The understanding of the Chinese language in the West began with some misunderstandings. Since the earliest appearance of Chinese characters in the West, the belief that written Chinese wasideographic prevailed. Such a belief led to Athanasius Kircher's conjecture that Chinese characters were derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphs, China being a colony of Egypt. John Webb, the British architect, went a step further. In a Biblical vein similar to Kircher's, he tried to demonstrate that Chinese was the Primitive or Adamic language. In his An Historical Essay Endeavoring a Probability That the Language of the Empire of China Is the Primitive Language (1669), he suggested that Chinese was the language spoken before the confusion of tongues.
The serious study of the language in the West began with the missionaries coming to China during the late 16th century. Among them were the Italian Jesuits Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. They mastered the language without the aid of any grammar books or dictionaries, and became the first sinologists.
Ricci and Ruggieri, with the help of the Chinese Jesuit Lay Brother Sebastiano Fernandez (also spelled Fernandes; 1562-1621), are known to have created the first Portuguese-Chinese dictionary some time during 1583-88.
The earliest Chinese grammars were produced by the SpanishDominican missionaries. The earliest surviving one is by Francisco Varo (1627–1687).
In 1814, a chair of Chinese and Manchu was founded at the Collège de France, and Abel-Rémusat became the first Professor of Chinese in Europe. In 1837, Nikita Bichurin opened the first European Chinese-language school in the Russian Empire.
The teaching of Chinese as a foreign language started in the People's Republic of China in 1950 atTsinghua University, initially serving students from Eastern Europe. Starting with Bulgaria in 1952, China also dispatched Chinese teachers abroad, and by the early 1960s had sent teachers afar as Congo, Cambodia, Yemen and France.
According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, there are 330 institutions teaching Chinese as a foreign language, receiving about 40,000 foreign students. In addition, there are almost 5,000 Chinese language teachers. Since 1992 the State Education Commission has managed aChinese language proficiency exam program, which has tested over 142,000 persons.
