On the Composition and Literary Significance of Iakinf (Bichurin)’s Book "China: Its Inhabitants, Customs, Practices, and Enlightenment"

The article is devoted to the analysis of Archimandrite Iakinf’s (N. Ya. Bichurin’s) book "China: Its Inhabitants, Customs, Practices, and Enlightenment" (St. Petersburg, 1840), one of the first systematic works on Chinese civilization to appear in Russia. The aim of the study is to identify the structure and conceptual foundations of the book, and to determine its place in the development of Russian sinology and in the formation of the image of China in the literary culture of the first half of the nineteenth century. The article interprets Iakinf’s work as an encyclopedic compendium of knowledge that brings together linguistic, ethnographic, historical, and philosophical observations into a coherent picture of a “rationally organized East.” Special attention is given to how the book constructs a model of scientific description of China, based on the understanding of language as a form of thought and of knowledge as the foundation of civilization. The methodological framework of the study combines textual, structural-compositional, and cultural-historical approaches aimed at identifying the principles underlying the composition of Iakinf’s book and analyzing its literary features within the context of early nineteenth-century Russian letters. The scholarly novelty of this research lies in its comprehensive approach to China: Its Inhabitants, Customs, Practices, and Enlightenment as both a scientific study and a literary work. The author examines the book not only as an early example of Russian sinology, but also as a text possessing independent artistic value. It is demonstrated that the book’s composition is organized according to a principle of gradual transition—from linguistic and ethnographic observations to a philosophical interpretation of Chinese civilization. This structure reflects a movement from the systematization of knowledge to its aesthetic and cultural interpretation. The language and style of the work combine elements of scientific discourse and Enlightenment prose, forming a distinctive narrative mode that lies at the intersection of scholarship and literature. The literary significance of the work resides in its construction of a rational image of China—an “ordered East”—which embodies the intellectual aspirations of its time.

Iakinf Bichurin, the image of China, cultural reception, language and thought, composition, literary significance, Russian sinology, oriental studies, Enlightenment discourse, scientific description of the East