'My first visit to Ireland was a wonderful journey that formed a great impression'
And Lecturer Studies Irish And Beijing Studies Zhang Fang, Language International School University Irish English Of At Teacher, Studies Foreign Centre,
Zhang Fang, lecturer and Irish language teacher, Irish Studies Centre, School of English and International Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, recalls his time in Ireland.
“Like most of the Chinese people, my knowledge of Ireland used to be meagre: I knew the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, I had already heard about the Irish language and knew it belonging to the Celtic languages of the Indo-European family, but the most I used to know about Ireland was that Northern Ireland had the Troubles of three decades – sin sin, before autumn 2010, when I became an MA student in the School of English and International Studies at BFSU.
"I was doing British Studies at that time, but thanks to Professor Wang Zhanpeng, then the director of the Irish Studies Centre and later my PhD supervisor, I started to appreciate the beauty of Ireland and the depth of Irish Studies, as I got acquainted with students of MA Irish Studies in BFSU for years, and got to know great scholars and writers from Ireland, including our beloved Professors Jerusha McCormack and John Blair, both of whom have long been our visiting scholars at SEIS, BFSU. Also our old friend, Professor Dermot Keogh of UCC (alas, he passed away last year; requiescat in pace), who delivered lectures on twentieth century Ireland twice in SEIS, and many others. Our first Irish courses for MA students also started in autumn 2010, to which Irish teachers were invited. We have also established a great partnership with the Irish Embassy at Beijing. Everything contributed to my understanding of Ireland, though this was still a vague image for myself.
“I continued doing my PhD in British Studies. One day in 2016, an intimate friend of mine and an MA student in Irish Studies suggested to me: ‘Why not try learning some Irish language?’ I was moved by his words: then I picked up Mícheál Ó Siadhail’s Learning Irish and within a year I had finished 24 lessons out of 36, based on my previous knowledge of European languages. I would still like to thank him for leading me into a new direction that I had never imagined before! In June 2017, I visited Ireland for the first time for 11 days — it was a wonderful journey that formed my first impressions of Ireland.
“And I have never thought that I would start a new journey in the Irish language and Irish Studies in BFSU — it was in late 2017 that I have received the news that SEIS needs to recruit Irish language teachers, and those candidates should stay in Ireland for two years to learn the Irish language. Without hesitation, I applied and passed and became one of the two candidates. Fully funded by the China Scholarship Council, I did another MA in Irish Studies and was learning the Irish language in UCD between 2018 and 2020. Though I have to admit that I haven’t reached my ideal advanced level (sin í an fhírinne, faraor!), my understanding of Ireland has greatly improved within these two years.
“I attended classes in Irish history, Celtic Studies, and Old Irish as well at that time, which has been fascinating. I discovered that the awareness of the Chinese public about Ireland is so limited and I believe it is our task and responsibility to deliver Irish Studies in China. Thus I have bought tonnes of books about Irish language, Celtic Studies, Irish history, Irish culture etc. and 15 or even more cartons of my own books were shipped back to China, safe and sound!
“I returned to China in autumn 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic: then I started my job as a lecturer of Irish language and Irish Studies at SEIS, BFSU. It was arduous in the beginning: we have decided to produce the first series of the Irish language textbooks for the Chinese students, and we have started the Irish courses for the whole university.
"Thanks to the support of BFSU, SEIS and FLTRP (our publisher), our first comprehensive textbook of the Irish language is to be published this year. The second textbook is under way, and we have plans to publish further textbooks, a grammar book, and many other books. We have been teaching the Irish language for three years, and despite the difficulties, we’ve successfully attracted students from BFSU, Tsinghua University, Renmin University etc. We had the pleasure of receiving Tánaiste Micheál Martin in November 2023, and he was amazed that Irish Studies here in BFSU are prospering and the Irish language is promoted as well. Our Irish Studies Centre has been the first one in China, and we hope that through our collaboration, we’ll keep ourselves to be the best Irish Studies Centre in China!
"We should do more for Irish Studies in China. We are proud of our achievements in Irish Studies, but in my opinion, this should go beyond the status quo. For the last decades, the greatest achievement of Irish Studies in China is Irish literature in English. Thanks to our profound tradition in the research of literature in English, most of the researchers of the Irish Studies in China have been delivering research in Irish literature in English. One of the earliest examples is the late Professor Chen Shu (1937-2017), who in the early 1980s became a visiting scholar at Trinity College Dublin and became a pioneer of Irish literature research and our first director of the Irish Studies Centre. And it is no wonder that most of the Irish literature works translated and published in Chinese language are in English, and they are loved by the Chinese public as well. I would say a great number of people know W. B. Yeats’s poem When You Are Old because it is translated and sung in Chinese as well.
“Notwithstanding such a popularity of Irish literature in English, there has been an imbalance of the other fields of the Irish Studies in China. Irish politics, foreign policy and economy would come into our view when there are changes or crisis, such as the border issue in Northern Ireland amidst the Brexit, but usually Ireland is usually neglected as it is often erroneously treated by the Chinese as a ‘small country’. To be more exactly, many Chinese may even mistake Ireland for Northern Ireland, and some would even still ask me ‘Is Ireland still a part of the United Kingdom?’ (irritating, but true!) It is important for the Chinese public to know at least what country Ireland is.
“Even less familiar to the Chinese researchers and the public as well are the Irish language, Celtic Studies, Irish folklore, and not the least to say, Irish history. An average Chinese would not know that there is an Irish language or teanga na Gaeilge, and they would be surprised to know that the two languages are distant from each other. Some might have heard the druids or leprechauns, but do not know what exactly they are. It is only those who have read some Irish literary works that would know about Cú Chulainn or other figures in Celtic literature, but many are receiving the information from second-handed resources — Irish manuscripts are not known to them as many are written in Old Irish. Apart from Dr QIU Fangzhe’s Legends from Medieval Ireland and Dr CAO Bo’s translation from Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin, it is not easy to find any other satisfactory translations of Early Irish literature in Chinese.
"One must know that many great treasures of the Irish literature lie in those written Irish language texts of all ages. If the Chinese people have heard of W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde, Flann O’Brien, Seamus Heaney, Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín etc., they might not have heard about writers of the Irish language such as Geoffrey Keating, Douglas Hyde, Fr. Peadar Ua Laoghaire, Patrick Pearse, Pádraig Ó Conaire, Tomás Ó Criomhthain, Peig Sayers, Seosamh Mac Grianna, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máire Mac an tSaoi, Alan Titley etc. As the official and heritage language of Ireland, the Irish language, no matter if it is being spoken or endangered, should be included into our Chinese horizon and be taught — and that’s what we’re doing now.
“A yet more serious problem is that the research of Irish history is often neglected by the mainstream scholars of world history in China; if we are not mentioning the small number of journal articles on Irish history (particularly compared to historical research of any mainstream country, e.g. United States, Japan, Russia, Britain, France, Germany), there isn’t a single book of Irish history written by the Chinese scholars as far as I’m concerned (whereas Chinese scholars have written history of former Yugoslavia!); as to translations, Edmund Curtis’s A History of Ireland is published in Chinese in 1974 and Robert Kee’s Ireland: A History in 2010, but neither Moody, Martin & Keogh’s The Course of Irish History nor Thomas Bartlett’s Ireland: A History is translated.
"Recently there are of course a small number of Irish history monographs published in Chinese, such as John Gibney’s A Short History of Ireland, 1500-2000, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, Cian T. McMahon’s The Coffin Ship, and Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s The Celtic Myths. Such, however, are yet unsatisfactory compared with the fast development of world history in China, nor is satisfactory compared with the further development of Chinese-Irish relationship and a growing mutual understanding of the two peoples. As both of Chinese and Irish civilisations have experienced the glorious past, humiliation and revival, is it not important to understand the similarities and differences of both civilisations? It is important to raise the awareness of the Chinese public in Irish history, and more research works and translations of Irish history should be available in China.
“Fortunately, we have been making efforts to change such a situation. Apart from Basic Irish courses, since 2021 I have been teaching History of Ireland for MA Irish Studies students in SEIS, BFSU, using Moody, Martin & Keogh’s The Course of Irish History and Keogh’s Twentieth-Century Ireland as main textbooks. These years more students in Irish Studies are becoming interested in various fields in Irish Studies. In my opinion, Irish Studies should be comprehensive and interdisciplinary. This will lead our research beyond the status quo. At the time when we are celebrating the 45th anniversary of the diplomatic relationship between China and Ireland, I’m looking forward to a wider and deeper research of Ireland in China, and to a better future of mutual understanding between the two great peoples.”