Dragon Tails 2015 conference: “A Practical Introduction to Chinese Digits”
Image: a slide from my Powerpoint presentation showing the rare sight of a villager in modern-day mainland China numbering wine jars with traditional Chinese digits.
Photograph of the verso of a wooden printing block at the Innisfail Chinese Temple, which I spotted on the pre-conference tour. It provides a good example of the historical use of Chinese digits in Australia.
While not unaccustomed to public speaking, this was my first public presentation on the subject of anything relating to my interest in Chinese languages, and should have been better timed to fit the twenty minutes allocated to me on the schedule. The occasion was the 2015 Dragon Tails conference, which was being held in Cairns, Queensland, and I was speaking as part of the “Currency, Numerals and Shopkeeping” panel, chaired by archaeologist Dr. Kevin Rains. My fellow panellists were historians Paul Macgregor and Dr. Joanna Boileau, who delivered presentations respectively entitled “Transactions and talismans: Using Chinese coins in Australasia and Southeast Asia” and “Chinese laundries and Chinese fruit shops: Two current research projects in Aotearoa/New Zealand”. I had chosen to speak about an obscure topic, but one that is relevant to anyone looking at older Chinese texts, especially those that relate to everyday contexts, namely what I term “Chinese digits” (otherwise known as “Suzhou numerals”), which are symbols with a long history of usage in the Chinese-speaking world that have all but been forgotten in recent decades and replaced by Arabic numerals. It was a topic I felt confident speaking about, having spent much time researching it, and I tried my best to enliven it for the audience, with the aim of conveying enough information for attendees to come away with the ability to read figures expressed in Chinese digits. To what extent I succeeded in meeting this aim is questionable, it having perhaps been overly ambitious given the time constraints, but my impression was that the presentation proved enjoyable. For the abstract, see the Dragon Tails 2015 programme, which is available on the Dragon Tails website.
It was at this conference that I met a historian named Dr. Michael Williams, who introduced me to a long-lost Australian novel, written in Literary/Classical Chinese, and proposed that I considered translating it.