Title
Southwestern Mandarin-English mercantile vocabulary.ca. 1860
Year/Period
1860
Material
Dimension
Object size: 11.5 x 6.5 x 3.0 cm
Accession No.
2018-00037
Collection of
The pocket–sized manuscript consists of some 400 entries of English and Southwestern Mandarin words mostly related to trade and commerce. Included is a conversion table from English to Chinese weights and measures This manuscript mercantile vocabulary is significant as it shows the importance of China to the West. The commercial lexicon, especially those related to weights and measures (eg. tael, picul etc) reveals how culturally embedded these terms are and in turn points to the localized practices of trade
