Podręcznik języka chińskiego "Cours graduel et complet de chinois parlé et écrit" Michała Kleczkowskiego (1876)

Michał (/Michel) Kleczkowski's "Cours graduel et complet de chinois parlé et écrit" is an early example of a Chinese textbook focused primarily on the spoken language. Published in 1876 as the first volume of an ultimately unfinished book series encompassing both literary and colloquial Chinese, it enabled the contemporary francophone readers to begin the study of 官話 (Guānhuà), i.e. the koiné dialect of Mandarin used in Qing-dynasty Beijing. Kleczkowski's textbook included a lengthy foreword, delineating the political, economic, and sociological aspects of Sino-Western relations, a French part, containing treatises on the language, writing system and literature of the Middle Kingdom, and a Chinese part, featuring selected usage examples from the 1829 "Arte China constante de alphabeto e grammatica comprehendendo modelos das differentes composiçoens" by Joaquim Afonso Gonçalves. While the coursebook enjoyed a certain degree of popularity shortly after its publication and was taught in the École (spéciale) des langues orientales (i.e. the present-day INALCO), it has not been thoroughly described thus far. The aim of this article is to examine Kleczkowski's textbook in greater detail and present it in the broader context of Chinese language teaching in 19th-century Europe.