The Establishment of the Tongwen Guan and the Fragile Sino-British Peace of the 1860s

The Tongwen Guan (同文馆) was founded in 1861 in Qing China as the first government-funded Chinese school specializing in Western languages. The period when it was established, following the second Opium War, heralded a new era of Sino-British diplomatic cooperation. A small core of diligent, well-meaning diplomats from both countries worked strenuously as agents and mediators to improve relations between the two nations. One of the first major issues that needed to be addressed, in order to establish an environment of mutual trust, was the massive language. Miscommunication and problems of translation had long bedeviled relations between Britain and China. Hoping to overcome this obstacle, a clique of progressive Chinese officials, in consultation with British diplomats, proposed the formation of the Tongwen Guan, which was the first government-sanctioned enterprise that deviated from the rigid system of Confucian schooling. The Tongwen Guan was intended to train translators to facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge between China and Britain, although during the first decade of the school’s existence, it largely failed in doing so. Nonetheless, when viewed from the perspective of building networks, the creation and development of this school appear in a more positive light. This article explores the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the school, addresses the reasons behind the school’s mediocre performance, and argues that despite its early failure to improve communication between Britain and China, it did contribute to network construction at both the individual and national levels. This seeming contradiction points to an interesting divide between the school’s intended function as a training place of translators and its actual impact on network building between Britain and China.