Chinese wills in Hong Kong: George Jamieson's translation of Qing inheritance law and the Hong Kong judiciary's understanding of Chinese wills

ABSTRACT

Viewing George Jamieson's translation of Qing inheritance law as both a research object and as a way to approach an unknown chapter in Hong Kong's judicial history, this article studies how Jamieson's translation motive was related to the extremely important issue of Chinese wills and how his work was received in the Hong Kong judiciary. As a work that found its way into the Probate Registry, Jamieson's translation facilitates the detection of the problematic way in which Chinese wills were addressed and reveals the registrars’ reluctance to admit their true import. The article delves into the underlying reasoning for this and finds that that the probate routine governed by the English legal mentality was the key factor that prevented the Hong Kong judiciary from recognising the meaning of Chinese wills, which was also the primary hindrance to the reception of Jamieson's opinions. As a work that combines analysis of translation motive and reception studies, this case study expands our understanding of the discrepancy between the two. It also unfolds a distinctive translation process characterised by a matching step, demonstrating the relevance of historiography to a deeper understanding of translation.

KEYWORDS:

• George Jamieson
• wills
• Hong Kong
• translation motive
• reception

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their constructive comments. I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the staff of the Public Records Office of Hong Kong for their kind assistance and cooperation and to Professor James St. André, Professor Ye Jia and Professor Carol G. S. Tan for their insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hereafter, this article uses ‘Chinese wills’ to refer to wills written by the Chinese, and ‘will’ is not used in its English legal sense. Its power under Qing law is to be discussed.

2 The article is indebted to Professor Carol Tan for her pioneering work, which led the author to important probate files, particularly HKRS No. 96, D-S No. 1-9868 and HKRS No. 96, D-S No. 1-7708.

3 For Hong Kong's judicial and legislative history in the nineteenth century, see Norton-Kyshe ([1898] 1971).

4 Eitel was originally German, but in 1880, ‘he was naturalised to be a British national’ (Wong, 1996, p. 244).

5 During the early years of the colony, Hong Kong judges and lawyers trained under the English legal system relied on George Thomas Staunton's (1781-1859) first English translation of the Qing Code for Chinese legal knowledge (Davis, 1865, p. 51). Even with its assistance, Hong Kong judges still encountered trouble, including regarding the true import of the Chinese ‘will’.

6 Smale and Eitel were acquaintances. They argued about the nature of female domestic servitude in Hong Kong in the late 1870s. The former regarded it as a form of slavery while the latter did not. See Eitel (1895, pp. 546–548).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Research Program Fund in the Philosophies and Social Sciences of Higher Education of Jiangsu Province, China in 2020 (2020年江苏高校哲学社会科学研究一般项目: 清律婚姻条款英译的人类学脉络研究) under Grant number 2020SJA0094.

Notes on contributors

Rui Liu

Rui Liu is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Studies at the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. She obtained her Ph.D. in translation studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include legal translation, translation history, translation and colonialism, translation and sinology. She is currently conducting a research on translations of Chinese legal classics and their cultural and judicial impact.