Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat. 1823. “Explication d’une Énigme chinoise proposée par le docteur Morrisson.” Journal asiatique. June 1823. pp. 365–370.
In this article, Abel-Rémusat discusses a curious Chinese puzzle found in Robert Morrison’s English-Chinese dictionary. The puzzle involves distortions of various Chinese characters; when these distortions are expressed verbally with their characters, they form parts of a poem.
Abel-Rémusat discusses some other puzzles he has found, many based on the forms of Chinese characters and their constituent elements. He also notes that there are many riddles as well, and the more difficult ones use homophones or obscure literary or historical allusions.
Abel-Rémusat ends his article by taking a rather mean swipe at his predecessor, Étienne Fourmont. He notes that Fourmont had translated a Chinese volume on riddles, but had misunderstood a Chinese word for riddle, yǎmí 啞謎,1 interpreting it as a proper name. This, claims Abel-Rémusat with no small measure of scorn, was a consistent habit of Fourmont:
| Il faisait ainsi des noms propres imaginaires de tous les mots qu’il n’entendait pas. Les titres des livres chinois étaient pour lui autant d’énigmes, et il ne lui est pas arrivé souvent d’être heureux à les deviner. | Thus he made up imaginary proper names out of all the words he didn’t understand. The titles of Chinese books were for him so many riddles, and it did not often occur to him to take pleasure in solving them. |
1: The yǎmí 啞謎, or “dumb riddle,” is merely one type of Chinese riddle. For a cursory but helpful introduction to Chinese riddles, see Richard C. Rudolph. 1942. “Notes on the riddle in China.” California folklore quarterly 1.1. pp. 65–82. ↩
