Thread by @BabelStone

The Tiānyīgé 天一閣 library in Níngbō holds two of the original three volumes (71 out of 108 folios) of the only surviving example of a woodblock printed edition of the Jurchen section of the Sino-Foreign Vocabularies 華夷譯語 produced during the Ming dynasty.

The Tiānyīgé library holds nine volumes of the Ming dynasty woodblock printed edition of the Sino-Foreign Vocabularies 華夷譯語: Siamese 暹羅 1 vol., Qocho 髙昌 2 vols., 百夷 Xishuangbanna Dai 2 vols., Jurchen 女直 2 vols., and Tibetan 西番 2 vols. gj.tianyige.com.cn/SearchPage?tit…

These volumes were originally part of the Bàojīng Lóu 抱經樓 collection of Lú Zhǐ 盧址 (1725–1794), but his library was dispersed in 1916, and the books were subsequently acquired by Zhū Dǐngxù 朱鼎煦 (1886–1967) as part of his Biéyòu Zhāi 别宥齋 collection.

Zhū's huge book collection was protected from damage during the Cultural Revolution, and in 1979 his family donated the collection to the Tiānyīgé Library. I visited the library in 2017, on a day trip from Hohhot, but unfortunately it was shut for the National Day holiday week.

Three manuscript versions of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary are also known to survive, the most complete (comprising 871 vocabulary items) being the one obtained by Friedrich Hirth (1845–1927) in 1887, and now held at the Berlin State Library resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB000103AF000…

The Berlin manuscript copy of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary was the basis for Wilhelm Grube's 1896 "Die Sprache und Schrift der Jučen" (my copy shown)

The manuscript copy of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary held at the Tōyō Bunko 東洋文庫 in Tokyo consists only of 158 entries under the heading 'New Additions' (新增), but includes 46 entries not found in the Berlin copy.

And the National Library of China in Beijing holds a manuscript copy comprising just fifty entries from the New Additions section, all of which are also found in the Berlin and Tōyō Bunko copies yingbishufa.eshufa.com/ZHUANTI/gudaiw…

The Berlin and Tōyō Bunko copies also include a number of bilingual documents purportedly submitted to the Ming court (but the Jurchen text is a literal and ungrammatical translation from the Chinese), with dates ranging between Yongle 12 (1414) through to Jiajing 5 (1526)

None of the surviving Jurchen vocabularies are dated, but as the Department of Jurchen (女直館) was one of the original eight departments of the Siyuguan 四夷館 established in 1407, the original composition of the Sino-Jurchen vocabulary should date to the Yongle era (1403–1425).

However, the Berlin and Tiānyīgé copies of 華夷譯語 both include a section for Siamese, and as the Department of Siamese (暹羅館) was only established in Wanli 7 (1579), it is assumed that the extant versions must have been produced during the late Ming, between 1579 and 1644.