Edkins’s book was ambitious in its scope, taking in all the world’s peoples and their languages. There is, however, a striking absence: the living, breathing, speaking Chinese he lived among. This is somewhat strange as his other writings, on Buddhism, on fengshui, on other aspects of folklore and religion, are full of anecdotes and the fruits of his day-to-day interactions. We also know from various sources, including his correspondence, that he spent much of each day while at home preaching and circulating among the Chinese who attended the mission hospital to which he was attached in Beijing.

Even stranger, perhaps, given that the kind of philology Edkins practised stressed seeking out the most ancient of texts and reconstructing the early pronunciation of characters, is his lack of interest in what the classical Chinese texts said themselves about the origins of their language. They are certainly not silent on matters of how writing was invented, how people communicated before writing, and how things came to be named. It must be observed, however, that the Chinese literary tradition always stressed the written over the oral, and speech itself appears to have been taken as a given. With the only written language in their known world, the ancient Chinese do not seem to have been much interested in comparative language studies and since Edkins’s project relied on the twin pillars of spoken language and comparison, it may simply have been that the ancient Chinese texts were simply answering different questions from the ones he was asking.

Comparative studies of all kinds on the scale that Edkins undertook, especially the comparative study of languages, are particularly notable for including in their purview both the language (or mythology, or religion, etc.) of the observed people, or peoples, and the language (or whatever) of the observer. Thus, in Edkins’s study the Chinese language and the European languages stand at each end of the scheme he sets out of the unrolling of linguistic history. To be sure, the European languages are seen to be the last group to have evolved but they are not, as I explained earlier, regarded as the most complex or most perfect of linguistic creations. By including his own language and Chinese in the same scheme, Edkins’s model, and indeed comparative philology as a discipline, can be seen both as relativizing the language of the analyst and granting the language of study a degree of respect. On the other hand, with the move to the study of single languages and societies at the end of the nineteenth century, and the decline of this kind of comparative study, the scholar became removed from the object of research. The Chinese became discursively disconnected, if not from the rest of the world, certainly from Europe and the West.

With this kind of model — us here and them over there — there developed a sense that we inhabited discrete worlds and ways of being. And from this, perhaps, developed an anxiety that something needed to be crossed to get from one to the other; a psychic metaphor of the vast Eurasian steppe. Nineteenth-century missionary writings on China in English certainly display anxieties on the part of their authors but those anxieties do not, in my reading, appear to include the sense that no matter how hard we try we will never truly understand the Chinese mind. “East is east and west is west and never the twain will meet” is a notion surprisingly absent in this context. It is absent, I would suggest, because these were people of religion, something we must take seriously if we are to approach an understanding of the encounter between Chinese people and Westerners before our times. Edkins and others like him knew exactly what they were doing in China and why they were there. We may not approve of what they were trying to achieve but there is little doubt that the only meaningful thing that divided Europeans and Chinese was that we were Christian and, by and large, they were not — yet.