commonly southern Fujian dialects \u95a9\u5357\u8a71 but most likely also some Hainanese, Cantonese, Teochow, Malay, Dutch, Javanese, etc.), depending on which linguistic community the person involved came from. Because of this complex linguistic environment, many words in these minutes are hanzi (written Chinese) transliterations of these different languages. Some examples include \u5abd\u8170for the Dutch word \u2018majoor\u2019 (the title of the highest office granted to a Chinese), \u7532\u5fc5\u4e39for the Malay word \u2018kapitan\u2019 (derived from Portuguese \u2018capitao\u2019 and Dutch \u2018kapitein\u2019, referring to appointed officers in charge of Chinese affairs), \u6881\u7901 for the Dutch word \u2018notaris\u2019 (meaning notary), \u5cc7\u5cc7 for the Malay word \u2018baba\u2019 (referring to Chinese men born and raised in Dutch East Indies), \u5b57 derived from southern Fujianese meaning documents, etc. There are also Chinese transliterations of place names such as \u5317\u52a0\u6d6a for Pekalongan (a settlement on the northern Java coast), etc. These strange words apparently presented a lot of difficulties for the participants of the workshop since I did not provide a glossary for them. But I deliberately refrained from providing a glossary in order to test the participants\u2019 threshold of tolerance for unfamiliar language and knowledge while reading a piece of primary-source document (see appendix for the list of questions on the select text for the workshop participants). Mercifully, the compilation volume has a full and detailed glossary for all the local terms (almost 50 pages long!). This glossary helped me understand the documents when I first came across them, and it helped us through the workshop with frequent utterances of \u2018oh\u2019s\u2019 and \u2018ah\u2019s\u2019 as the glosses for strange words were revealed.<\/p>\n A tour of the visual materials on the website dedicated to Chinese documents of the Dutch colonial era (http:\/\/www.kongkoan.nl\/), especially those produced by the Chinese Council in Batavia, was very helpful for the workshop participants to visualize and imagine a world very different from their own and very different from late-imperial society on the mainland. Indeed, this world of \u2018the Chinese in colonial Dutch East Indies\u2019 was so alien to people working on late-imperial China that quite a few workshop participants emphatically proclaimed that \u2018This was not China!\u2019 (even when the people involved were mostly ethnically Chinese and the spoken and written languages were mostly Chinese). Perhaps it is not so important whether or not that was China; rather, these documents alert us to the incredible diversity of lived experience and sociocultural practices amongst the Chinese during a time of great mobility, a time when China as a geographical entity had very fluid boundaries.<\/p>\n Appendix 1 : Appendix 1 Questions for the workshop participants<\/a><\/p>\n Appendix 2 : Appendix 2 Chinese Records from outside China by A. Chau<\/a><\/p>\n Appendix 3 : Material from the Friends of the Kong Koan Archive: http:\/\/www.kongkoan.nl\/ <\/a>(Kong Koan, Chinese Council of Batavia\/Jakarta).<\/p>\n The EFEO thanks the Foundation of the Friends of the Kong Koan archive that gave the permission for the reproduction of the two images.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am an anthropologist primarily working on Chinese religion in its more contemporary manifestations. However, some of my projects do require me to work with texts from pre-modern periods (e.g. ritual protocols from early China and writings on popular religion from the late-imperial period). While preparing for this workshop I first thought of finding a … Continuer la lecture de Chinese Records from Outside China (Chau)<\/span> <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>http:\/\/www.kongkoan.nl\/gallery\/nggallery\/kong-koan-gallery\/majors\/<\/a><\/p>\n