Multilingual Empires

Multilingual Empires reinterprets Ming China as a polity with a linguistically diverse population and a government that actively cultivated multilingual expertise to produce texts, inscriptions, and monumental displays. Drawing on diplomatic documents, translations, artifacts, and multilingual glossaries written in Chinese, Mongolian, Persian, Tibetan, and Tay, Johannes S. Lotze examines how language policy, translation practices, and script choice shaped Ming rule and self-representation.

By situating the Ming in a cross-dynastic and global comparative perspective, Lotze shows how Ming rulers inherited and reshaped a Mongol legacy of cultural hybridity in language use and governance. The Ming continued this hybrid imperial tradition by employing multiple diplomatic languages, even as they promoted Chinese as the primary internal medium of communication. In contrast to the Qing, whose rulers incorporated non-Chinese languages into their core administration, the Ming developed a more restricted yet highly systematic approach to multilingualism.

As with other multilingual empires, from the Yuan to the Ottomans, Ming rulers adopted specific strategies for managing multilingual knowledge—from training language mediators to sponsoring large-scale translation projects. Translation and multilingualism emerge not merely as practical tools but as central instruments in the symbolic construction of imperial rule. Integrating political and linguistic history, this book offers a new framework for understanding the interplay of empire, language, and power in premodern Eurasia.