Talk:Shenjiying

	China portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject China, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of China related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ChinaWikipedia:WikiProject ChinaTemplate:WikiProject ChinaChina-related articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.

Military history: Asian / Chinese Start‑class

This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.Military historyWikipedia:WikiProject Military historyTemplate:WikiProject Military historymilitary history articles

Start

This article has been rated as Start-class on the project's quality scale.

This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-class status:
Referencing and citation: criterion not met Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met Structure: criterion not met Grammar and style: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met

Associated task forces:
/
	Asian military history task force
	Chinese military history task force

The title "Divine Engine Division" makes no sense

Latest comment: 10 years ago2 comments1 person in discussion

This article is about a military unit called the Shenji ying 神機營. Translating shen as "divine" and ying as "division" is fine (though there are other possible translations), but it makes no sense to render ji as "engine" in the early 15th century. Shenji meant something like "divine mechanism" or "divine instrument" and probably referred to the firearms themselves. I searched Google Books for "Divine Engine Division" and found only 5 results, all mirror pages of Wikipedia.[1] This means that not a single reliable source uses this translation of "Shenji ying".

I was hoping to find a standard translation in the scholarly literature, but I couldn't. The "Shenji ying" has been variously translated as "firearm brigade" (Chan Hok-lam in the Dictionary of Ming Biography [1976]), "Shen-chi Camp" (Edward Dreyer in Early Ming China [1982]), "Firearms Division" (Charles Hucker in his Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China [1985]), and "Artillery Camp" (Chan Hok-lam again, this time in the first Ming volume of the Cambridge History of China). All three scholars are major authorities on Ming history, so their books are all reliable sources.

Because there is no dominant translation in the secondary sources, I think we should just stick to the native Chinese name. Instead of opening a formal request for move that might take forever to get accepted because very few people are watching this page, I'm moving the page to Shenjiying directly, on the same model as Hushenying. If anyone disagrees, please revert and we'll do this through the formal channels! Madalibi (talk) 15:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Incidentally, I'm working on the Qing version of the Shenjiying, which I'm calling Peking Field Force because it's the name used by most reliable sources (see my sandbox). Once I move that new article to main space, we should add a hatnote to the top of our page to indicate that there was another Shenjiying. The Ming "Shenjiying" and the Qing "Peking Field Force" are completely different forces, as they were created 450 years apart by two different states and for different purposes, and there was no historical continuity between them, so I think it's reasonable to discuss them in two different articles despite their similar name in Chinese. Madalibi (talk) 15:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)Reply

Add topic